Writing and Grace

As a writer, I sometimes feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to my craft. I take it seriously—maybe too seriously! As the days and months and years go by, I fret that I’m not writing as much as I SHOULD, that I’ll never get to all the writing I want to do. I feel as though I’m at fault for not being more productive.

Do you ever have thoughts like those? If you do, then perhaps you and I are both confusing our faithfulness to our calling with the power of Divine grace in our lives. Of course God will not write that book, story, essay, or article for us; we have to use our own brains and fingers to organize our thoughts and find the right words. But our time (the passing days and months and years), our abilities, and our inspiration are all part of something far bigger than our tiny ego-efforts. They’re aspects of grace—the amazing Divine economy of freely given and joyfully received light and love.

“Grace,” wrote Thomas Merton, “is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God.” Feeling guilty or anxious or resentful because we’re not writing as much as we’d like does not unite us with either our inner selves or God; instead, it creates a sense of division. It isolates us from our sources of life and light and love, from the very things that fuel our writing. Anne Morrow Lindbergh put it like this: “I want…to live ‘in grace’ as much of the time as possible…. By ‘grace’ I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.” That inner and outer harmony and unity that Merton and Lindbergh described is both the ground from which writing springs and also the fruit that writing yields.

“What is at the root of all these words?” asked the Sufi mystic Hafiz. “One thing: love.” How easily we forget that the real purpose of anything we write is love! Words are intended to build connections—connection between our lives and hearts and others’, connection between ourselves and God, and connection between the divided pieces of our own hearts. Struggling along beneath the weight of our egos, we forget that our writing (the writing God calls us to create) wasn’t intended to impress others with our intelligence and creativity; it wasn’t given to us so that we could feel we’ve somehow proved our worth (because our worth is GRACE); and our writing was certainly never meant to be used as a weapon to promote our opinions or shame those who disagree with us. As Natalie Goldberg wrote, just as “you meditate by yourself but not for yourself, you meditate for everyone,” that is also the way we should write, for others rather than for ourselves.

We do the best we can with what we have been given (both in talent and time) . . . and then we let it go. We trust grace. As Rumi, another Sufi mystic wrote, “Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave until it gets to shore.”