First, thank you for your kind comments after
my last post. I have strong but mixed feelings about writing in such a way about
myself. I don't think anyone has yet figured out exactly what blogs are or what
they should be. In my case I think of Real Live Preacher, first of all, as the
place where I post/publish very serious works of writing. My essays are precious
to me, and I put everything I have into them. Writing is the only area of my
life where I can truthfully say I've done my dead-level best. I can't write them
any better.
But RLP is also a blog, and another part of my
writing here is less polished and more personal. I also venture into the journal
side of blogging, which is cool in its own way. I write specifically about my
life, and I try to be honest about myself and my own struggles. That doesn't
mean my struggles are easier or harder than anyone else's, of course. And
sometimes I struggle with things that other people don't even understand. The
point for me is seeking honesty, both in writing and about myself and in the
place where those intersect.
So now I've opened my life to a lot of people,
and some of them have begun to truly care about me, which is a
precious and incredibly generous gift for them to give me. But that opens up a whole new
level of complexity doesn't it? Ideally, honest, personal writing would have a
nice separation between the writer and the reader. In order to write without
worrying about the reaction I might get, I enter a state of denial. I write as
if no one is going to read my words until after I'm dead. That really is how I
think about it, or maybe how I don't think about it.
But of course we all know that I'm not dead,
and since you care about me, you want to leave comments and encourage me. Again, that's
incredibly kind of you. What a gift! But there are so many of you...yikes! And
truly my problems are such run-of-the-mill, normal, human kinds of problems. I
don't mean to suggest that I need a telethon or anything. Yesterday I saw a blog
entry that just said, "RLP is in pain. Pray for him!" It had a link to my last
post.
And I was like, "No, no, no!" Then I
felt bad because it was such a kind thing to write, so then I was like, "Well,
okay, sure, thanks, but why don't we put whatever compassionate energy we have
into some hungry children or something like that, you know?"
You get this, right? So it's okay. There is a
tension here, but I can live with it if you can. I can write honestly about
myself if I know that we all understand that a blog is the story of one person's
life, told imperfectly and awkwardly at times, but in the way that seemed right
in the moment. It's weird, I almost don't think of Real Live Preacher as my
life. It's just a life. Just someone's life chosen at random. Don't you think
this has got to be inducing some kind of serious schizophrenia in me? I don't
know. What do I know? I just write stuff as it comes to me.
Okay, but wait, because there is another, more
serious, complicating issue that comes with this. And this is actually the
harder issue for me. See, almost everyone I know in real life - I mean the
people who know Gordon Atkinson - now are aware of Real Live Preacher and read
this blog at least occasionally. And that's fine with me. Mostly I just write
stuff and then never speak of it around my friends unless they bring it up, and
then I try to change the subject. But reading a posting on a blog is an awkward,
crummy way for people to find out that a friend is sick or hurt or depressed or
got fired or whatever. So I always know that when I write about a personal
struggle, my mom will probably call me, worried. My sister will get worried.
People in the church won't know what they should or shouldn't say. And I start
feeling like a lousy friend, brother, son, husband, father, pastor, whatever. I mean, don't the
people in your life deserve to hear stuff straight from you?
And I think that using a
blog to send messages to people in your life is a VERY unhealthy thing to do.
It's creating a dysfunctional communication triangle with two people and a blog.
That's not straight, honest communication. I try never to do that. I never
consciously use Real Live Preacher to send a message to anyone. Only I guess it
probably seems like I do to my friends and family. I'm really sorry for that,
but I can't call everyone I know and tell them what I'm going to write ahead of
time. And even if I could it would be such a grandiose, self-absorbed kind of
thing to do.
Let's face it. Here is a hard truth:
There is no good way to write about yourself
with any depth and honesty if people who know you and care about you are reading
your words while you are still alive. There is no way to do this without causing
problems. At least I haven't figured out a way yet.
So here's what I've come up with...for now. For
those of you who only know me through my writing, you can do whatever you want.
Send comments, pray for me, whatever feels right to you. I don't care if it's
one comment or a hundred. I'm going to try not to be embarrassed and to accept
that this is a unique situation we're in. I understand your compassion, and if I
were you I'd probably leave comments and send email to me. You go right ahead.
I'll read them all, and they do matter to me. I love you for that.
For those of you who are my friends (in real
life) and family and especially those of you who are a part of my faith
community, I'm sorry if my writing makes things a little awkward between us. I'm
trying to push the edges but also not go too far. I'm trying to write about one
man's life, and mine is the only life I know well enough to write about. If I
write about something and don't bring it up when we talk, I'd love it if we
could both just let it go and not worry about it. If I need to talk about it,
you know I will. But if you are worried about me, having read
something at Real Live Preacher, feel free to ask me about it if you want to. If
I write about it, you can ask about it. That's only fair.
I can't think of any physical or social thing -
no amount of possessions or wealth or power - that is as important as relationships. Our relationships are our most important treasures. I want mine to
be straight and honest and healthy.
You probably didn't need to read any of this.
But I needed to write it, so that I can try to keep it straight in my mind.
Ironically, I'm probably the most confused person in the weird, online world of
Real Live Preacher.
“What is truth?” Pilate
asked Jesus. And Jesus answered him not.
