A "Released" Amateur

I said that I wanted to write more about “writing.” Here goes.

I’ve never seen myself as an artist. I’ve actually seen a lot of things about myself and things that I love as simply fragmented and incoherent aspects of me and I’ve often struggled to figure out how they fit together and even tried to get rid of some because they just “didn’t make sense.”

The fact that I love to write has always been one of those things. It never really made sense or seemed useful (by the classic American standard: money). Also the fact that I love Italy, the fact that I also love mountains, but the fact that I’m a bookworm too and then the fact that…*sigh* the list goes on.

But this summer I feel like God has been addressing these things one after another and telling me to be me. If I am going to encourage others to be everything they are meant to be then I must explore this in my own life and God gives me unqualified permission to love the things he created me to love.

That said, I’m beginning to come to grips with the artist’s soul in me, and it feels really good. It’s not an academic degree, it’s no formation or education in me, it’s actually a part of my constitution. And I need to cultivate that. Because He gave it to me. Period.

It started with a question that someone in Italy posed me this summer. I was describing the whole legal education thing and what that meant for me and they said: “But what about your passion for art and literature?”

I had never had anyone ask me that before. It made me think, and then it surprised me how much it made me think. In my culture, art and literature is highly impractical and so in a way it is considered respectable to not pursue it. In Italy, it seems that this is less so. So, I thought a lot about that question. This summer I admonished someone to become all they were meant to be through Christ and then realized that there were areas of my life to which I needed to apply that very principle.

But this release has not been difficult, it’s been so freeing and it feels great. I ruminated on this question for a while and discussed it with a fellow writer friend. She encouraged me to ignore the “amateur” part and bolstered my already burgeoning conviction that I just need to sit down and start doing this.

And in all of the discipline I’ve learned all of these years I’ve never applied any of it to my writing. And it’s day 4 and I love this so far! I feel that what I’m offering on a daily basis (thus far) isn’t as deep as some of the posts that mustered in the past but I feel like I’m covering a breadth that I’ve hitherto never explored.

As far as the literature part goes, I have dared to sign up for a highly "impractical" course in law school called "Law and Literature." Only because I love literature. And that's okay. I'm really excited about the books (and plays) we'll be reading and having a forum to discuss it.

Anyway, that’s all for today. I will not always be able to say this so I’m just going to take advantage of the opportunity now: I love this “being who I’m supposed to be” thing. :)

(Day 4)

Common Denominator: It's Not About Me

I eventually want to talk more about how this whole resolve to “write” came about but it's difficult to do without taking a moment to explain the difficult part of being in Italy this last summer. And it’s hard to talk about the “difficult” vaguely, but since I want to move on to talking about the very positive things that have born out of the painful situation so far, I’m going to try.

Over the last couple of years I have been exploring the idea of “spiritual gifts” and what that means in the Church today (the church meaning the biblical version which may or may not correspond with where I spend my Sunday mornings) and in my life today. I had come to some conclusions but as soon as I’d felt that I’d nailed some things down in my theology and was feeling more “confident” in my own “gifting” then all of that mental and heart work was put powerfully into question in Italy. I'll come back to this, but this last weekend was extremely timely as I needed to sort through some of said question. And I did.

First of all, during the retreat I was able to articulate what the common denominator is between all of my supposed gifts: intercession. Not “intercession” in the sense of intercessory prayer—even though that happens sometimes—but intercession in the sense that all of my gifts (it’s still hard not to use that word without quotation marks) are gifts that go between things:

•  Prophecy (not telling the future, it’s truth-telling) goes between a truth and a person.
•  Teaching/Discipleship goes between knowledge and/or wisdom and a person.
• Communication (still thinking about this one, I’m not always effective at it, but I do have a heart for it which plays very directly into my love for language) goes between ideas and people. 
• Advocacy (enough said).

All of these things share one common denominator: they’re not really about me. I’m often meant to be a "go between" and my gifts center around relaying something that has nothing to do with me. This was incredibly enlightening to me because it made me realize where my weakness then lies: when I make it about me. That means, when I take personally however the situation goes--good or bad.

