If you’re like me, the first five minutes of writing are the hardest. The blank staring at an empty page, the silent room filled only with the clicking of a pen or the banging of my head against the wall. Sitting at the table, I wonder, what else is on? Somewhere there is a video to be watched, an opinion to tweet, a podcast to listen to, and surely whatever it is will be more interesting and valuable than this. Maybe you sit down with pen in hand and volumes of thought come spilling out with the verbosity and wit of Alexander Hamilton. If that is you, congratulations, share your secret. For the rest of us, there are few more painful places than the beginning. So we get up, wash the dishes, vacuum the rug, pick up that book we’ve been meaning to read and do the chores we’ve been putting off for who knows how long.
But something drives us back to these blank pages. Something will not let us rest until we’ve written. Is it narcissism? Sheer vanity and self-obsession? Quite possibly. Those are, after all, the zeitgeist. But we’re all such poor writers and thinkers, so maybe not.
The trouble of the blank page is that it requires deep reflection to produce thought. When we write we must empty ourselves onto the page in some lesser or greater form. The greater the revelation of the human soul and experience the greater the work. All else is doodling; finger painting with words.
Perhaps those of us participating in the journal challenge this week are experiencing this very phenomenon. Staring at blank journal pages before bed wondering, is there anything in me worth mentioning?
Such thoughts, I think, should be dealt with seriously. We see the journals of famous men, explorers, generals, kings, presidents, and infer that great men keep journals, men of consequence and destiny. We get the idea that journals are for other people. Journals, we think, are for those who come after us, those who wish to know what was in our thoughts as we rode on our high horses all the way to history. Or at least, in my vainer moments, this is what I think.
But writing is not for other people. It is for the writer.
Writing is a process of discovering the self. Of discovering the soul. It requires an inward gazing, not possessive in nature, but revelatory. It demands we not simply see the world, but we perceive it.
This is an elusive art, not just in our day, but for all of us over the course of history who have made the attempt at being human. As Sherlock Holmes once noted to Watson, “You see but you do not observe.” We receive but we do not grasp. Our senses are at work but our perceptions fail us constantly. What is the meaning in the furrow of our spouse’s brow? How should we interpret the dripping of water in the sink? To what end is that window open? It is easy to imagine this is a new problem, unique to the post-modern, information-addled world, but the issue is common to the human race and should be treated accordingly.
What then? What loss is it to see and not to observe? To receive and not to understand? To put it simply and plainly, our very soul is at hazard.
Wait a minute. I apologize. The dramatist inside me has run away with the essay and begun ringing alarm bells from roof tops. Someone stop him before he climbs to heaven to trouble God with his self-inflicted existential dread. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again…probably.
All the same the dramatist means well. What he means to say is what is made available to us in the act of writing is an opportunity to recognize that the nature of man is not merely material, but spiritual. A written reflection, when done properly, is not a strict statement of facts and figures. It is not a tallying up of the day’s activities and the factual contents of the minutes and the hours but instead is a returning upon past events with a deeper eye, not to understand the natural chain of cause and effect (though that may be all well and good) but instead to dare to delve into interpretation of reality.
The question is not what happened but what do you have to say about it? What spiritual significance can be attached to the day’s events? What brought you to life during the day? In what ways were your eyes drawn to God and your soul stirred to praise Him? In what manner were you made aware that you are a created being and created for a purpose by a loving creator? And let us be frank, not all questions will be so rose-tinted. What caused you to despair? What morasses did you enter? What temptations most bewitched you? What parts of Earth seemed more lovely than Heaven? What elements of creation would you worship over the one who made them?
We speak often (and not without cause) of mental health, of gender identity and sexual preferences, of burnout and anxiety, of political ideology and allegiances, of patriotic and social duty, and all these things we mistake for what it means to have a self, to have a soul. The physical, the sexual, the mental, the political are all mistaken for the spiritual, for issues of the soul. In our day our social media feeds are filled with rants, reactions, and responses to the issues of the day. What difference, we might ask, is there between this and writing? What have we really lost? Reflection is not necessary for a video essay, or even, (dare I say) for a podcast. All that is needed, at least for attention (and what other end could there be for a visual medium), is feeling, which is mistaken for passion, and outrage, which is mistaken for argument.
This then is the battlefield. It is not a cultural war fought at large. It is a spiritual war fought at home, fought within, and the first victory is to acknowledge it is already half-way lost. As Soren Kierkegaard once said, “The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc., is bound to be noticed,” but the condition of losing our self, the essence of who we are that differentiates us as an individual from any other living soul, can disappear from us without so much as a murmur. Modern Christian men must lead the charge against sentimentality, outrage, and mistaking the parts of ourselves we cannot see and understand for the spiritual and the soul.
And why? Because the religion we profess is a spiritual religion and we live in a materialistic age, one that says matter is all there is, which denies anything beyond the tangible. Without noticing, we have been told since birth that what we can see and smell and hear and taste and touch is what is real and whatever else we might think we know, is in fact only our opinion, only a supposition, only a feeling. And there is nothing wrong with feelings, they say, but that is all they are, all anybody has is feelings about things. Or chemical responses. That is all there is. And so the soul is lost, the immaterial is discarded and the only option left for the individual in our day is to set themselves apart by what they purchase, and who purchases them. Even non-conformity is a commodity – buy our t-shirt to show everyone else you don’t belong with anyone but us.
So the challenge is this. Know thyself. But to know thyself do not fall for the trap of the honorable Socrates. To know thyself is not the beginning of wisdom. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and the knowledge of the Holy One is Understanding,” says Proverbs chapter nine. For we might be tempted to believe there is no soul if we close our Bibles and cease to pray but we cannot, we must not let fall the sword of the spirit. If we would know ourselves as men, as created in the image of God for a purpose on this earth, then we must, firstly fight the everyday temptation to believe (and note that word believe) that all is unspiritual, that nothing is real except the rational. The enlightenment has done much good in the world but it has done one terrible thing. It has convinced us all that our soul is just our opinions, and our spirit is demonstrated in our purchases and our decorations.
We need not all be poets, authors, essayists, English majors, but perhaps we all must spend more time in the uncomfortable chair with empty paper before us and allow ourselves to be confronted by the thorny questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What do I have to say, to contribute, to decide, to produce, to carry, or to lay down? Let us pass through the darkness and break through via the painful process of spiritual labor till we emerge, newborn, into the spiritual world, the world of mysteries, of miracles, and the world of the Messiah, who came to save us, body and soul. Take up your sword and take up your pen and join the struggle, not of flesh and blood but of spiritual forces and against this present soulless age.