One of the poems in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of
Grass" is called, "Song of Myself." That poem caught my attention the first time
I read it, and I have contemplated its meaning many times since. Singing the
song of yourself has a thrilling and dangerous appeal, like skinny-dipping or
hitchhiking across the country with only twenty bucks in your pocket.
Many times I have wanted to sing the song of
myself, but I’ve never been willing to take the time or pay the price.
What would it take to sing the song of
yourself? What would it cost you?
First, you would have to know yourself. And
that is quite a thing to consider. You would have to take a long, careful look
into what is deep and hidden within you. What is lurking around the corners of
your mind? What memories and obsessions haunt you? What causes your glands to
seize? What gets your blood moving so that your veins and arteries swell and
push to the surface of your skin? What comes from your gut? What do your
instincts say? Who or what speaks to you at night when the raw cuts of your home
movies are shown on the screen of your mind?
Knowing yourself takes a long time, but even if
you take that journey and arrive knowing yourself as well as a person can, you
still might not sing the song of yourself. What would stop you?
Cowardly fears and righteous obligations.
Because…
Singing the song of yourself means telling the
truth, and the truth has a way of severing ties to people and places and things.
The words are spoken and a gleaming scalpel flashes. Living cords are sliced
away. There are howls of pain and then silence.
Because…
Singing the song of yourself is like removing
your clothes and standing naked before the world. Clothes do not make a person;
they make the image of that person. Underneath the clothing lies the
vulnerability of flesh. This is my true body. This is all I was given and all I
will take with me. There will be no more hiding.
Because…
Singing the song of yourself creates a flash of
white-hot fire in the kiln of your life. Everything that is not you is burned
away. You lose it all, all the stuff you have accumulated over the years that
follows you from house to house, wailing like a wraith. It would be gone
forever. Burned away.
Because…
You might lose your community. Few
relationships can withstand the song of yourself. People don’t want to hear your
song. They don’t want to hear their own songs. They want to sing little love
ditties filled with undefined words all the days of their lives.
So if you dare sing the song of yourself, be
aware that you might be standing alone at the end of it. Maybe there is one
person in the world who can bear the flames and will sing his or her song beside
you. This is the person you've longed for and can't get enough of. The person
whose voice you would recognize in a thousand voices. The one who draws you out
and brings you forth. Perhaps you will find that person.
But probably not. You will probably be alone at
the end of your song. The last refrain will echo back slowly, and there will be
silence and solitude.
“So what would be so great about singing the song of
yourself?” you ask me.
I’ll tell you. Singing the song of yourself
would be the closest you could come to real truth. Descartes knew this. He knew
that the only truth you can know and sing is the truth of your own existence.
And maybe truth is the Siren whose song has charmed and tempted you all of your
life. No one knows how you have longed for her, wanted her, pined for her,
sought her in the hard places.
When I began Real Live Preacher back in 2002, I
had an insane dream of singing the song of myself. I couldn’t do it then, even
though I was anonymous. What held me back was your opinion of me. Within days my
blog had already formed the crust of a persona, a crust that has thickened over
the years.
And persona is death to the song of yourself.
Every time I sit to write, I flirt with the
melody of the song of myself. I can feel the song. I can sometimes imagine the
words I would lay down on paper, were I to sing it. I also count the cost.
Singing the song of myself would hurt people, and that would hurt me. Truth is
brutal. The cost too high, and it is getting higher every day.
So I push the edge a bit. I pull a few things
out of my gut that are risky and lay them down with language that, ironically,
gets its beauty more from what I left inside than from what I put on the paper.
But I tell you this ferociously and with bared
teeth. The song of myself echoes in my ears every day. I’m in love with the idea
of that song, though I have never even hummed it to myself.
Because I would like to write the truth about
one human being. And I’m the only human I will ever truly know.
Just a little update. I've received very nice
emails and comments about my recent little heart glitch, and I truly appreciate
it. In fact, I'm at the place where I feel a little guilty about it. You write
something that is true about yourself, but if your blog is (for whatever reason)
one of those blogs that a lot of people read, suddenly there is this gush of
kind and sincere concern. At some point you begin to feel like you're drawing
attention to yourself, which of course you are.
Or I am. I used the vague, American-style "you
as indefinite pronoun" above because when I do that it feels like I'm
once-removed from what I write. I like using the word you in that way. Hemingway
did it, so I'm not going to apologize. I want to write like a man ripping chunks
of meat off the bone. Not like a dandy fellow, all prim and proper, dabbing his
lips with a napkin and keeping his pinky extended from his knife. "One cannot
be too careful..." - you know all that kind of stuff.
You want to write with a touch of brute
strength. Just a touch, and then be gentle as a lamb.
But back to my main point. Whatever pronoun I
choose, this blog is a personal thing. Blogs are intended to be that. They are,
we might say, a record of a person's life. An old way of thinking might lead you
to say, "What makes you think anyone wants to read your personal diary, you
self-absorbed fool?" A new way of thinking suggests that we are all adding to
the collective information network of the blogosphere. Whether or not anyone
reads your work isn't the most important question. It's the larger idea that's
important. We are reading each other's lives. We are learning about each other
and beginning to know each other across previously insurmountable geographical
and cultural barriers. I like being part of that.
