God, Too, Uses Boxcutters

Well, here I am, y'all, in sunny Grand Rapids, MI at Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing. It should be called "Feast" for all the chewing I've done in only two sessions. I had a somewhat embarrassing epiphany in the first. Phillip Gulley is a Quaker pastor who writes fiction and essays that are homespun and charming and delightfully real. I hadn't heard of him before today, but I went on the recommendation of a friend.

It was great. He read from a forthcoming collection of essays and then opened the floor to questions. I felt like the kid on the short bus as people made pithy and insightful queries about his characters and settings and, in short, had clearly read his stuff. I, on the other hand, kept dwelling on a comment he'd made about Quaker services -- a few hymns, a brief sermon, and then thirty minutes of silence. It resonated so deeply with my spiritual direction experiences and the heart of Abbey Way, so I popped my hand up.

"Mr. Gulley, I come from an evangelical, conservative, very cognitive-based tradition and I'm finding the older I get, the more contemplative my personal spirituality is becoming. I'm wondering if and how the rhythms of silence in your spiritual tradition inform your writing process?"

He looked me dead in the eye for a long second, and said "That's a really good question. I don't think I've ever been asked that before. To answer, silence is absolutely indispensable to my writing. Most of my ideas come either on my quiet morning walk or in Meetings."

Now, if you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll know one of my favorite rants is against the "western" compartmentalization of life. I HATE this concept of church is a place you go and set of routines you perform on Sunday, the sense in which we become different people depending on our environment.

So imagine my shock when his answer prompted me to think, "Wait. Maybe God is leading me to Abbey Way in part to help me be a better writer." It was like a solar flare in my skull. The more I looked into the light, the more I started to think, "Well, duh... If He's calling you to write and calling you to Abbey Way, they've got to be connected." I was chagrinned to think that here I am, Mr. Holistic, and God still has so many of my boxes to slash open, walls to tear down before my life is an open, spacious, and ordered sanctuary for His holiness.

Who knows? Maybe more will even be shattered this Festival weekend. Stay tuned to find out.

Let the renovation continue. Amen.