I think of all these gifts I’ve struggled most with the prophecy. Paul tells us we’re all supposed to seek it out and desire it but frankly it’s the one I find the hardest. It’s so many things but the words "isolating" and "painful" are the first to pop into mind.

Ever since my prayer life took off, things got harder. But I remember a couple of years ago, before I went to law school I could feel God asking me to say yes to “intercession.” In my head at the time that meant "intercessory prayer," of course, and the idea freaked me out. But I remember being facedown in tears on Secora’s living room floor in the dead of winter and saying “yes” to God about it with her as a witness.  I had no idea that what I was getting into was way broader than merely spending hours in my closet in prayer at odd and random times for who knows what--well, basically way broader than the small idea I had in my head. Actually, it turns out, He’d been breeding this in me for years.

So yeah, prayer and “prophecy” got harder. I started hearing things. I started getting insight into things that I couldn’t always talk about or even feel like I could trust. I started seeing situations as if they were on a completely different plane of existence than the one I was waking up in every morning. I don’t know if all of this makes sense but suffice it to say that while it got more and more painful it also has gotten (as I’ve written so many times before) more and more REAL. But I often doubt it. I often doubt whether or not my spirit hears things or my flesh gets in the way and I mess things up. It’s such a fine line to walk and one that take extraordinary sensitivity and investment. It’s exhausting.

But just as I was starting to get in a groove about this, God threw me a curveball this summer: I felt Him ask me to do something far and beyond what I’d ever heard before and it was, well, kinda crazy.  I was asked to be far more vulnerable that I was comfortable being and I was asked to go into a far more vulnerable place than I would have ever been comfortable going and there was no small measure of "relay" involved. 

I didn’t know if I was hearing right. I fasted for 3 days to get to the bottom of it and I did: "GO." I knew it wasn’t me because there wasn't an atom in me that wanted to perform this aforementioned "relay." And I went. 

And it did not go well….Yeah, suffice it to say, it did not go well. The situation is very complex--indeed far more than I had any idea--and the whole affair ended up taking a direction I could have never foreseen. And really, it all ended up being far more personal even for me than I had expected the situation to be. It's messy loving people. But anyway, it goes perhaps without saying that it kind of rocked my emotional world. What was that? It's still kind of painful even to write that, actually.

Anyway, it took a month of processing to get to the point where I was even ready to pursue the idea of gifting again. I thought I was sure about all of this stuff (FINALLY) and then this happened. And while all of the logical, biblical mantras ring true about “prophets” (again, truth-bearers not fortune-tellers) being perennially misunderstood blah blah blah, it doesn’t make the heart heal faster.

And then I went on the retreat. And then I realized this common denominator about these strengths I’ve felt and been told I have. And then I realized that there is an inherent weakness in this “common denominator” and that is that I can easily make the thing I’m called to relay—in whatever context—all about me instead of the thing and instead of God.

And that’s what I did this summer. That’s why the whole thing was so painful. And that’s what God wants to deal with in me before I can move on and grow in my gifts and be who I was created to be. That's at least part of why He allowed this to happen. I have to trust that I'm not crazy and that God knows what He's doing. That relay was His not mine and it's not. About. Me.

This is just a sliver of what went on this last month and particularly this last weekend but I’ll write about more later (I know I keep saying that). But this was the most healing portion, I think.

In other news, after my ode to the Facebook sabbatical I’m back on. But back on with boundaries. Also, I’ve noticed that with this commitment to write every day I am more content to just write about one thing—I don’t feel so much pressure to get my entire heart out on the page. I’m incredibly grateful for that. And tomorrow I'll try to tackle the subject of this newfound impetus to write.

Here’s to growth and God.