I think of Real Live Preacher as my gift to the
movement. And it pays off personally too. I imagine my grandchildren could pick
through these essays and know something about me, even if I were to die too
young to know them. So I'm constantly weighing my desire for honesty and
openness against the privacy of my family and church. And I weigh the
uncomfortable sense that I'm writing too much about myself against the reality of this
new medium of expression. Sometimes saying "You" instead of "I" helps me with
that.
So enough about me; let's talk some more about
me. ;-)
My cardio stress test went well. I am,
apparently, strong as a horse. Good strong heart. Nothing physically wrong with
me that is causing a persistent arrhythmia in my heart. Jeanene and I talked
with our doctor at length about what it means to carry around too much stress.
Let's say that stress = anxiety. In that case,
are you walking around worried and anxious, never finished with your work,
always with a pressing project hanging over you? That's me. I'm never done
because the things I do for a living are things that will never be finished.
And there is also this little messy problem of
being a minister. Other people's lives are, to a certain and hopefully proper
extent, my concern. I don't want to carry that burden in an awkward, clumsy
fashion and with grandiose ideas. Grandiosity is foolish, whether you think you
can conquer the whole world or care for it. I struggle mightily with this
because I am in a helping profession. This struggle goes with the territory.
I see myself making adjustments to my
sleep, my caffeine, and my exercise. Well, the exercise that looms large in my
very near future. I quit one job and now only have two. What does this doctor
want from me anyway? Having two jobs seems reasonable, given the freedom my jobs
provide. My goal is always to be growing more healthy with both of my callings.
So thanks. I feel good to have gotten good
news. I have a good life, and I'm thankful for it. I hope I'll be a good steward
of it.
If you want to write you must have faith in
what is. You must respect what exists, because it has earned the right to exist.
Of all the possibilities, of all the things that might have existed, this thing
exists and you should write about it. Be fearless. Explain nothing. Justify
nothing. See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative
energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the
things you see and know.
If you want to write you must have faith in
yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is
likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and
your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear. With the right
kind of faith, you can be at peace with people knowing things about you and
passing judgment on you. And they will judge you. Those who will never dare to write and who will
never bare their souls in words will pass judgment on you. And the more hidden
they are behind masks of lies and pretense, the more eager they will be to turn
the spotlight on you. You will be a scapegoat. You will speak our sins, and they
will lay hands on you and drive you into the wilderness.
This is old school. This is primitive. This is
the way things are. We look for someone to bear the burden of our sins, then we
drive them away so that we don’t have to look at them and can go back to our
sinning with peace of mind.
But if you can live with all of this, if you
can let people know things about you, keep your eyes on the ball, and keep
moving forward, living hard and straight and writing about it, then you can be a writer.
And maybe a writer is something you want to be.
Here is my deadline for The
Shepherd Story, or whatever I will end up calling it. It has to be DONE by September
the 1st. Eight chapters - 1200 or so words per chapter. Done. Then in the studio
in September so that I can have the CD ready by November the 1st.
I know a lot of people who write fast. I used
to read about people doing the
nano noonoo whatever novel writing thing
and writing thousands of words every day. What? Who are these people? Not me. For
me to finish 1000 words in one day is a very rare thing. Almost never. So this
deadline is pushing me a bit. I cleverly arranged to have
Tom preach for me for two Sundays so that I
could take a couple of intensive writing retreats. I'm on one of those retreats
right now. I've been working on the Shepherd story since Thursday morning.
There is this moment for me - in writing
fiction - when the story rises up and takes over. I don't know how to get to
that moment, and sometimes I feel like I'm just messing around waiting for it to
happen. But when it happens, I become like someone watching a movie. I watch and
write everything down. Only you can stop this movie, back it up, change things,
make suggestions. You're the director of the movie.
That happened for me yesterday, so at this
point I feel certain The Shepherd Story will be fine. I'm through with chapter
three. We've met the shepherds, found out a little about them, and now they are
in a meadow on the top of a hill, waiting for the big event. One of the
shepherds, Hananiah, tried to sneak a wineskin with him on his first night as a
shepherd. I had to invent a strong, authoritative man rather like a football
coach to catch him and take it away. I named him Amos because I just read the
book of Amos recently. Anyway, Amos took the wineskin away, uncorked it, and drank
some right in front of Hananiah before sending him off.
I laughed so hard to myself in my little
writing room.
Speaking of my little writing room, some very
dear friends are out of town and letting me write in this little cottage that is
behind their house. I'm rather in love with it now.
Click for larger images
If you want to see a short video of the
place, check it out at YouTube. It's more beautiful than the pictures can
possibly convey. I'll be here again next week. I hope to get through chapter
four then.
I've never uploaded a video to
YouTube before. The audio lags behind
a bit. Notice that I wave to my reflection, but it is a moment or two
before the audio catches up. Oh well, it's free bandwidth. I can't complain.
rlp
Sadly, I got all mixed up about what week it is
and it turns out I DO have to preach this weekend. It's the last Sunday of the
month and the first Sunday of August when Tom agreed to preach. Nice. I arranged
a whole writing retreat thing and put it in the wrong week. You know me and
calendars. Looks like I have a sermon to
get done PRONTO.
