Today, I did something hopeful and tender.
It was also a bit terrifying.
But I can’t take it back, and now the first pitch for my devotional cookbook Roux and Lament lives in someone elses’s inbox. My dream publisher’s inbox. Waiting to be read, waiting to be contemplated, waiting to be replied to, forwarded, deleted, or ignored. God only knows.
And here I am, wondering what I’m going to do if they say no, and wondering frantically what I’ll do if they say oh yes! Please tell us more. What happens if they say yes and the words won’t come?
I don’t believe in writer’s block, but I do believe that for the saints, writing is spiritual warfare.
I’ve always been a writer. I learned to read at four; and by six, I was writing poetry on sheets of blank newsprint we cut off the remnants given away by the local paper. Over the years, my sisters and I would awkwardly stitch together many sheets of hand-cut pages, then write and illustrate our own little books. I still have a few, yellowed and crumbly with time; endearing and embarrassing, all at once.
But then, not so innocent. There was the time when my words were devoted to philosophies designed to move you. “Oh, your writing!” Folks would exclaim. I had an ardent group of readers. I’d find my poetic, magical phrases and paragraphs tucked into other people’s blogs, no credit given, claimed as their own. Still, I would write, wanting to give language to deep inner soul feelings and dreamings, hoping to take your breath away with a tapestry of words and sentences woven from incense, feathers, and flowers. Mystical. Metaphysical. Evocative, like a spell. Following Rumi and Rohr, all priestess and poem in my sultry ways.
I wrote as a wild woman, slowly deconstructing like a siren beginning to disrobe. And you loved me for it.
I wrote so much; I put words together well, and gave nothing to you but a few fallen petals carried off by the wind.
Nothing to build your life on. Nothing to feed you or give you real hope. Nothing to cling to or be sure of.
Forgive me?
When the Shepherd found me, I stopped writing. Grief came. Oh yes, there was grace. But grief, too, choking-on-oceans-of-it grief. Then, after a while, when this writer groped for words again, she found safe ones, stern and academic. I couldn’t trust myself; I’d been deceived. I couldn’t trust my feelings, because they weren’t truth. I couldn’t trust my words, because they came from myself and my feelings. So I wrote as if I were penning a textbook: clinical, sterile, scientific. Choppy and robotic and dutiful. As I unraveled from my wanderings in the New Age, and as Jesus taught me what He wanted me to know, I wrote about God. I wrote about Romans and Revelation. I wrote Bible studies as a babe in Christ, zealous in her renewed (or maybe newly-found) faith, but without the warmth that comes with being seasoned long and slow over time. Perhaps I wrote out of guilt, reluctant to allow grace to fully soak in. I offered austere, godly words; my penance for deceit.
But I wept.
Jesus the Messiah offered the written word in a spiritual war. “It is written: man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
The living Word became warm, breathing flesh. He, the Word who feels, opened His arms and said come to Me, all you who are labor and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. He opened His bleeding arms, spread them upon a cross, gathered up our sin, and took it upon Himself.
“It is written,” Christ said to the accuser. And we, with the authority of the risen Christ, overcome the same accuser by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.
So I don’t believe in writer’s block, but for the saint, I believe writing is spiritual warfare.
By the grace of God, I am learning to write again.
I have no appetite for profound depth of sayings, or existential concepts woven with metaphysical flowers. I don’t want an “experience, not things” effect with my essays, writings, and books. I also don’t want stern or austere. I crave simple, warm, and true. Sustenance to actually feed you. Truth to actually heal you.
May my words always and always point you to the living Word, the bread of God that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.
Will I ever be able to write again? I cried to the Lord many times. Well, our Father is funny. I stopped writing poetry and He gave me a cookbook to work on and He gave me a poem.
Come.
Come, you artists and saints.
Come, poet and prophet, beggar and priest
Come and feast.
Come, weary mothers and fathers,
come prodigal daughters
and sons. Come, you who are weeping;
Come hungry and needing, with sorrow and ache;
Come with want
and partake.
Come, sorrower; come and be fed
Come receive grace
and bread.
This poem will be featured in my upcoming devotional cookbook, Roux and Lament. Release date to be determined, as I am still in the early stages of writing and development.