(Day 3)

Social Media…

So we all know social media affects us to some degree, but I’ve been off Facebook for about a month now and there have been some interesting and unexpected insights into what the world of social media has done to me. Every once in a while I will pop back onto Facebook “just for a minute” and it happens again: the time drain. That part is no surprise, I guess, but I do wish I could just use the thing in moderation. So far I can't. Grrr

I went of Facebook for a variety of reasons (and people) but the easiest one to talk about is that it is such a distraction for me. I love being able to keep up with people from a distance and so Facebook is great for that. Frankly, I live far away from the majority of people in my life that I care the most about, so Facebook is such a great way to consolidate keeping tabs on them. Without this tool it is true that “keeping in touch” is harder, but what has most surprised me about my Facebook sabbatical is that I didn’t realize what a drain it was on my creativity.

I think inherent in creativity is the need for it to be first "externalized" and second "acknowledged." Or really, if not acknowledged at least publicized. This is my own experience speaking, of course, as I’m no authority on the matter, but well-known author Madeleine L’Engle corroborates this:

“The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been stillborn.”*

I experience this with writing. Even though my readers are very, very few, there’s something about putting my thoughts online in an organized fashion that gives me that outlet that I need.

That’s where Facebook comes in. I have found that I have written more in the last month than I have in a long, long time. Not all of it has been “published” on this humble forum but I’m been surprised at the prolific degree of the words flowing out of me. Granted, some of this may be due to the time on my hands; part of it may be due to the events of the summer and the effect they had on me, driving me to process through writing (perhaps more on this later).

Maybe all of these things. But I have realized that some of it definitely has to do with the fact that I no longer sate my desire “to be heard” through small little--sometimes insignificant, sometimes not-- quips called “status updates” or even photos on Facebook. This “outlet” being removed, I have had more to say about many more things. I’ve been forced to hang on to my thoughts about things longer and to be more circumspect about what needs to be externalized and even more fastidious about what is “publicized.”

All of this as been very interesting to realize in the last month. I may come back to the world of Facebook soon but I’m really glad I’ve had at least this month to me, myself, and my thoughts.

(Day 2)

*Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water (Page 30). Emphasis mine.

Every Day for a Month

“It’s that thing I can’t not do.”

“Then you need to do it. If you’ve found that thing then definitely pursue it.”

I went to a retreat this last weekend put on by my school. I’m still in awe at how Divine it is that I ended up at the school that I did—I had no idea about St. Thomas. The retreat was a guided, spiritual retreat to pursue God’s will for your life and vocation and a time dedicated to figure out where your giftings lie and how they are designed to interact with the world around you, however locally or globally.

I went because one of my Professors in Rome recommended it. I went to lunch with this Professor and her husband in Rome one day after finals and picked her brain about her relationship with God because I could see it and wanted to understand it better. She’s one of those truly alive people and I wanted, no needed to know her better. She recommended that I go and so I did. A very good decision.

So much happened, and I’ll be writing more about later, but one significant “epiphany” was that while I’ve kind of been in denial about it for years (simply because I’ve chosen to never see myself this way) I am coming to grips with the fact that I do have an artist’s soul. Finally I'm realizing that I'm not just an appreciator or sympathizer, but in fact even though my “art” is very amateur it’s there. Because indeed writing is that thing that I can’t not do.

The spiritual director of the University of St Thomas School of Law met with me for a salient half hour this weekend. She mostly asked questions and gave me very little definitive advice except for this: Yes. Write. If that is how you feel about writing then pursue it. She identified, she said, for she herself wrote…and she reiterated the above encouragement later that day.

This was all actually just a confirmation of something that’s been stirring in me for the last couple of months. I’ve felt lately a series of "releases" in different areas of my life to just be who I am and love what I love. This is one of them.

So, I’m going to write. I’m going to write more. I feel as if I’ve essentially been given permission to do something that until I’ve only allowed myself to keep on the back burner. I’m excited. And slightly apprehensive, but never mind.

I’ve felt one more thing in this regard—I need to have some discipline about it. That said, I’m going to start with this: I’m going to write every day for a month. I will do my best to post what I write, for the action of posting what I write on my blog is a degree of accountability for me. But regardless, however short or long I will be writing and posting every day until September 19^th. 

(This should be interesting when school starts).

À demain.

All Week.

“Document 4.” 