Well, at least it does for me. I have now
gotten very serious about my upcoming Christmas story, the one I hope to release
in November. I have to be done by September 1st. Eight chapters and an
introduction, each one roughly 1200 words. That's a lot of writing work for me.
I'm a very careful, obsessive writer. The price of good writing - at least for
me - is an insane amount of work. I don't even want people to know how much work
it is because they might try to talk me out of doing it. For my health or
something.
For those who are new to Real Live Preacher, in
2003 I wrote a 12,000 word dramatization of the birth of Jesus. I did it in one
month, a thing that stuns me now. I could not do that again. It was the only
thing I did during that month, and I was driven by forces that I hope are no
longer dominant in my life. But I liked the story when I was done. I wouldn't go
back and take the story away, even if it meant that I would have been more
healthy in 2003.
Two years later I recorded myself reading that
story, made my own audio book, and sold it right here at Real Live Preacher. No
publisher, no distribution arrangements, none of that. Just you, me, and
whatever network I've developed here at RLP. I
thought it worked out fine. I didn't really make any money, but for me it's all
about the work. If you are a writer, then write, dammit. Write your stuff. Build
a body of work. And one day if you find a way to make a living from your work,
then good for you. But don't ask for anything more than the chance to write.
So I have big plans for Christmas stories. I plan to write seven
dramatized Christmas stories, one for each of the major gospel stories
surrounding the birth of Jesus. I'll expand them much the same way I do in my
dramatized scripture stories, though I take these a little farther. I plan to do
one every year until it is all done. All of these stories will fit together like
puzzle pieces. Characters will sometimes appear in
more than one of the stories. This is something I have dreamed of doing this since the early 90s when I
first began writing and telling the Christmas stories at our church.
Right now I plan to make audio recordings and
an audio book each fall. What happens to these stories in the long run is not something I have to
worry about. So here is the plan so far:
2005 - A Christmas Story You've Never Heard -
Mary Joseph, manger. - Done! 2006 - The story of the shepherds. - Working
on it. 2007 - The story of 3 and a half wise men. This story is written, though
it will need a complete rewrite. When I'm done not much will be left except the
basic skeleton of the story. Still, that's a great start. This story is my
favorite, and it carries a lot of personal meaning for me.
After that, I'm not set on the order. I'll do the story of Zechariah and
Elizabeth, the story of Simeon and Anna, the story of the angel visits to Mary
and Joseph, and the story of the slaughter of the innocents and the flight to
Egypt. That last one scares me. I don't want to do it, but something is drawing
me to it.
So what does this mean for July and August?
Well, it means that I've got a lot of writing
to do. I'll have two Christian Century articles and two High Calling articles to
finish in that time as well. I will post things here as usual, but there will be
more personal updates than serious essays. I'm thinking I might talk to you
about how things are going with the shepherd story. I really don't know what
I'll do in this time.
I'm a little worried about getting the shepherd story done in time.
Just the right amount of worry. Not a serious burden, but enough to get me
working. And that's what I need.
I have some writing tricks, but I never say
that I’m going to put aside writing for a time in hopes that I can bluff my muse
into giving it up. That’s like a cheap line in a single’s bar. That’s like
telling a headstrong toddler that you are going to leave him in the grocery
store.
Here is a tip for you: Never try to bluff or
seduce your muse. Instead, court her. Learn to love her. This is a marriage, not
a one-night stand.
There are days when I want to hurt people. No,
that’s not true. Let me think about this. Okay, I’ve got it. There are days when
I like the idea of hurting people. I give them such a tongue lashing
while I drive to the coffee shop. Before I arrive I set everyone straight,
establish my boundaries, and confront the enemy. And because I’m a writer,
somehow I believe it’s all real.
Here is another tip for you: You need to win a
battle before you write. So win one - even an easy one - and get all
that stuff out of your mind.
There are days when I want to hurt myself.
My mind betrays me, and I start to believe crazy things.
On these days the worst is all I can see. A mist of anxiety floats over me like
mustard gas on a battlefield. I
look up and see it dropping softly into my shell
hole.
Anxiety is a pre-emergent creaticide. It
spreads itself over your root bed. It chokes your seedlings and scorches the lungs of your muse.
You have to get rid of your anxiety. I don’t know how you will do it. Maybe
you’ve learned to deal with anxiety in other areas of your life. Do whatever it
is you do, but do it now.
There are days when nothing can move me, so I
move myself. I give my body because my soul cannot be found. I give my
body because I am a husband and a father and a pastor and a writer. Not doing
what I have to do is unthinkable; somehow I know where that would lead me.
You should heed the call of duty, but you
should also know that nothing kills your muse faster than clapping your feet
into cast-iron shoes and dragging them through the earth. If you are in that place in life, I don’t know what to tell
you. Maybe not write.
There are these days, and they are not
good writing days. So here is a final tip for you: Let these days go because
there will be other days. Life is made up of days, and they keep coming, one
after the other.
Here are the last two stanzas of a poem about
snakes by Emily Dickinson.
Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
Zero at the bone. Read it and know that Emily
Dickinson wrote that line. She closed her eyes, swayed gently back and forth in
her wooden chair, and unhooked whatever part of her mind needed to be loosed
from the constricting hold of standard English usage. Then she put the words
“zero at the bone” on paper where they are as alive today as ever they were.
