To open up windows is the function of religion, says Rumi, the wonderful Persian poet. And I would add of writing as well. But how? What kind of writing opens up windows? So much of what we write simply repeats what is in the windowless rooms of our reader’s mind. So much of what we write does not open up a window to something new or something valuable that has been forgotten. Writing that opens up windows gives a new perspective to a reality that in many ways has been shaped by others in predictable ways. A reality that has been shaped since childhood by ancient prejudices and fears, by commercial expectations of success, by the media. So when you write, ask yourself if you are opening windows or whether you are simply reinforcing in the reader what is already there. Writing that opens windows is more than a metaphor – it is a practice, a technique, a decision that is made before you start to write and constantly as you progress in your work. There are innumerable places when your story can go in one direction or another, when your character can be this way or that, when you can choose to say or not say something. Writing that opens windows then becomes an ever-present, bold search for the unpredictable, a struggle to shift the reader’s perception toward some new way of seeing and feeling and understanding. Writing that opens windows arises ultimately from the writer’s recognition that art is capable of feeding the hunger for meaning that exists in the reader’s soul, or at the very least, awaken it. Art helps us live. It gives meaning and solace and hope to our lives. Writing that opens windows allows the reader to look out and be a part of a larger world. It lets the reader know that she is not alone with her yearning for truth and beauty. But writing that opens windows also lets light in. When writing opens a window it becomes a vehicle for grace. It allows grace to enter a person’s heart. Grace can have a divine origin if you are religious, like Rumi, or it can simply be the gratitude for living that life bestows to anyone open to it. Finally, writing that opens windows can only happen if the writer opens windows in his or her heart. That’s the ethic, the responsibility, the integrity of this type of writing. Your writing will open windows in the reader’s life to the extent that you open windows in yours.
October 22, 2015
March 1, 2015
Our Creative Duty
Sermon given at Pilgrim Church, Sherborn, MA – March 1, 2015
I am very honored to speak to you this morning and very honored and grateful to Pastor John for selecting my novel Marcelo in the Real World for Pilgrim Church’s Lenten Reading Series and indeed for being the primary instigator in the Town’s selection of Marcelo for its One Town One Read program. I was reading Marcelo again in preparation for all this hullaballoo and I was surprised and happy to feel as if the book had been written by someone else: Someone a lot wiser and a lot better writer than me. Since its publication more than five years ago, I’ve often gone back to read passages in the book that help me get unstuck from those mental blocks that are keeping me from writing. Some of the passages I like to re-read are the dialogues between Marcelo, the main character of the novel, and Rabbi Heschel. Marcelo is a young man with an autism-related condition known as Asperger’s Syndrome who has a special interest/slash obsession with God. Even though Marcelo’s family is not Jewish, Marcelo’s mother, Aurora, a little afraid of Marcelo’s special interest has arranged for Marcelo to meet every other week with Rabbi Heschel to give Marcelo someone to talk to and also to make sure the special interest doesn’t become too extreme. There’s one interchange between Rabbi Heschel that I turn to again and again when I am anxious and discouraged about my writing. It’s the passage where Rabbi Heschel tries to explain to Marcelo her decision to become a rabbi. She tells Marcelo:
“I never knew for sure that going to seminary was what God wanted me to do. Sure, I used to complain to God, to Moses you appear as a burning bush, but to me you come like a burning hemorrhoid. I knew that going to seminary was what the Lord wanted only afterward, when the burning — not stopped — but at least got bearable (. . .) How I found out that God wanted me to do it was that the urge to do it got too painful to ignore. I ended up going to seminary just so I could get some sleep.”
