Yesterday morning, I drove into nearby Pittsburgh in an
attempt to attend a talk that I thought would inspire and influence me. It was
called “Writing as Vocation.” All week (more or less) I asked people if they
wanted to go with me and even succeeded in finding someone willing to drive
into the city with me. Unfortunately, that fell through about twenty-four hours
before hand, as she found out about a meeting she was required to attend. I
decided that I would go to the talk anyways, even if that meant driving by
myself.
Despite the fact that I am typically okay with driving in
traffic, I got flustered in the light traffic that I encountered coming through
the tunnel on Saturday morning. The short version of this story is that I ended
up driving around downtown Pitt in search of St. Paul’s Cathedral, certain that
I would find it. But my twenty-minute cushion time quickly dwindled as I
realized that I was nowhere near the cathedral.
In a last effort to get to the talk on time, I got back onto
the highway that I had come from. The highway only took me back to the tunnel
and so I drove out of the city, fifteen minutes after the start time of the
lecture, frustrated with my spoiled plans.
“This is stupid.”
“Lord, bring good out of this.”
The two phrases alternated in my head for the next five
minutes. Then I made up my mind to enjoy myself and drove to a little French
café that I discovered over the summer, deciding that well, if I couldn’t
attend a lecture about the vocation of writing, I could at least write.
Maybe that is what I really needed that morning—a sort of
retreat from familiar faces and places, a time to recollect myself and to think
about how writing is a vocation and
what that means for my life.
Maybe there are times in our lives when we don’t need
conversation. Times to pause and think. Times to enjoy a smooth cup of black
coffee. Times to fill the cream colored spaces between notebook lines with dark
loops and swirls.
Writing is something I can throw myself into—with my heart,
my mind, my short experience, and my faulty wisdom—and become better for it.
Writing requires endless learning. Not simply learning in
the sense of research, but in a deepening disposition of wonder towards the
world.
In the development of a critical eye for culture and for my own writing.
In the discovery of my own relationship with the Infinite.
In an understanding
of how particular circumstances relate to the universal situation of man.
In a
tuning of my rhythmic ear.
In a ripening sense of humor.
In a sharpening of my
notice of small intimate details.
In a deepening ability to relate to all types
of people simply because they are people and I am a person. In a discipline and
passion for the gritty revision of my own words.
In a vocabulary that expands
to become more precise.
At this moment, looking at all these ways that writing will
continue to demand the best of me and to sharpen what exists of me now, I have
great hope! It is a work that will not be futile, a calling that will stretch
me beyond the narrow limits that I set for myself.
Writing about writing—what a stereotype! But it’s necessary
sometimes to step back from what we are doing and to think about why we do
those things.
So why do I write? I write because it’s how I discover the
world. It’s how I discover myself. And it’s how I discover God.
If the glory of God is man fully alive, I pray that the Holy
Spirit comes to animate me, to inebriate my writing, so that my person and my
words may be a spring of water welling up to eternal life; so that through my
work, I may be refined into the sanctity that the Lord requires of me.