The first time I read it, I took a sharp breath
and froze. I didn’t dare exhale. I held onto my delight like a pot smoker
holding a lungful. My first coherent thought was, “I could marry the woman who
wrote that SIGHT UNSEEN.” If she could write zero at the bone, we’d figure out a
way to make the rest of it work. Admittedly, I have a reputation for wildly
passionate outbursts laden with hyperbole and suggestions that are impossible
given the limitations of space and time, but you understand what I meant.
Apparently English was Ms. Dickinson’s
own personal sock puppet. She slipped an entire language over her hand and used
it to entertain children from her porch on Saturday afternoons.
I was one of the boys there in Amherst, playing
at draughts and jack straws until Ms. Emily stole onto the back porch to
entertain us. It was wondrous. It was completely unexpected. It was a
revelation, and we knew that the world would never be the same again. What that
woman did with one hand and a sock made us laugh and cheer. It brought joy to
our hearts up until the moment she went back inside and left her sock lying limp
on the porch steps. The children gathered around it, whispering and pointing.
One of them poked at it with a stick.
But I was different. I lifted my eyes from the
sock and sought the woman herself. I caught a glimpse of her as she disappeared
into the house. All I saw were her wrist and hand, but they were slender and
lovely and graceful beyond all description. And I was forever changed.
For though I was but a boy, my heart beat
faster as I thought about what kind of woman could write like that.
If I fired up my blog software and wrote with no
editing, do you know what would come out?
Comedy and Horror.
Rabbits. Funny little bunnies running every which
way. Hundreds of them. Little cuties that would wear you out. You would run in
circles for awhile, trying to catch them, and then you'd fall down laughing and
exhausted.
Idea creatures would rise up at your feet,
snarling and swiping the air before falling back, half formed, their terrible
growth arrested by my lack of attention. They would lurch through the bunny
races, frightening everyone and slowly losing whatever…I…was going to…
And I would be angry. Very angry. My mouth would
be a furnace door, and I would open it and blast the heat of my anger across
the face of creation. Which is strange because as far as I can tell, I have no
good reason to be angry. But I do get very angry sometimes.
And if I wrote without editing
It.
Would.
Beeeeee.
Sooooooooo.
Looooooooooong.
So long. Oh, God make it stop. You would chew your
own leg off if I would just stop, but I go on and on and on and on, way past the
point where I made a point and should have stopped but didn’t of course. Oh, so
long that it just hurts.
The truth is - the real truth now - I’m ashamed of
my scattered and unorganized little mind, and my horribble spelling, and the way
facts and names disappear at the worst moments. I don’t have very many pegs in
my head, I guess. Certainly not enough pegs to hang everything that needs
hanging. Somehow my mind doesn't have pegs, but it has a lot of thoughts, so
these thoughts just float around in there. I can't find my file allocation
table. My mind is like RAM memory. It's fast, but there is no easy way to find
out exactly what's in there. I’m so obsessively tied to my
thesaurus and my dictionary and Google. I have special links on my desktop so I
can get to them as quickly as possible. Otherwise I would be lost and stupid.
So I craft and polish and fuss and powder my nose.
I don't want you to see me without my makeup. And I don't want you dropping by
unannounced either. I want time to cage the bunnies and slay the monsters and
kick out the salesmen and check the facts and cut, cut, cut, cut, so it won’t be
too long.
And where am I in this whole process? Where am I?
The real me? I don't know. Sometimes I think the better the essay, the farther
away from you I am. Every minute I spend polishing adds another layer of
separation between us. My writing is a smooth surface, a shiny lacquered hood
under which I hide my shame.
But relationship is constantly working its way
through my armor, like a little plant that somehow cracks open the sidewalk.
Through some miracle, the truth about me comes out. I am seen. I am known.
Things I never intended to reveal make their way to the surface. Writing is very
dangerous this way.
And then you comment and send emails and your
names form themselves out of the swirling mass I call "the readers". We come to
know each other, some of us. At least a little.
I admit this is a little self-indulgent of me.
I'm writing this in part so that I can simply send a link to it in response to
the emails I'm getting from people who say they miss the old Real Live Preacher
blog. They range in tone from wistful to accusing. Last night a woman took the
time to write me and let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I've become just
like the televangelists. I wish I were healthy enough to say that I laugh that
sort of thing off. I'm healthy enough not to care about the usual critical
emails, but since I have such a deep fear of commercialization and its
cheapening effects, I admit that stung a little. And I wrote her an angry
response that was meant to hurt. I wanted to sting her back. I don't like it
when I get like that.
So let me say this as carefully and clearly as
I can. I've said it before, but not everyone reads everything I write. So if
you've missed it, here it is again:
I miss the old Real Live Preacher site too. It
was nice to launch a blog and throw myself into it with wild, anonymous abandon.
It was fun being the cussing, edgy, Texas preacher. It was fun when people were
trying to figure out who I was. It was fun, but that's over now. There is no
going back. We might as well stop talking about it as if going back was an
option.
There is no option for me that involves going
back to the old days. The old Real Live Preacher was fun, but he took everything
from me. I wonder if anyone but a writer can comprehend the absolute and
uncompromising commitment to the craft that it takes to produce the amount of
writing I've done over the last three years. It's not a little bit of work. It
is everything. It is one gasp short of selling your soul. I would have lost my
marriage if I had kept it up. The three sisters would not have their father.
