When Words Rear up and Roar in Your Face

Every so often in life we find that things have gotten a little stale and such an assessment almost always calls for a rethink. For weeks on end now, I have been suffering from chronic writer’s block, my finished words coming only with great difficulty and a tremendous amount of effort. But I once heard somewhere that all “blockages,” if such they may be called, merely require creative thinking, seeing the problem in a new light, learning to think outside the box all over again. After repeated prayer seemingly to no avail, I realized that I must investigate closely the reason why writing anything has been so difficult lately: I must be brutally honest with myself. What I began to realize is that, at least in part, my expectations had begun to shift. There was a reason why I felt so uninspired and underqualified to put pen to paper for another week’s newsletter: I had lost touch with why I do what I do. I could, of course, offer you a pious answer for what motivates my writing, but the true answer is that I write because I want to write; I write because writing is what I do. It is artistic expression for me: it reflects my natural gifting and blesses me even as (and perhaps more so than) it blesses others.

I have been reading Madeleine L’Engle’s thought-provoking classic Walking on Water which chronicles the life and meaning of the Christian artist. I first heard of the book after reading how much it had inspired singer-songwriter Nichole Nordeman, who, incidentally, wrote the introduction for the latest edition. The history of how I became interested in Nordeman’s art—and hence came to read L’Engle’s Walking on Water—is an interesting one. Feeling the need to include a more devotional aspect to my life, several years ago I began listening to Christian radio on the extended drive back and forth from home and work. Nordeman’s song “Who You Are” from her album Wide Eyed caught my attention because of its honest, intelligent lyrics and (at least comparatively) unique instrumental arrangement. Being a musician myself, I tend to evaluate a song’s instrumental arrangement as much, if not more, than its lyrical imagery. And further, while it is not my intention to insult anyone’s tastes in music, speaking for myself, I often find much of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) scene rather bland and insipid in terms of song structure and arrangement. As a rule, I have always found that secular music is more innovative and diverse, setting the trends that the Christian music scene follows.

It was none other than Albert Einstein who was quoted as saying that “Creativity is more important than knowledge,” and I think there is a great deal of truth to that statement. What I think is often missing from CCM—and from much of my own writing these days—is imagination. Last night, in fact, I was listening to “Goodness and Faith,” the tenth program in R.C. Sproul’s twelve-part overview on the fruits of the spirit entitled Developing Christian Character. He spoke about the redeemed person’s newfound ability to enjoy the classic virtues of goodness, beauty, and truth, and I have taken the pains to transcribe this excerpt from his talk, though I am sure, given the spontaneous nature of speech versus the more polished quality of prose, he would probably have worded a few things just a bit differently if he were writing instead of speaking. I have taken the liberty to ferret out a few extraneous conjunctions (represented by ellipses) and consolidate or complete a few dependent clauses (represented in square brackets) so that the ideas contain increased continuity. He says:

You have obviously lost some of the immediacy of Sproul’s words in trying to read something transcribed from his lecture, for Sproul is one of those professors who becomes impassioned when he speaks. The fact is, speaking and writing are two different mediums: while Sproul can write equally well, he is in teacher mode here and it is the beauty of his ideas that merit mention. The point is that Sproul believes one of the attributes of the fruit of goodness is a renewed appreciation for the excellence of God as seen in all things beautiful, whether that be in nature, in the world or art, or within the walls of the church. What is more, he feels that aesthetic blandness is an unfortunate byproduct of Protestantism. Call him crazy whoever may, he appreciates the way the stained glass and the spires of Gothic architecture arouse a sense of the numinous within him. I must agree: daisy chained chairs and polyurethane pulpits fail to stir within me any great sense of the sacred, practical and utilitarian as such may be.