Hm. Yet another document open on Word…maybe I’ll be able to finish my thoughts in this one….so frustrating. I’ve started saying so much, but haven’t finished any of it. Maybe because I’ve begun writing about anything and to anybody but You. Maybe. Fine, so here goes:

Dear God,

I know I’ve been running from You all week. I see it now. I read this book while I was gone and then and You said, “go home and rest in Me.” And so I had every intention of doing that. I was going to fast and “rest.” Instead what have I done? Read. A lot. Also a lot of paperwork, meetings, chiropractor…all of these things I wanted or needed to get done as soon as I got home. It’s been a productive week, sure, but “rest”? I think not.

I can hardly say the word “rest” without a measure of internal disgust—mostly with myself—because when I actually think about it I know very well what it means to physically rest but I have no f***ing idea what it means spiritually and frankly the word just invokes a sense of failure in me:

I suck at this.

But why have I been running from You? The Person, the Thing that fully, completely, and utterly understands me? I think I figured it out today. It’s because I’m afraid of what You’ll say to me. 

No, that’s not it. Not quite. It’s because I think I already know what You’re going to say to me. You know better than I even do what this whole thing is—indeed You made it happen—and I, in my vast wisdom, have the nerve to think I know what You’re going to say to me if I actually just lay at Your Feet and just “rest” (if I ever figure out what that means): I think You’re going to tell me to wait. And I don’t want to hear it.

I already know that, Lord. I have to wait. But YOU know I don’t wait well. I never have. Ever. 

In a perfect storm of the naturally impatient personality You gave me and probably the ADD that I just found out about I have never been a patient person. Little wonder I dread hearing the word “wait.” Little wonder I went running from You this week. I’m not making excuses, though.

But how judgmental of me, really. The irony of me assuming anything about You and judging what You’re going to do before You do anything at all. I don’t really know that’s what You want to say to me. Or maybe I’m also afraid that You won’t say anything at all and I’ll just be at Your Feet wondering what You’re thinking and if I just messed everything up. 

“Perfect love casts out fear.” Right. So none of this, therefore, is grounded in reality. The only thing I have to fear is my own humanity—that thing that is neither love nor perfect. That thing I want You to heal. 

What’s real is that You want me to show up. You’re always there, and You want me to be too. And for me, I want to do instead of be because I find “doing” something to be more tangible than being with You.

It reminds me of that café scene in that Godard movie…maybe if objects are what serve as links between subjects, allowing us to live together in association, then maybe I view doing something for You as more of a link to You than just being with You. I see a task as more as an “object” linking me to You than an ambiguous intangible. Maybe. 

But I need no tangible link to You. Actually, the questions and desire described in this scene—at least for me, it would seem—are answered in You. But to be fair, they are certainly not answered in my knowledge of You, it’s true. No, they are answered in my relationship--rather experience with You. Exactly, yeah, that thing I’ve been running from all week. It’s so crazy the more I live the more I know to the core of me that knowledge of You and a relationship with You are two UTTERLY different things. One is a starting point and the other is the consummation. Still doesn't stop me from fleeing every once in a while, huh?

But anyway, it’s funny because the whole problem that the scene describes, that language “divides as much as it unites” due to the hard (read: human) fact that we can never fully communicate our thoughts within a finite system such as language, is not even a thing with with You: You are not bound by language, nor any form whatsoever, in Your Knowledge and Understanding of Man--indeed, of me. Nothing I ever feel, think, know, or am will ever be outside the scope of expression in You. You don’t just “get it," You invented it. Godard whispers:

“Mais alors puisque la relation sociale est toujours ambiguë, puisque ma pensée divise autant qu’elle unit, puisque ma parole rapproche par ce qu’elle exprime et isole par ce qu’elle tait, puisqu’un immense fossé sépare la certitude objective que j’ai de moi même et la vérité objective que je suis pour les autres….”