I'll never forget the sad day that Jeanene turned away from the computer screen
and said, "It's beautiful, but it's hard because this is what you used to give
me. This is my Gordon and now you're just handing him out to everyone."
Here's the harder part. I can't write in a
half-ass manner. I cannot. I won't. And if I gave myself the chance, I would
sell my marriage and my children down the river for just one more essay. Oh, I
wouldn't say that out loud, and the transaction wouldn't be that obvious. I
wouldn't sell them all at once. I'd sell them piece by piece until there was
nothing left. I would sneak out of the house to write and say I was going to
visit the sick. I would stay up until 3 am to finish something and be sleepy and
irritable the next day. I would hide essays around the house, behind books and
in little plastic bags floating in the toilet tanks.
Do you like my writing? This is what it takes.
I have no idea how to be balanced and do this.
So yes, the old Real Live Preacher site is gone
and the new one is all we have. And sure, there's a couple of money things
cluttering up the works now. There's a bookstore, and now some audio files for
subscribers, and a fair amount of my energy goes into the Christian Century work
and into some other paid writing gigs that I get from time to time.
It's bottom-line time for me, folks. I had
nowhere left to run. I had nothing left to sell. I had no more tricks up my
sleeve. I either find a way to make a little money as a writer to justify the
time it takes, or.....
Or what? I don't know. I don't want to know
because you and I both know that I can't stop writing. So I'm
trying not to think about "Or What?" I don't want to think about it. I'm not
going to think about it.
So RLP is what it is. It's not like I ever had
any say in the matter. I just wanted to write. It's different now. Less cussing,
more polish, whatever. We can like it or not like it, but let's not pretend
there is any other option.
The old Real Live Preacher is gone. He went
away and we can't have him anymore. He took a long, wistful look at the horizon,
but then he turned his horse around and rode home to Jeanene and the girls. He
is turning back to them. He is trying to do the right thing.
Do you know why I chose this image to represent
RLP? He's a small man holding two forces at bay. His writing and his life. The
pressure of the impending collision is causing all sorts of creative sparks and
stars. He is trying to live inside of that collision. And he's willing to do
just about anything to stay in that sweet spot for as long as he can.
The truth about writing finally becomes clear
when you come to understand that words are cheap and easy. YOUR words are cheap
and easy.
Pain will bring this realization to you.
Words tossed carelessly at pain are an
obscenity. What’s needed is a shoulder thrown against the load. What’s wanted is
a back to bend and a soul to feel. What’s missing is any real commitment to
living. What’s absent is any movement of sinew and muscle. There is no real
stuff behind words, nothing to stink, nothing to flex, nothing to stand against
even one moment of real pain.
Words are tragic. Words are liars and thieves.
They seem full but are as empty as an unused tomb. Words bear nothing, believe
nothing, hope nothing, and endure nothing. Words are seductive; they are the
handsome man who is winsome and eloquently empty. They are pretty feathers brushing against a planet-sized ball bearing.
Words
sound nice and they are like magic. You write words on paper and a thousand
miles away, someone looks at the paper and says, “I like the sound of that. Do
it again.”
Only there is no such thing as a word. A word is
only a sound, and writing is even farther removed from reality than that.
Writing is a mark that stands for a sound that stands for something unknown and
perhaps unknowable.
If you love words, you must renounce them. You
must throw them to the ground like the statue of a false god and trample them.
You must deny them three times. You must name
these demons and cast them out.
Turn your back on your words and live for a
time without them. Only then, after this terrible knowledge has come to you and
you have been reborn, may you claim the right to take up words again and make use
of them.
And even then you should be afraid. For even
after all of this, your words may still end up using YOU.
rlp
For a very old friend, who needed more than my words at
a time when I had only words to give her.
If you think having three children is a lot,
consider for a moment how many children I didn’t have.
Yeah.
I think of those unborn children sometimes,
when we tell our third daughter the story of how we were only going to have two
children, then changed our minds one morning after a single, reckless
conversation at the kitchen table. She stares off into space when I tell her
that story. She is thinking of her own non-existence. She almost never was.
I know how she feels, for I almost never was. I
remember when my mother told me about the miscarriage she had a few months before
she became pregnant with the child who somehow became me. I used to think of
that lost baby as my older brother. In my imagination he never spoke, but stood
by watching. He was shy and unbelievably kind to step aside for me.
The odds of me meeting the woman who somehow
became my wife were slim at best. Someone paired us together to lead a small
group during
freshman orientation at Baylor University in the fall of 1982. There were
hundreds of volunteers and someone took her paper and mine and put them together
with a paper clip. My God, this person was holding our lives in his hands. He
was shuffling children in and out of existence with no more concern than someone
tossing a salad.
Think of all those who never were. My beloved
Elliot is one of them. He reminds me a little of my older brother. He’s always
standing across the street in my imagination, pounding his fist into a tiny
baseball mitt. He’s not sad anymore and neither am I. Sometimes we even wave at each
other. I think he knows that I remember him every time Mars hangs low near the
horizon.