The passage reminds me of the time I finally decided to bear down and write a novel. Although I wanted to be a writer since I was a child and kept a journal, writing in it almost daily since I was a teenager, it was only when I was forty-five years old that I took it upon myself to start, persist and complete a novel. I had just gotten laid off from the law firm where I had been unhappily working as a real estate lawyer. Yes, the real estate market was sinking and there was not enough legal work to go around the various associates, but it was also true that practice in a high powered law firm and me were not, how shall I put it, jelling. So there I was in one of those moments we all have now and then. You know, the moment when you wonder where your life has gone and you have this awful feeling that you have wasted lots of it. I was wondering how it was possible to go through a life time ignoring the persistent urge to write and it was clear that the unhappiness that I found myself in at that time was at least partly related to the recognition that the urge I had ignored had a divine origin. I had ignored a call from God to utilize gifts given to me. So I started to write. An hour, sometimes a couple of hours each day, for many months. Then I sent the book out and after all the rejections were in, I re-wrote and re-wrote and five years later a novel was published by a small university press. About six months after I was laid off, I was able to find a legal job that was less stressful and less time-intensive and which allowed me at least a couple of hours to write early mornings or on weekends. I’m not going to tell you that I went from being miserable to being happy. It was more like experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s reason for going to the seminary. I wrote so the burning could diminish and I could get some sleep. One time someone asked Flannery O’Connor, why she wrote, and she answered: “Because it feels worse when I don’t.” I think that what Rabbi Heschel and what Flannery O’Connor were referring to, and what I found out the hard way, is that if the creative urge, the call to create and to express your talents and gifts is not attended to, sooner or later there will surely be psychic and maybe even physical pain. And this pain can in turn lead to all kinds of ways and tactics to lessen the painful certainty in our hearts that we are not responding to the call to fully be who we are meant to be. It’s as if the creative urge were a relentless force that needs to find proper expression less it explode in unwanted ways that are painful and hurtful to ourselves and others.
I used the word “duty” in the title of my talk today because I wanted to emphasize a sometimes forgotten aspect of creativity. Yes, there is joy in responding to the creative call. But this joy is the joy of meaning and purpose and it does not always feel good. Responding to the creative call requires persistence and discipline and patience. I’ve never had a book go from first draft to publication in less than three years. The last one that will come out next year will take six years by the time it comes out. It is not really possible to grind out this kind of effort without firmly believing that you have an obligation to do so. The words duty and obligation have taken on a negative connotation in our modern world. Duty is what you have to do as opposed as to what you like to do. But duty can be joyful if it is linked to love. What helps me the most in the fulfillment of this obligation I feel is to connect the obligation to God. To see writing as a religious vocation, an individual call from God. Indeed, it is helpful for me to see the creative urge as originating not in me but in God. Creativity flows through me and I give it my own individual expression, but it is not mine. Seeing my writing as something that is from God and for Him helps me not to worry about the book’s success. My job is to write the book and do what I can to get it published. What happens after that is up to Him. What I do know about the results of my efforts is that God will find a way to place the book into the hands of the reader that needs that book, that will be touched by it and find it useful. Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite Christian authors, said that “vocation was the place where the gladness in your heart meets the world’s great need.” Writing books that are helpful, useful to young people is where the gladness in my heart meets one of the world’s great needs, providing our young people with inspiring role models, inciting them through good stories and complex characters to ask the big questions: who am I? Why am I here? Or as Marcelo asks Rabbi Heschel: “How can we live with so much suffering?”
Through the years that I’ve been writing, what has helped me the most is to understand that writing is secondary to the primary object of God’s creative urge. Writing is about doing that which gives my heart gladness, but creativity is first and foremost an urge to be, to become, and only secondarily an urge to do. My first creative duty is to create my soul and my life in the image of an ideal. We are all free to choose the ideal we want to become but as someone who tries to follow Christ, the ideal that I endeavor to create is the ideal represented by the life and words of Jesus Christ. To be like Jesus is my first creative duty. The Beatitudes encapsulate for me who Christ was and is and who I want to be. Poor in Spirit, Able to mourn, meek, hungry and thirsty for righteousness, merciful, pure of heart, a peace maker, and someone willing to be persecuted, i.e. ignored, sometimes rejected, for trying to be like Him. I am not very successful at embodying this ideal into my daily life, but in this, as in writing, ultimate perfection is not important. It’s all in the trying. The writing, the doing, flows from my connection to Christ, my poor attempts to be like him.