God, this resonates so deeply for I know this all too well when it comes to the human relationship. So often I’ve mourned these barriers, wanting to understand the very essence of the person in front of me but held irrevocably at bay by the immutable constraints of the form that human relation requires. But You’re a completely different thing. You transcend this. And then he continues:

“Où commence, mais où commence quoi? Dieu créa les cieux et la terre bien sur, mais c’est un peu lâche et facile, on doit pouvoir dire mieux, dire que les limites du langage sont celles du monde, que les limites de mon langage sont celles de mon monde, et qu’en parlant je limite le monde, je le termine et que la mort un jour logique et mystérieux viendra abolir un jour cette limite et qu’il n’y aura ni question ni réponse….”

Oh dear God, I grieve an unfulfilled existence where it isn’t until death “arriving one mysterious and logical day,” where the relational limits of language are abolished. Sure, he says, God created the sky and the earth…but….” Ugh. “But?!” May I never live in that “but” that represents that terrifying idea that You’re totally removed from that which You created, that You were satisfied to just watch Your Magnum Opus unwind and unravel the very beauty and fulfillment for which You created it. 

Indeed, I grieve said existence because I shudder at how my person would react under such limits; so crushingly complete if I didn’t choose access to You, the only escape from them. These limits are the very nature of being human, their only relief being a Union with You. Dear God, if I already feel the weight of existence the way that I do, even with this escape, who would I be if I had not this respite? 

It’s strange, for while I am often humbled and in awe at the form, substance, and method in which these minds greater than mine pose these questions, Lord, the other part of me just wonders if I settle for a trite and simplistic answer to them in You. Like, sometimes I wonder if I just choose the easy way out and choose You. But then I remember the ink that I have spilled processing the life I have in You and the words “simple” and “easy” flee my vocabulary immediately. Maybe I’m more heart now than I am head and maybe I’m not as intelligent as I think I am (no, that part is definitely true), but I’m led back to Greg Boyd’s book on imagination: “Wondering if Christianity is real is not the same as wondering whether Christianity is true….Remember, it’s not what we believe intellectually that impacts us; it’s what we experience as real. ” Though, I would postulate that there must be a nexus. But I think there is: and I know this is real.

But anyway, if all this is true, and you are beyond the arguably beautiful but frustrating limits of language and communication through “objects” then why in my interaction, no...relationship with You do I limit myself to this idea of expression called language or what I perceive to be a more objective expression of doing for You—whatever that looks like (fasting, reading, even writing)—when all the while You’re just wanting me to move beyond. To be.

Oh.

DEAR GOD.

Is that what this is about?? Is that what “Rest” is? I already know the answer, but I still have to ask-- God: why couldn’t you JUST SAY SO?

So...

So...maybe Rest is actually being willing to move beyond the form and substance of language and “objectivity” (which is only an appealing mirage anyway) and learning to “communicate” with You in ways that my soul aches to they way this man sitting in a coffee shop aptly characterizes…

…and Rest means feeling liberated to be who I am and not feel constrained by form.

Oh. That’s what this week was about???

Again, I’m angry at myself. So “Rest” actually had nothing to do with the word “Wait” and this is what You were actually ironically waiting to tell me and I just wouldn’t let my fingers hit the keyboard to talk to You till now.

Oh....Forgive me, God. 

Oh Father, show me this Rest thing? Show up in my imagination, in my intuition and let’s go beyond any and all of these limiting forms I know (and have learned to navigate to varying degrees of success). If this is about something new for You and me, then I’m surprised to feel a sense of relief and not resentment. Wow, I had no idea all of this was going on in my subconscious.

Maybe Rest isn’t so dreadful, and maybe I'll learn its language someday. If it can even be called that...

Finally, I'm kind of speechless. Which, I suppose, is the point.

Post Script: Even though those of you reading this are so ridiculously few that this forum is hardly "public," and even though this letter to God is essentially a prayer, because I've chosen to make it public in the very technical sense the legal side of me feels that I must cite the sources to which I refer. That said, the film excerpt is HERE, all emphasis on the script is mine (and if anyone is actually reading this then I apologize for not translating the text); and the book by Gregory Boyd is called Seeing is Believing: Experiencing Jesus through Imaginative Prayer, Baker Books 2004. Also, the quote about "perfect love" comes from I John 4:18.