There is a parable in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas that struck me, after some deliberation, as appropriate to the writing life. The parable compares the Kingdom of God to a woman who is traveling home from the market carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking, the handle broke and the meal spilled. She did not realize it. When she got home she found the jar empty. When I first read the parable I could not understand how such an image so full of apparent despair could possibly represent the Kingdom God. No wonder Thomas’ Gospel didn’t make it into the accepted canon. But then I thought that maybe what the Jesus in Thomas’ Gospel was telling us was that the Kingdom of God spreads through us without our knowledge. The greatest good that we do is the good we don’t even know we’re doing.
It is like a book that I spend months or years creating and then it goes into the world. Whatever life the book has after it leaves my hands is a life that takes place without me. I no longer matter. Whatever good it does in the heart of a reader is a good that takes place without me. I write a book during many hours, many days and as I write I don’t see the words spilling on the sand and when I finish, when I get to the end, the jar is empty. Whatever joy there is in writing comes from this emptying, from this letting it all out on the page. Believe me when I tell you that it takes practice to give the book your honest work, to not hold back, and then to let it go. The joy is in the purity and sincerity of the effort, in not having anything more to say because it was all said.
I was just reading a post I wrote in 2013 entitled Second Chances, where I talked about a revision I was working on to Behind the Eyes, my first Young Adult novel. I was grateful to be getting a second chance to write the story because I had finished that first book with a sense that I had not given it everything I had. I held back something, I wasn’t sure what. Something essential. Well, the years went by and so did the revisions and still I could not reach that point where I said all I wanted to say, all I needed to say, in the only way I could say it.
It’s okay to be proud of oneself for the right reasons, no? I am humbly proud of myself for persevering with Hector’s story until I can finally say that I emptied myself in the book. The honest effort through many years of work (with lots of help) has taken me to the publication of On the Hook in May of this year. Hector is fully alive on the page (and in me) and I hope that he will live in the hearts of others. I love how Hector struggled with hatred and fought toward a self-acceptance that included both cowardice and courage, for as human we are a mixture of both. I started writing Hector’s story when I was in my forty’s. It could be that I had to wait until my late sixty’s to understand what he was trying to tell me. Maybe I had to find out about the courage of emptiness, the courage of love and of good work that spills from us undetected.