It could be argued, I suppose, that the very “blandness” of Protestantism could be whetting Sproul’s appetite, making him hungry for the splendor of Gothic architecture; perhaps someone raised in the Catholic tradition would find those same four walls routine and commonplace. There may even be a time in which getting at the deeper creativity requires four plain white walls, but I think the point is well taken that blandness of aesthetic does tend to characterize much of Christendom, at least in America. An emphasis is often placed on evangelism and that’s good: a belief that if we just put the word out, God will honor it. Still, there is a side of me that longs for the expression of the truly gifted, for I don’t believe we have all been equally equipped; some have the gift of music, others of silence. The latter can only truly sing when saying nothing, for that is from whence their beauty derives and neither man nor beast can help but be affected. It is only the former, however, that have truly been given the gift of the musical voice, pleasing not only to the ears of God, but to their fellow man as well. Each radiates beauty in his own way; each functions best by being the individual member of the larger body where we are not all hands nor were we ever created to be: to be sure, there are hands—it is just that we are not all hands. I suspect, however, that part of this blandness has less to do with gifting and its external expression and more to do with the denial of our own inner poverty. We who claim to have the Elixir of Life are dying slow deaths in our program propelled churches where drivenness is all the rage; we have forgotten how to be honest with ourselves and others: forgotten that the most constructive aspects of life often involve the simple things: sitting in front of the fireplace while savoring a cup of hot mocha or coffee or green Asian tea.

Not so long ago, I was reflecting aloud to a compatriot on the relative lack of social obligations I have vying for my time and attention after more than three years of constant busyness. Thoughtfully realizing that there is a time for rest in God and that he is in control of all things, I said: “Nothing happens for an accident, you know,” thinking all the while of the providence of God and the fact that I am learning how to slow down and rediscover anew how quickly we can become bundles of burned out energy. The person to whom I was engaged in conversation startled me by saying, “No, we have to be intentional, don’t we?” I was thinking of God’s divine providence; he was thinking of the Christian’s duty on earth: his comment was the last thing I was expecting to hear. Now I don’t say he is wrong, for as the Apostle Paul instructs a young Timothy: “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction” (2 Timothy 4:2). But I do find it interesting that the first conception that crossed his mind was one that could easily be misinterpreted as rhetoric from an all too common trend in our churches today: an obsessive focus on our performance as Christians. So then, should we be intentional? Yes, I think we should lead our lives on purpose. But I think far too often we feel like we cannot possibly rest, that we never do enough, that God somehow needs our services, as though he is somehow deficient within himself. To me, the title of Rick Warren’s popular book The Purpose-Driven Church says perhaps more than he intends: the church today is so often obligated, duty-bound, driven: lacking the joyful response of a heart overflowing, sacrificed, Aztec-style, on the altar of performance, wan smiles growing increasingly grimace-like, foam beginning to fester around the gums.

As I’ve been thinking a great deal about our role as Christians—and in particular my own frequent failings—another picture has begun to emerge. What I need to do on purpose, ahead of evangelism, ahead of anything else, is learn how to be honest with myself, with God, and with others. And I need to be intentional in renewing my mind daily with the tools of study, prayer, and, whenever possible, fellowship with my brothers and sisters in Christ. Part of my honesty involves not only diagnosing the problem I see in Christianity, but admitting my own fault in the matter, and, if possible, proposing and implementing a solution. So I will accept my own advice and be candid with you concerning my journey as of late in hopes that it will inspire you in some small way and help you along in your own Christian journey.

Somewhere along the line, something happened to me. In the early days of the newsletter, long before Le Penseur Réfléchit received its name, my job was easy. My mailing list consisted of a handful of friends who knew me personally and they had the great misfortune of being bombarded two and three days out of the week by articles I found of interest, thrust upon them to overflowing until their inboxes virtually sagged beneath the weight. Things were more family-like in those days and the handful of articles I had written were well-received, the responses filling my mailbox and making me feel truly in love with life and the goodness of God. Over time, I began to write more and more of my own material and I greatly enjoyed doing so. My writing began to become more imaginative and eloquent, the knowledge I was writing to a growing list of appreciative people giving me the extra “oomph” to strive for excellence. But somewhere along the way, I began to take myself too seriously. Little by little, the articles I sent were no longer sparked by a sort of spontaneous naïveté in love with life and the living of it, instead becoming more and more a way in which I was attempting to demonstrate my relative worth as a human being. The trap had sprung so slowly, each newsletter becoming that much larger than life, more so even than the one before it: each a performance in which I tried to wow and woo. Is it any wonder I have been suffering from chronic writer’s block? There was an inhuman expectation riding on my words, the whole aspect of what I do inflated to monstrous proportions. Until moments ago, I had forgotten that what my loyal readers see in my writing is me, Eric, a unique person with different eyes and “a certain way” about him, as one particularly dear Web friend once described me. In other words, I suffer from the delusion that everyone loves me because of my brains or my finesse as an author—and it became harder and harder to live up to such impossibly high stakes—when in truth, what I am most loved for is my honesty and vulnerability, characteristics that make me more human, not less. I cursed as a weakness the very thing that gave my words life.

