Fencing Bear at Prayer

Okay, so in retrospect, that was more than a little bit manic last week.  Kinda like deciding to start exercising a little bit every day and then trying to work out four times a day and/or every chance you can get.  No wonder I crashed and burned.  And yet, oddly, I do think that the experiment worked.  Because, truth to tell, even in the midst of the flames, I did learn something.†  Several things.  One, and perhaps most importantly, it is possible to find a half hour a day for writing, even on what might otherwise feel like wholly impossible days.  And, two, doing so curiously means that the days themselves feel less impossible, less pressured .  But, three, and this is probably equally important as one and two, this does not necessarily mean trying to finish a piece of writing (no, not even a blog post) in any one segment of time that has somehow miraculously opened up.  What it means is allowing oneself to come back to the writing ev...

Okay, folks, here it is.  The Sermon.  I am taking a huge risk putting it out here before I give it at our university chapel on Sunday, but Prof. Boice also says that writers need to practice asking for feedback.  Please be gentle, I'm really scared about this.  NB I don't intend to read the footnote.  That is for your benefit.   And the opening sentence will be slightly different.  I should probably say a prayer--suggestions welcome. This is the psalm assigned by the lectionary for the Sunday that I have been asked to preach.  I've always had difficulties with this psalm.†  Perhaps because it is the one psalm that everyone seems to quote whenever they want to make a point about how loving and undemanding God is: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.  He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters.  He restores my soul.”  It all seems so saccharine and, well, fake. After all, who wants to ...

This is worse than not working.  This is a disaster.  I am not only not enjoying my writing (as per Prof. Boice 's promise I would if I worked in brief, daily sessions rather than in deadline-induced binges), I'm even more anxious than before.  I can't sleep, I spent another couple hours after last night's session watching yet more episodes of New Girl , I felt myself wanting to pig out--really pig out--for the first time in months.  It's hopeless.  It would have been better--much, much better--just spending this week feeling busy and writing the sermon in a single two-hour session on Saturday (which I could do if I thought of it as a blog post).  Instead of which, I've now spent nearly a week niggling at something that won't work and that will probably still need to be rewritten in a great binge on Saturday.  Or, if I don't try to rewrite it ( again ), will just make me feel even stupider because I actually worked at it over a couple of weeks and it ...

I'm not sure I like this exercise of writing just because I have a pocket of time that has opened up.  It was fun last week when I was testing whether such pockets exist , but now that I've found them , I'm not entirely sure what to do with them. I've been working on my sermon off and on since Thursday (at least, I think it was Thursday), but I am worried that part of my breakdown on Friday evening was owing to the stress of trying to write in such brief chunks.  Okay, so I managed to write a first draft of something in the course of two days, but it sucked (well, parts of it sucked) so much so that I lost it and ( as you may remember ) ended up in a binge.  I took a break from trying to write on Saturday and came back to the sermon on Sunday, but I really needed more than just twenty minutes to settle into the writing and be able to figure out what I wanted to say.  Sure, it was nice having a draft (however terrible) to work from, but what if I had just given m...

My heart feels so hard right now, it's like having a rock in my chest. I am sick of being hurt.  Sick of hoping for some understanding, sympathy, or support.  Sick of risking asking for help when all I get is indifference.  Or examples of how others have done better than I have. Why is it so very hard to listen to what each other says?  Just to sit quietly and give the other person time to speak?  You'd think it would be the most basic skill in the world.  And yet, so rare is it that it is almost by itself evidence of sanctity. I'm sorry, what was that you said?  I was too busy worrying about myself just now to listen.

I'm so ashamed.  I did it.  I couldn't help it.  I fell off whatever wagon I was trying to ride this week by working in brief, daily sessions, counting carbs, trying everything I could not to fall back into my old patterns of working.  I binged.  Not, thank goodness, on carbs (although there was that third Atkins bar of the day at about 11pm, but I was still only at 25 carbs for the day even then).  And, okay, not on writing , although maybe I should have.  But on television .  Okay, technically, internet-streamed episodes of television on my iPad.  Eleven of them (not counting the one that I watched earlier in the afternoon).   Full confession?  I was up till 2 am watching eleven episodes of New Girl .†  I would have kept going, but the battery on my iPad gave out. And now, predictably enough, I feel like sh*t.  It would have been better if I had just tried to write that stupid sermon in one go.  I don't know why ...

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I think that I understand better now the anxiety that I woke up with the other day , about wishing that I were able to write about something other than what I have read in books.  It's not just my perfectionism.  It is also my habit of noticing. I spend most of my waking life reading in one way or another.  Reading books and articles in my field, preparing for class, grading papers, reading applications for admissions or faculty hires.  Almost everything I do involves the written word. And I'm good at it.  In fact, I think that I am very, very good at it.  It is one of my principal skills: exegesis, reading a text for what it actually says, not for what I want it to say.  To my mind, it's what makes what I write as an academic distinctive: I actually read the texts. And not just read them in order to pluck out whatever bits of information (examples, ideas, arguments) I want to use in order to make some point or other that I have gleaned from read...

