Today, I bring you the continuation of the blog banter Hilary Sherratt and I have doing, in which we write public letters to one another back and forth and invite you to join us in the comments. Read the letter I’m responding to here.
Dear Hilary,
You wrote of rootedness. Beautiful rootedness. And I understand you. But now, I am not rooted in the same way. I am rooted and yet, completely, pulled.
Yesterday, the book contract arrived in the mail. After nearly four months since signing the letter of intent with my publisher, I was without serious expectation when I opened my post box, thinking it would be empty. But I slid a first-class-stamped envelope out and look down at a piece of my future self held in the palm of myself in the present. And suddenly, everything became very real.
The fourth month space between letter of intent and contract has given me a good deal of time to worry. There was always the suspicion that they had gotten my age wrong and, discovering it, would immediately revoke the offer. Then there was the fear that a meteorological catastrophe would leave my editor unable to communicate to the publishing house and the project would never get under way. Then, more frightful, was this delicate balance of space and time we live in that could implode at any moment–at least, this is what very little proper training in physics has led me to believe–and then where would I be?
But no, the contract is now in my hands. I can touch this thing that was only possibility for so many months and, if I consider the whole, for so many years. Here, now, suddenly manifest.
It’s frightening.
As excited and honored and humbled as I am, for that is the way of these things, I am also incredibly unnerved.
I am supposed to write a book about reading Scripture well so as to understand that this cosmos is an icon of the Creator. I am supposed to shepherd people along a spiritual path, to brush up against and touch their Saviour is a unique way. I am supposed to offer the best of myself and experience–all two decades of it, conceding that for the first two years before that I really recall nothing.
God, what am I doing?
I know He is the qualifier. I know He is the ultimate Author. But it is such a real thing to be responsible for people, to be held to account because you put words to page and claimed that they leaned hard toward True. It is that singular wonder that troubles me. I feel insufficient. Not that I, fundamentally, am, but that I have not yet understood just how insufficient I am.
I still try to be people’s Holy Ghost. I still forget to pray as much as I should. I get so excited about how articulate or clever or crafty or artistic or whatever I am that I leave out Him in the process, grab the bag of vocabulary about Him, and start piecing together thoughts with fingers-crossed it shall be good enough.
That is what I need to avoid, here. This project needs more prayer than I know how to pray.
What, nephew, said the king, is the wind in that door?
He comes to us when we do not expect His coming. He pushes through, breaks into, brings in the glory and light and praise. But how do you translate? How do you say that prayer is important when you yourself struggle so very much with it? How do you speak of Love when you so imperfectly–and I do mean so imperfectly–love?
It’s funny. I don’t really hold this standard for anyone else.
Next week I shall spend the Wednesday through the Saturday of Spring Break staying in an Anglican monastery near my home. I had expected to go into the silence of that space with the baggage of uncertainty, to work to leave it there.
Now what? The baggage is gone.
What do we do when all the worry has gone away? All the doubt? All the insecurity? Do I even know how to feel at peace?
I shall go with a different question, with a different silence. The how. Now I am asking the how. How do I speak of the wind in the door? How do I speak of the God who visits us in the silent places?
I should like your prayers in this.
Love,
Preston
How do you all manage to do it, some of you wonderful writers yourself? How do you translate Mystery when we are such poor reflections of it?
© 2012, Preston. All rights reserved.