The bitter pill that I must swallow is not a new one: I have written of it before. I must always accept that I am a nobody before I can ever become the somebody I so long to be. God always gives grace to the humble, but it is hard to admit that I am proud; hard to admit that I am insecure and needy and lacking and longing to be loved. And as an artist—a painter applying words to an electronic canvas of white—I am once again reminded that a man’s art is only as good as his honesty. True creativity is a gift that courses freely through the veins, but dishonesty clogs the creative arteries faster than anything I know. I don’t think many of us mean to be dishonest exactly, but how quickly our lives can become lie-like when we feel we must prostitute ourselves in order to have worth and value! I am convinced that we will never tap into the deeper recesses of our creativity—we will never breathe life—until we can learn to drop the piety and get honest with ourselves and others. Yes, I am convinced that if honesty shapes the very core and center of our lives, all the other virtues (and our creative imagination) will flow naturally. We will then no longer have to be driven and dogged, but instead be carried up and away, the spontaneous overflow of our hearts a contagion to others. And, because we have built our lives upon honesty, when the creative flow of life has become temporarily dammed, honest words come from our lips, the Biblical conception of confession and forgiveness reaching its natural fulfillment, cleansing us, purifying us, once again freeing us to flow, carrying others away in our wake. We need not be affected and forced; we should always be free to be free and to liberate others. That much, at least, I learned from the days of my non-Christian youth, the disillusioned idealist in search of goodness, beauty, and truth.

In keeping with this theme of honesty, my uncertainty as of late has also spread to thoughts of my education and my future. Do I stay in the institution in which I am currently enrolled, or do I try to find a school with higher accreditation? Do I continue to pursue my current major in literature as I work toward my Master’s degree, or should I switch to philosophy or theology? And while teaching is unquestionably my aspiration—I would have no patience with any age level other than college—what subject should I teach? If I stay here, the choice will be made for me, as English majors of all types are assigned 101 and 102 level Composition, teaching freshman how to write more effectively. Recognizing this factor, I began to think more carefully about college and my major. I always wanted to major in psychology. How then did I end up majoring in literature? Before I answer that question, let me state the reasons why I have concluded I am to continue to major in the subject after all and why, of all the many disciplines available to the Christian professor teaching in the secular university, it is, for me at least, the best possible one.

The world over, people ask the basic questions of life: “Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is the meaning of my life?” Literature deals with the fundamental aspects of humanity, its truth transcending the very words it employs as few art forms can, particularly when we are speaking of its narrative aspects. There is a proverb from India that says it well: “The shortest distance between a human heart and truth is a story,” for if you stop and consider on a philosophical level the surprisingly difficult question “What is truth,” you begin to realize that it is an abstraction that accurately describes reality, but is not reality itself. A story, however, can help bridge the gap between the two, making manifest the implicit. When I was sharing with a Christian brother on a camping trip recently the idea of the difference between truth and reality, I recalled to mind the specific illustration I used from a much earlier newsletter that I think captures this concept well:

Among the first words out of my fellow brother’s mouth were: “Wow, that gives a whole new conception to Christ as the Truth,” and as I began to reflect on his statement, I realized his quick observation has depth on many levels. In Christ alone is merged both the abstraction and the reality into a single, fully integrated and unified whole: Christ is both the head from which all emanates and the consummation of all created things. In fact, I was reading something just recently about ma’at, the Egyptian concept of law and order, that I think has some noteworthy parallels to this thread of thought. Caroline Seawright writes in Ma’at, Goddess of Truth, Balance, Order . . .:

