I just returned from a week at the Frederick Buechner Writer’s Workshop in Princeton, New Jersey. Buechner has always been a model for me, an author who expresses the essentials of faith in beautifully crafted prose, creating new forms as he writes. Spending a week with other presenters and prospective writers got me thinking about why I write.
Not long ago I received a letter from Indonesia written in fractured English:
“I been reading your book The Jesus I Never Knew. These truly a blessing. I read them three times. many times i couldn’t sleep at night thinking what you wrote. Your book help me see Jesus not only a person who lived and died on earth 2000 ago, but also a real person that risen 2000 ago that still reacheable until today.”
Whenever I get such a letter, I give thanks for the privilege of working with words and for the unlikely linkages they make possible. I know no more isolated occupation than writing. “We read to know that we’re not alone,” said one of the students tutored by C. S. Lewis in the movie Shadowlands. Yes, and we write in desperate hope that we’re not alone, hoping that the sometimes-tedious tasks of researching, composing, and polishing words will eventually become a virtual chain that links us to others.
Writing has afforded a way for me to work out my faith, word by word. As a journalist I sought out people I could learn from, people who ultimately pointed me toward the Jesus way (I wrote about some of them, including Frederick Buechner, in Soul Survivor). And to my astonishment God eventually began to use my own words to encourage others in their faith.
A woman in Lebanon told me how much my book Disappointment with God meant to her. She read it a few pages a night in the midst of the civil war there, descending thirteen flights of stairs in a darkened stairway to a bomb shelter underground and reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. Another woman in Beirut wrote that my book What’s So Amazing About Grace? helped her have a better attitude toward the P.L.O. guerrillas who had commandeered her apartment. I read such letters and think to myself, I really had in mind a chronic illness not a civil war, and neighbors who play loud music not guerrillas who move in uninvited. Again and again God has surprised me by using words written with mixed motives by my impure self to bear fruit in ways I never could have imagined.
I have an entire bookcase devoted to copies of my books published in foreign languages. I used to worry about how my words would relate to other cultures. As I travel internationally, though, I realize that we human beings are alike. We face the same basic issues: growing up, sex drives, temptation, romance, ambition, money, children, illness, death. We wonder how a God who created the universe can care about our petty problems, and why God’s intervention on earth seems so unpredictable and sporadic. We wonder about right and wrong, life and afterlife, pleasure and pain. Though they manifest themselves in different ways, at heart the same realities confront us all, no matter the culture we live in, and we writers simply try to tell the truth about those realities.
Words have a way of penetrating barriers. Think, say, of when a Jehovah’s Witness missionary knocks on your door: immediately defenses go up. But printed words are far less threatening. Someone in Indonesia can pick up a book about Jesus and decide to read it, confident that if she finds it unconvincing, she can simply put it down. Words literally saved my faith. When professors and pastors didn’t know answers to crucial questions, I could find them in authors such as C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton—and, of course, Frederick Buechner.
God forbade “graven images,” which can overwhelm and dominate, like an idol. Instead, God approaches us in the most freedom-enhancing way imaginable: through words. John’s Gospel settled on the title the Word for the clearest revelation of God’s own self.
Modern society keeps drifting away from words, relying instead on images and graphics. There’s even an emoji Bible that translates verses into emoticons (http://www.bibleemoji.com/). I won’t make that shift. I’m sticking with words.
Thank you Philip. Well said. The quest to connect and to be understood even meshes for those of us who occasionally write incoherent stories while trying to tell the truth about reality.
When I was seventeen, I was forced to take a high school class that I didn’t want to take, from a teacher whose manner irritated me. By the end of the year, I was fond of the teacher. As a graduation gift she gave me a bundle of books, including one by C.S. Lewis. It turned out that I was heading into a crisis of faith, and somewhere in the middle of it I picked up the Lewis book (it was Mere Christianity) and it was as if I had been spiritually suffocating and someone let in a blast of fresh air. I read more of his books. Here was a Christian who actually thought, who wrestled with deep questions yet had strong faith. He even believed in evolution while taking the Bible seriously. I shudder to think where I would be spiritually without that gift.
Recently, one of my friends was so impressed with What’s So Amazing about Grace that he bought a dozen or so copies and gave them away. I got one. Pretty good. I’ve always rejected the American Evangelical tendency to blend patriotism, militarism, and politics in general with the gospel. Then I saw Reaching out for the Invisible God in a thrift shop and picked it up. Refreshingly honest.
Then I saw you on the Biologos website.
Keep up the good words!
Writing is my full-time occupation, whereas for many people it’s a hobby or something they do evenings and weekends while juggling demands of family and job. So I’m not sure if our circumstances are the same. At one point I sat down and made a list of ten books that I wanted to write, mainly because I wanted to explore those topics. Eventually I got them all done. In my case, if I keep thinking on one track, reading books, speaking…I stop and pay attention. You know how when you get a new car you start noticing all the others on the road of the same model and type? When I keep gravitating to books on prayer, for example, I pay attention to that questioning voice.
You’re an accomplished woman with a gripping story, Vahen, and I know you have the opportunity to tell it often. I’m sure, too, that along the way many people respond with their own stories and questions. I hope you keep writing though, as you say, there are various forms: articles, blogs, books. It’s hard work, as you well know. Thank you for the encouragement, and bless you as you listen to the voice of guidance that only you can hear. –Philip
In this raucous and mean political season, I write here about the last chapters in your book “Vanishing Grace” which spotlights the troubled relationship between politics and faith — how wanna-be candidates court evangelicals insincerely; how celebrity preachers and talk-show hosts adopt Christian phrases and poses to push a favorite political agenda in disguise. This is arrogance of the highest order and the lowest denominator. As a working journalist on social issues and the arts,(you once quoted me in your book “Prayer”) I have interviewed a number of faithful people — both celebrities like the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and the Apartheid writer Alan Paton (“Cry, the Beloved Country”) and ordinary folks like two ambitious Baltimore ghetto brothers and a remarkable deaf-blind teen from Iowa. One thing they share to their credit is humility — what you call Grace — before God and before society. That doesn’t mean they are passive; just measured: they take their wisdom from above and their inspiration from below — that is, from even humbler folks whom they can help. (Mr. Wiesel once gave up his only break-time during a busy day of teaching to sit alone with me to hear my concerns.) That is real grace in practice. But meanwhile, even more disturbing than the political arrogance on display these days in the US is the public’s approval of it all as support-polls and TV ratings soar. Americans cheer the arguments, the wall building, the hubris on all sides. What a self-centered era. Once, for want of a people’s grace, Jesus wept. Thanks for your reminder/warning in print.
Thank you SO much,
I really appreciate your time and attention to responding to my questions, and your beautiful words of encouragement. I value it GREATLY.
In this season of my life God has greatly blessed me with the luxury of time and resources to travel and speak, as the doors are opening WIDE. The fact that I get to share what God has done in my life is truly a gift from God, and I thank Him EVERY day.
I also understand what you mean about listening and “paying attention,” and so I will continue to pray for God’s direction with ears WIDE open, as I follow where He leads. 🙂
“I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.” (Revelation 3:8)
Together in HIS service,
Vahen