Yeah…
Did I ever tell you that my essays feel like
children to me? There are some high achievers, a few with
special needs, one or two with attention issues, and several that are just silly
rabbits. There is a nursery full of these children somewhere near the soft edge
of my heart. If I see someone reading one of them, it feels like a warm hand on
the back of my neck.
Sometimes I think of all the essays that might
have been but never were. My writing folder is filled with drafts in various
stages of completion that only had a brief moment in the sun. Some miscarried
for reasons unknown; others were aborted. Some tried so very hard, but just
never made it. These potential essays live across the street from my heart, and
they wave at me with little arms that are made of the precious titles that hint
at what they might have been.
The Prayer of a
Penitent Sinner
Madeline’s Silly Onion
Hair
The Opposable Thumb
Kicks Ass
Grape Soda and the
Little Black Fly
Let’s Put the X Back
in Christmas
For the Love of Xeno
I Suppose I Like the
Idea of People
Four and a Half Pounds
of Sunlight
So where do you suppose children and words come
from? Do you think of them as existing somewhere before, waiting to be born or
gathered together into paragraphs? Do you think of them in a giant queue with
only one out of a hundred chosen and the rest going into the abyss? Does the
possibility that they might have existed mean anything? Does the scent of these
broken dreams linger somewhere like the richest pipe tobacco?
And what of all the love and energy that would
have been poured into these fleshly and inked vessels?
Where does that energy come from, and where
does it go?
How the sound of them feels while they scurry around in your mind. How they close your eyes and give birth to a little smile on your face. How they have their own secret powers. How you love them all, even the naughty ones. How shocking it is when no one else is laughing or crying or unable to raise their eyes from the table.
How they are delicious. How they cause hair to stand up on the back of your neck. How they have the power to hurt or heal, slay or bring back to life.
The panic and despair of a desperate “fuck ME!”
The love behind a laughing, “You little sonuvabitch!”
How a hollow and hurried, “I love you” thrown over your shoulder cuts like the sharpest “bitch!” ever shouted on a street corner while the clothes came raining down.
How the “Oh shit!” of a middle school boy trying to be invisible holds as much honesty, fear, and hope for grace as any prayer ever uttered in church.
People send me email regularly, asking how a preacher can use such language.
USE LANGUAGE? USE IT? USE WORDS?
I don't know what to do with a question like that.
Sometimes I try to explain. Sometimes I say, “I don't know.” Sometimes I say, “Why don't you leave me the hell alone.”
Heard of bad hair days? Yeah? Well, we had a bad server week. The server crash on Tuesday caused me to spend every spare minute of my time answering the phone, republishing websites, working on the server, stuff like that. It made for a very stressful week.
I make about half of my living designing and hosting websites. That way my church doesn't have to worry about how much they pay me. It's a good thing, but I do get very stressed out if there are server problems. VERY stressed out.
Did I mention how stressed out I can get? You don't even want to know.
So anywho, writing was out of the question last week. My Middle Man cannot function unless he is in a good mood and able to achieve a zen-like level of absolute focus. I wrote about my Middle Man once before. I've paid close attention to the writing journey over the last couple of years, and I've discovered that I have to bring three very different persons to this task.
Creative Guy comes up with ideas. For whatever reason, my mind is never short of ideas. But Creative Guy is very messy. He drops sentences, thoughts, sketches, whatever, and then disappears. I currently have about 150 essay ideas and partial essays sitting around on my computer.
The Middle Man is absolutely the most difficult one to manage. I generally have to bribe him or lie to him to get him to come to work. The middle man is the unsung hero. He has to take the mess left by Creative Guy and organize it into something possible. It's dreary work, if you ask me. There is no end in sight. Just hours of moving paragraphs around, pacing, cussing, and trying to figure out where this thing is going. And since I rarely have several hours in any one day, this work gets spread out over time. I often have to work on several things at once just to manage the time.
Now if I can just get him focused and interested, Middle Man can do some amazing work. And sometimes he breaks open the essay with a fantastic idea of his own. But alas, he is also the guy who wants to read or watch a movie or do things that give him more immediate gratification. And he is also the part of me who works on websites and sermons and does all the things that bring money to my family. And writing definitely does not bring in much money. If I told you how much I've made as a writer, you would laugh and laugh. Then you would get all serious and tell me I am out of my mind to do this sort of thing.
Sadly, I don't really have any choice in this matter. I have to write or my heart will start to die. I'm serious. If I can't write, my heart will be like a sad little boy walking to school every day alone with no lunchbox, no hope, and nothing to look forward to. I think my heart WAS dying, and that's why I started Real Live Preacher in the first place. So, for better or for worse, I have to write now.
But anyway, the server troubles are mostly behind me, so I got Middle Man out of bed early this morning and put about three solid hours into the second half of my grandfather's story. Middle Man is just about done, and that's good news because I have an OUTSTANDING Closer. Seriously, he's like Mariano Rivera. If I have an idea down, and Middle Man has cleaned up the mess and put everything in order, then my Closer is MONEY.
The Closer is my editor, you might say, and for whatever reason I love that part of writing. The piece has form enough to get me excited, and I do enjoy polishing. I go over it and over it and over it until I can read it all the way through without having to stop because something doesn't sound right or because some sentence here doesn't quite fit with some sentence over there. Plus I know I'm close to being done, so it's exciting.