Whatever we are to make of ma’at, reality and truth can be seen as distinct from one another, except in Christ, the Fountainhead from which all living water streams, the point at which all tributaries converge. But there is a sense in which story alone of all the art forms can most perfectly span the gap between reality and truth, unifying both into one homogonous whole, impossible to separate and still have “story.” Our lives consist of events in time and interpersonal interactions with other people. Much like the reality of our daily lives, a story is a level deeper than simply a truth statement such as “the sky is blue” because it offers the illusion of motion, hence the idea of the “moving storyline.” In a story, we find relationships much like those in life where things happen, people are changed, affected, make decisions, and struggle to find their place in a world in which the boundaries are not always clearly defined. Story can tap into deeper truths made all the more poignant because of their literary import and eloquence.

Recognizing the significance of the arts (in which literature plays the dominant part), Ravi Zacharias advises burgeoning apologists to make use of what he terms the three levels of philosophy. There is, he proposes, the level of ordinary “table-talk,” such as a family might share around the dinner table. On the opposite end are the formal aspects of logic and systematic study, that, unless a person happens to be so wired, are not generally enticing to the average person. Yet this deeper end of the spectrum is appropriate for solid theology and grappling with the revealed aspects of God, such as the last issue in which Father Weinandy addresses the question of the “suffering” of God. I suspect that for many of you, that issue was more difficult for you to get into and gain as much enjoyment from, given that he was writing to an assumed audience with a high level of theological literacy. There is a reason why the general populace does not often appreciate truth communicated on this more formal level, suggests Zacharias, and that is why the theologian does well to illustrate on the second realm—the realm of the arts. Even in pop culture, the arts are somewhat elevated beyond mere “table-talk,” yet form the basis from which the vast majority of the general public gain their understanding of the world and bring new ideas into the home. The arts, when used to a higher purpose, supply an imaginative element to discourse, adding beauty to goodness and truth. Therefore, the theologian does well to move between these domains, bringing most of his illustrations to bear in the realm of the arts for the memorability and eloquence they impart.

The correlation to life is particularly true of story, but also of poetry as well. Poetry is more like a portrait than a moving sequence, yet it was not until about two weeks ago that I began to realize its full import. While I was driving to the bank and beyond two weeks ago after a Saturday morning men’s fellowship, I was listening to a poet on the local college station read the first lines of his poem. Unlike ever before in my life, I experienced a very vivid sense of auto-suggestion akin to the hyper-suggestive states harnessed by masters of guided imagery, a thrill running down my spine. Of course, poetry has always been an oral art form, always most effective when read aloud, and who better than the author himself? Without ceremony or introduction, the poet first began to describe a pair of hands—that was all, no mention of whose hands or why—and I could see them in my mind, vivid, startling: the discolored arthritic spots, the dark hair sprouting behind the knuckle joints. And as he began to describe these hands and their characteristics (and hence implied things about their owner), I felt as if I were seeing a stranger sitting on a subway perhaps, evaluating him, given the same sensual cues that would ordinarily present themselves to my senses if I sized up a stranger. It was an amazing experience and I think it was the first time I have ever so vividly seen a portrait painted with words, for what are poems if not shifting portraits, sometimes of matters of the heart and sometimes, as it were, of fingers, hands, and toes? Perhaps you are beginning to see the larger picture I see of how teaching literature could be brought to bear on virtually any other discipline I might wish to incorporate in my lectures, for it is so fundamentally human, dealing not only with the sensual aspects of life, not only with the nature of relationship and romance, but also with all the questions humans have ever asked, whether these questions be epistemological, ethical, or metaphysical in nature.