Sometimes I think we tend to limit creativity to artistic or scientific endeavor or to some kind of innovation in business or medicine or government. In other words, we limit creativity to doing and we limit it to a few people we consider special or gifted. But really, the most important creative act, our creative duty, is to the creation of our person, the creation of who we are through choosing what we think about and what we pay attention to and what we do. The objects we create, the writing or inventing, are simply expressions of who we are. Viewed this way, imagining who you want to be and actualizing that image in the particular facts of your life is a creative act, the most important creative act. The kindness, the forgiveness, the helpfulness that we first imagine and then make real are all creative acts. If you listen closely, you will recognize in yourself the urge to become, to grow in accordance with an image of goodness and beauty that you carry in the silence of your inner most being. That urge, bothersome at times, is God’s call. It is God calling you through Christ to be like Him, to be the person we are meant to be. This, becoming who God wants us to be, is our creative duty.
February 6, 2014
What I Learned About Depression
For the past three years I’ve been working on a novel about a young girl who suffers from depression. The idea, as it was first proposed to me by Cheryl Klein, my editor, was to depict an “organic depression” as opposed to a depression that is caused by a particular traumatic event. As it turns out, Vicky ends up having a depression that is both organic and situational in that the natural mourning after her mother’s death six years before turns into an abiding and debilitating depression. In any depression, the chemical origins and the life stressors are hard to separate. There are people and events in Vicky’s life that are stressful but there is no ongoing trauma. Her family is well-off. She attends an exclusive private school. She is the first to admit that she is very privileged. And yet one evening she swallows enough sleeping pills to end her life. The book starts on the day after her suicide attempt and follows her stay at the hospital, her stay at a “recovery” ranch and her return home. Vicky’s story is the story of her struggle to “be friends with life.” Whether she succeeds or not is the driving tension of the book.
I’m one of those who agree with Ursula K. Le Guin that “one of the things fiction does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.” I thought I knew about depression before I started writing the book (my long-time experience with this illness was why I agreed to write it), but there were attitudes, feelings thoughts about depression that I now recognize for the first time. (The fact that it has taken me three years trying to “get it right” is some indication of both the complexity of the illness as well as, perhaps, a personal hesitancy to go deeply into the dark belly of the whale). I found out, for example, about the heavy, dragging weight of pretending you are “okay”. I discovered the anger and frustration that depression can evoke in others. Most of all, I glimpsed at some of the tools needed to, if not overcome, at least live and function with depression. Yes, medication is needed. Medication is essential in organic depression. But along with medication, surviving depression in the long term requires a shift in the way we see the world. I’m going to call this shift “accourage” because it consists partly in accepting that life is hard (abandoning the expectation that it should be easy and totally likeable) and partly in courageously proceeding to try to be useful, as best we can, despite life’s hardness. But how do we get accourage? What I learned from writing this book is that accourage comes eventually from the daily decision to live for an ideal. What ideal? It’s up to you. You create the ideal you want to live for. An ideal is an image of who you want to be. It is more than a belief system or a moral code in that an ideal tugs at your heart and soul and not just your mind. The ideal can be based on myth or religion or history or your imagination. You choose it and then you do your best to embody it. The only rule is that the ideal you follow has to be large enough, better enough, true enough to what is best in you and human kind to exert a pull on you and fill you with hope. The ideal has to be worthy enough for you to want to be like. Gustav Jung said about patients in the second half of life that “there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.” This is what I most learned about depression from writing my book: that learning to live with and even prevail against depression depends on finding a “religious” ideal. Religious not necessarily in the traditional sense of a faith in a body of beliefs, but religious in the root meaning of the word, re-ligare, as in we need to re-connect, bind ourselves, with mind, heart, soul and strength with an image that embodies kindness, and courage and sacrifice and dedication. An image of someone  greater and deeper and truer than our hurting selves.