When Closer is finished, I get to publish it online, and I always say the same thing out loud - "Publish that Mofo!" It's a secret little ritual of mine, and that is the sweetest moment of all.
Writing, it's not just a job, it's your whole life!
I don't really feel like writing an essay. My middleman has gone missing anyway, so it's probably just as well. Maybe I'll just write whatever I want and do the best I can without him.
My friend Larry says that a writer is like general contractor. His job is to bring the right people to the project at the right times. There's the creative guy who drops off the idea, outline, and title, then runs off to wherever it is that he goes. There's the closer who does the polishing at the end. He reads it out loud until it goes down smooth. If he does his job right, the thing reads like you're running downhill.
Then there's the guy in the middle. He has the hardest job of all. He brings order out of chaos and asks the hard questions like, “What are we writing about anyway?” He makes the tough calls, cutting my favorite paragraphs because “they just aren't getting us where we need to go.”
Well, my middleman is nowhere to be found. I think the book might have been too much for him. One thing is for sure, his absence is really gumming up the works. Creative Guy keeps dropping off great essay ideas like “I Think of You as Roughly Five-Hundred People,” and “Elements of Primal Worship.” I tried to convince him to take a few days off because things are piling up, but there's no controlling that guy.
I don't know what's going to happen, but I kind of blame Larry for coming up with the whole “writer as general contractor” idea in the first place. That is SO Larry.
Larry, by the way, was my roommate at seminary and is now a pastor near Dallas. You know what that means, don't you? It means that somewhere there is actually a church that has a preacher named Larry.
Is it just me, or does that seem a little off? Like naming your dog “Paul” or something. What do you think they call him? “Pastor Larry?” “Reverend Larry?” Actually, Larry has a Ph.D. in ethics, so I guess they call him “Dr. Larry.”
I can't tell you his last name because I think you're not supposed to do that. Larry would know, what with the ethics degree and all. I can give you this hint: The next time you're at the supermarket looking at the spices, his last name will be on one of the jars. It's not cinnamon, tarragon, or curry. It's one of the greenish ones. That much I can tell you.
So any-who, there's this church near Dallas that has a pastor named Larry with a spicy last name. Like I said before, that just seems wrong to me.
Larry, that was for all those weekends you left me alone at seminary while you went to be the big fancy youth minister in Jasper or to visit your girlfriend in Waco or wherever-the-hell-else you used to go when you left for days at a time.
Oh yeah, and it's also for making me laugh that time Old Man White the landlord kept sticking his head in our oven and sniffing because we told him it wasn't working.
Hey, remember the time I went over to Old Man White's house to pay our rent, and he had shot a squirrel in the back yard and was getting ready to eat it? I guess there's no reason to be talking about Mr. White and his squirrels. I mean, so the man ate the squirrels in his backyard. Does anyone really care after all these years?
Okay, I seem to have strayed a bit. See what happens when the middleman isn't around? That's all I'm saying.
Oh yeah, I was talking about Larry and his weird, spice name.
I have lots of minister friends like Larry. Some of them have regular names, and some of their names are a little strange. I know of a minister here in San Antonio whose first name is Soapy. I swear on a stack of bibles. If I told you what his last name was, you wouldn't believe me. You would call me a damn liar.
The world is filled with ministers of all kinds. Seriously, truckloads of them. You can meet some if you want. They're around. I met most of my minister friends either at seminary or at one of those preacher conferences they're always having.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but they have a lot of those. Conferences for preachers, I mean. You can tell a preacher conference because it will usually have one of these words or phrases in the title:
Purpose
Emergent
Seeker Sensitive
Post-Modern
Felt Needs
Contemplative
Contemporary
Demographic
Twenty-First
I don't remember what any of those words mean to preachers. I used to know what they mean, but I started forgetting when I had to get a real job back in '98. If all preachers had to have real jobs along with their churchy jobs, there would be a lot less seminars on emerging purposes for the felt needs of twenty-first century post-modern people or whatever.
I do remember one thing from the days when I used to go to preacher conferences and all that. When you go to a preacher conference, it's weird being in a room filled with people who have all had some kind of soul-blistering religious experience that inspired them to attend four years of seminary and go through all the crap you have to endure before you can actually get hired by a church.
Seminary's even stranger. The religious experiences that brought people there are still fresh and raw. And the natural selection process of church employment hasn't weeded out the ones who are just there because they want people to love them. In seminary, there is no end to the weird haircuts, the appalling lack of social skills, and the absolute seriousness of everything.
I think the only thing that got me through seminary was having Larry there and having Old Man White around to keep us properly grounded and very afraid.
So okay, thanks Larry. Forget all that stuff I said about your name. If middleman were here, he would probably edit that out anyway. Maybe he'll come back soon. Thanks for all the years and the silliness and the memories. Thanks for being a minister friend who takes all the right things seriously and takes everything else with a grain of salt. You are the salt of the earth, my friend.
And that brings me to the end, which isn't much of an end since my middleman isn't here to fix it up and make it pretty. I'm all over the place with this essay or whatever you want to call it.
It's a shame.
I think the guy who picks the artwork is taking some time off too. I don't know who picked this picture or what it means.
“So what would be so great about singing the song of
yourself?” you ask me.