Wisdom could be defined as “knowledge integrated into life” and this is the unique contribution literature can afford us, for we gain knowledge even as we experience a simulation of life’s relationships and experiences. What is more, when we come together collectively over the same text, no matter what our respective beliefs, we are for that moment united by a common source from which rich and fruitful discussion can arise. A truly good teacher can use these times to instill wisdom and virtue; what is more, the Christian professor will inadvertently shine forth Christ no matter what words he may speak, particularly if his heart’s desire is to glorify his Master. Christianity is not a matter of formulas or prescribed rules of behavior, but rather about an internal relationship with external ramifications. Wisdom transcends mere knowledge and I hope to pass along some small sense of that to my students. Not all of them are going to be converted to Christ by my words, but I can at least move them along in a direction that will make the transition that much easier and more likely: I can plow the field of the heart so that others may sow. It is for me more a question of substance—of essence—than of formula. And many of the deepest truths in life can only be communicated by quiet example, for words often only get in our way and obscure the very thing we seek to elucidate. There is a time to speak, but equally there is a time for letting wisdom speak for itself. I know these things now, but I haven’t always.

Sitting in the classroom discussing the great works of literature is often a very spiritual experience for me. I caught the bug that has infected countless others before, learned a secret that many people today have forgotten or perhaps never heard. There were so many days that my literature classes gave my life more meaning and substance than countless church services I have attended. Why, do you ask? God is impartial. He visits where he wills and will not long be stifled. What is there about literature that makes it so great? what is there about it that is timeless and eternal and capable of instilling a sense of wonder, awe, and profundity, what is it that can create the aching beauty during those few transcendent hours when the poem literally comes to life and dances before your eyes, pirouetting, gyrating, each image tantalizing the imagination, each suggesting with pictures things that exacting exegesis never could? To be certain, the literary masterpieces don’t always come to life. Many times the words weigh heavy upon the page and the eyelids begin to droop. But then there are the few hours of magic, those times in which the text comes alive and rears it ugly head, roaring in your ears, deafening, exhilarating, intoxicating.

L’Engle’s book Walking on Water is all about the Christian artist, struggling to find his niche, struggling to be true to the call of art upon his life. The fact is that being true to art is never easy, for the artist, of all people, is a person who looks at his world in different shades and hues. The mass of society is filled with people trying to find themselves and discover their sense of identity—insecure people trying to impose order on a life and a world that does not always conform to their conceptions. Yet for the artist, he lives in a paradoxical world, embracing the mystery in order to understand it, in order to gain some mastery over it. Like a man with an idea on the tip of his tongue—he can’t quite get it unstuck, yet so longs to call it forth—the artist names the unknown in order to tame it, in order to wrap his mind around it. Perhaps the favorite questions of the artist are “Why?” and “What if?” in a world swirling around his fingertips, filled with possibilities. He peers into the darkness ahead and he dares to see, not in black and white as others do, but in shades of pastel and swirls of paisley: varied reds, greens, blues, and yellows. And the vision he sees does not always comfort, yet in the end, if he be honest with himself and his Creator, he will bring healing to the world and light to the darkened landscape. His gift is not his own—it comes from God—and to God it will again return, not void or empty, but accomplishing the purpose for which it was sent.

It is interesting that L’Engle employs the expression “cosmos from chaos,” to describe what the artist renders. The Wednesday night group that meets in my home enjoys in its ranks an engineer and an artist and one day we fell into a discussion about how we view the world. We noted that the engineer sees his world in a logical fashion and that he seeks after the objective and the concrete. In this way, he either imposes order upon, or, perhaps more accurately, sees the order in, the world of creation, depending on how you look at it. Yet the artist in our group does not see the world in exactly the same way as the engineer, though we soon realized that even though it could be said that the order he imposes upon, or finds in, created reality perhaps at first appears arbitrary, it nonetheless is an ordering of its own fashion, or else it could not be called art. Both ways of viewing the world involve the imposition—or the finding—of order. So art—and creative expression of all types—could be seen as creating “cosmos from chaos” or discovering the cosmos in the “chaos,” for the cosmos within (the imago Dei) gives form to the “chaos” without: the eternal should always give shape to the temporal, not the other way ’round. It is interesting, is it not, that we serve a God not of disorder but of order: the God of artist and engineer alike.

Subscribe to Le Penseur Réfléchit, the Mr. Renaissance bi-weekly newsletter.

Previous E-mail | Next E-mail