I can’t stop writing about God.
I want to. I want to quit theology and write about life and love and art and Azaleas, but I can’t stop all these words about God. For the majority of my life, I’ve dedicated vast amounts of mental energy to thinking about God, to theology. I’ve read countless books, written thousands upon thousands of words in sermons and bible studies, dedicated myself to the study of the Christian scriptures, and generally been consumed with the process of—the processing of—and the chase after theology and good doctrine.
So, perhaps all this writing about God is just a regurgitation of what I have fed on for over twenty years. Maybe I feel the need to write about God simply because that’s all I know to write about. Maybe it’s a simple truth that I have trained by brain to think in this way, about these things, and so my neural pathways are entrenched, and I can’t help but spill some sort of poetry and prose about God.
But it feels more than that, more than a compulsion from habit and expectation. There is something in me that keeps turning to God when I have questions. Not for answers—God isn’t in the business of answers and resolutions—but as someone, or something, to test my questions against. I keep looking for better questions, questions that get to the heart of what existence means, what it means to love, and those questions, those good questions, I find myself echoing off the abyss of God.
This isn’t just about God and theology. If it was, I would produce books and essays riddled with footnotes and scripture references, dropping obscure theological terms and theologian’s names as if they would prove my credibility in and of themselves. No, this is about art, about the quest for meaning, about capturing what we fleetingly call inspiration, and by doing so losing the very thing we are straining to glimpse.
Truly, this is about true faith, for what is faith if not trust in the fact that the questions are worth answering? We may hold our belief in moments of faithfulness, and we may return to those moments when belief begins to dissipate and burn off. But faith isn’t belief. Faith is trust, and what—or who—are we trusting in?
This is what drives me again and again to the person of Jesus, the one who embodies, who enfleshes God. I can’t stop writing about Jesus because Jesus opens and gives shape to the bright abyss that is God. Jesus gives boundaries to a boundless God, gives intimacy to the divine transcendence. Jesus gives my imagination something to conceive about the eternal, infinite God who is outside all I know because God is the very basis of reality. Writing about Jesus is how I can conceivably write about God.
There is some sort of Imperative I feel to keep writing about this God, this Jesus. Something carries me into these ideas and words time and time again. I am forced, compelled, driven to write, held hostage by existential questions about theology and meaning.
Which would be fine, except a part of that compulsion involves sharing these words with the world.
God may be the topic I’m chained to, but the action is the act of crafting the written word. I can’t stop writing. Writing is more than a fascination to me, more than a hobby or a means of conveying communication. The desire to write, to craft words, to set down stanza and sentence, is a drive deep in my depths. I don’t feel like I can’t do it. No matter how insecure I am about my writing—insecure is a mild way of putting the despair I feel at not being able to capture the words well—I am still driven to write.
Writing is a form of art, a form of interpretation of the world around us into a distilled experience that, even as it invites us into the moment of experience, drives us out into the experiences around us. Art is wild like that. It is a capturing of a glimpse of beauty, insight, meaning and at the same time failing to be the glimpse that first inspired it.
Into this weirdness I must go, and into this weirdness I must take God. As compelled as I feel to write about God, that same drive and compelling spirit keeps me tethered to the words, tethered to the work, tethered to the ways I have accessible to me to capture the glimpses of God I see. The burning in my bones is not to dust off answers to questions and academically engage the mind to know doctrine and theology proper. No, what sets fire to my spirit, to the breath of my life, is that weird thing called art, that way of questioning the world, of turning it on its side, examining the microcosms of its facets and the macro-universes that existence both creates and lives in.
I am driven to attempt to create art, to craft words of prose and poetry as well as I can, even as their inspiration eludes me.
I am compelled to bring God, faith—at least the questions I have about why faith matters—and Jesus into this art, into this craft.
On a good day, I’m at peace with it. I gladly piggy-back God into my words. But good days are fewer and fewer and farther and further in between the days of disquiet. Most days, I feel both inadequate to talk about the questioning the divine and hemmed in, limited, stifled even to be stuck talking about God. This probably makes me a bad Christian writer and a god-awful theologian.
Good.
I want to be a writer, an artist, not one qualified by the limiting adjective “Christian.” And, for all the love I have for good theology, I don’t want to be a theologian so much as I want to be a poet. With these desires buried deep in my bloodstream, it is often—let’s just say the word—embarrassing to write so much, so blatantly, so obviously about God. It feels as if I can’t tell it slant in any real way. It’s as if I am stuck on childish things in a room full of PhD professors. I feel inadequate and foolish talking about God precisely because my subject is God.
Yet, I cannot stop.
There is a spirit, a holy spirit, a haunting spirit that will not leave me alone. Time and time again, I swear off writing about God, and the very next line I pen is an affirmation of my love, belief, and faith in the very God I’m trying to put away. I am reminded of Jeremiah. The prophet meant to not make mention of God anymore, to not speak God’s name. And that very name became like a raging fire in his mind, a fire trapped in his bones. Jeremiah couldn’t not talk about what God had given him to say.
Now, it sounds rather self-aggrandizing and pompous to compare myself to a prophet of Israel, yet I relate to Jeremiah. I can’t stop either. I can’t put down my pen and not write. And when I do finally come to the page again, God is what pours out of me. I am helpless. This haunting, Holy Ghost billows down the halls of my heart and drives me forth to write—a form of speaking—about the God I cannot leave behind for the sake of art.
As much as I desire to write about life and love and art and Azaleas, I can only write about them in the context of divinity. I am trapped, stuck, doomed to write about God until I cannot breathe any more. I may want to, but the Spirit that haunts me will not leave me alone until I speak, write, work the words about this God. The disquiet in my soul won’t stop, and the tension between faith and art—of faith as art—will reside in me until I die.
Perhaps that’s what it takes to make good art that speaks about God. Perhaps this tension is exactly where I have to be—unresolved as it is—in order to write well about God, in order to not just convey information about a deity, but to speak about, to, into and from that bright void that is God. Perhaps this is my slant, my hidden way of speaking truth.
I don’t know if I will ever—or can ever—be considered a great poet, or even a good one for that matter. But I do know that the words won’t stop coming, and every one of them keeps ringing the bell by hammering away at the thing we call God. The words resound with divinity, and I can only survive the clatter, clamor, and din by giving in and ringing the bell into the void.
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