“Why do you write?”
Like anyone with the passion of being known, I return again and again to this question so that I might check myself for the truth—that endless search for purpose and meaning. Maybe this will be the moment, the lucky visit to the empty page when I will find the courage to write in both the bright places as well as the murky ones.
A couple summers ago my husband, Jamé, and I had were invited to stay at The Convent with David and Jody Nixon in Cincinnati. A fun feature of that trip was being guests at a small gathering of fans for the Servant reunion concert, a band James had admired in the early 1980’s and whose lead singers live in community with the Nixons. Prior to the show, a woman seated behind me asked how I happened to be there. I explained the connection, that Dave was the spiritual director of our program at George Fox Seminary and how impressed I was by the Quaker hospitality I’d found there.
Soon, my new concert buddy and I were discussing how remarkable the Quakers are at discernment and how they ruminate or muse over a decision similar to how God “brooded” over the waters at the time of creation. “This brooding for the Quakers is not to arrive at a yes or no,” she explained, “but rather to allow an idea to come to its fullness of being….”
The music started just then and in the humid summer night air of an old church-turned-concert-hall, we “rocked out.” The woman’s words sat heavily on my soul while I clapped and sang along, fanning my face in the humid dark with a grocery list from the bottom of my purse.
The next day at The Convent, I sat in the hush of early morning with the rare gift of a sunny, clear, blue Ohio sky. All was bright and still. I prayed the psalms and fell in love again with the sound and weight of silence.
My gaze was fixed just beyond the reach of an old Cottonwood tree on a rosette of stained glass cathedral windows. Feeling like I was in the pages of a Howatch novel, I marveled at the antithesis to the previous night…and the dark that still enveloped me inside.
I had been asking God, “What now?” I worried over the possibility that I’d committed to writing memoir for my doctoral project—prematurely. I was not finding anything remotely interesting or redemptive about my story. Surely, I had been mistaken in thinking that it could in any way bring life or hope or even laughter to another person.
I tried to still my mind and my fear long enough to listen.
“What if the artist of that gorgeous stained glass window had refused the task? What if the artist of the small Eastern Orthodox painting above the fireplace had shied away from using color? As they did, can you trust me with your desire also?”
It was then that I knew this brooding of God during Creation was not found in the bright light of clarity, but rather in womb-like darkness, of a shadow hovering over and allowing God’s design for His Kingdom to come to its fullness. The same was true in me…in us.
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
The flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic—or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
–Denise Levertov, “Variation on a theme by Rilke,” Breathing Water
How would you describe the Master Creator who hovered over the world in its earliest conception and now animates and moves and creates in and with us? What are you being awakened to do?