So, I'm reading along in Prof. Boice 's book as I eat my strawberries and roast beef and ham and drink my beef broth and tea with half-and-half for breakfast , and here he starts talking about how strange it is that there are so few therapists actually working on understanding what we call writer's block when there are hundreds and hundreds of therapists for other anxieties and phobias. Why [he asks] do writing blocks remain largely untreated?  Why are most accounts of blocking and its treatment amateurish and less than credible?  Where else can we find similarly unimpressive results?  The answer to the last question is easy and illuminating--in traditional programs for weight loss in obese people.  Put simply, dieting generally leads to failed plans and even greater weight gains in the long run.  The reasons for this expensive failure are becoming more and more apparent.  For one thing, diets typically rely on external forcing.  For another, weight ...

Okay, so I've proven to myself that there is actually time in the day for writing that I didn't believe I had.  Now, when does the brilliant prose start flowing?  'Cause, you know, I'm already getting a little tired of these meta-posts about writing.  For goodness' sake, it's already been two whole days.  Where's my Muse?  Where's my deathless prose? I'm waaaaaiiiiting!  Nope, not coming to me.  Nada.  I don't believe that this is going to work.  Anymore, let's be fair, than I was confident about cutting down on the carbs .  Sure, it sounded great in theory, but who had months and months and months to spend counting carbs?  Oh, right, me.  And, yes, guess what, it's working . Soooooo....  Do I give this writing thing enough time to start having an effect?  Or do I toy with it for a day or two, decide that, exhilarating as it is, it won't work, and simply go back to my cycle of procrastination and bingeing ? ...

This feels a little manic.  I probably shouldn't be trying to write again today.  Three posts in a day is more than enough.  But I have found yet another twenty minutes that I never knew I had, so here I am, writing again. It's like finding a treasure in your sofa when all you thought there was was loose change.  Suddenly, I have all the time in the world for writing.  More than enough.  An abundance!  I am overflowing with time, just like the Virgin Mary overflowing with graces.  It is as if I have stepped into a whole other life, one in which there is actually enough time to do everything I ever dreamed I might want to do. And then some.  I have not only written three (and counting) blog posts today.  I have walked into campus with the Dragon Baby (i.e. exercised--she walks fast on those little legs!  Especially when we go past the vet's).  I have spent two and half (or thereabouts) hours finishing preparing for class....

My head is dizzy with images.  Songs.  Thoughts.  Thoughts about the Virgin.  Thoughts about devotion.  About putting devotion into words when I am so filled with images and songs.  The Virgin and Child.  The Virgin of Rocamadour in a tub.  Tomie dePaola's illustrations of the story of the tumbler who juggled before the image of the Virgin.  Songs. I am tempted to start Googling for links.  But then I would get lost in the thicket again and lose the images.  The Virgin as a pillar of ivory.  The Virgin smiling at her Son.  The Virgin protecting her devotees.  A woman delivered of a dead child.  A child in a glass furnace.  A child murdered because he sang.  A woman who lost her pet bird and "went into a rage every bit as violent as if she were present at the funeral of one of her children."†  A knight who teased his pregnant wife that he had been unfaithful to her so that she stabbed herself in t...

I just spent ten minutes niggling about with my email when I could have been spending it writing. It occurs to me that this exercise, of practicing writing in brief, daily sessions, is the correlate I've been looking for to the decluttering that I've been doing in every other aspect of my life. What, after all, are carbs if not clutter ?  It is not that I need to eat fewer calories (although when I give into the temptation to check, particularly when I'm feeling rather hungry, I realize that I probably have cut significantly down).  Rather, I need to eat better food. Likewise, it is not that I do not have time in my life for writing, even quite significant amounts of writing.   Rather, I need to give it higher priority than the busywork in which I have been inclined to indulge at the expense of writing.  Which is hard.  Everyone knows that the first thing that you do when you have something to write is start cleaning the kitchen.  Or clearing out c...

I wonder what it would be like to trust my experience as a source of knowledge.  To know something other than what I read in books.  Because then I would have something to write about other than other people's ideas.  Something that I created.  Something that I understood. Why this anxiety?  Because everything I think to write about feels so forced.  Okay, so I'm trying to force this exercise, maybe it's just a part of the process of learning to write in brief, daily sessions.  Step one: start keeping a file of things that I observe that might turn into topics to write about.  What Prof. Boice calls "prewriting": reading, noticing, collecting, taking notes, organizing, filing, outlining. But for blog posts?  I've never needed any of that stuff before, I always just sat down to write when an idea (usually in the form of a title) crystallized and I knew what the gist of the argument was going to be.  And the few occasions when I have...

Are you as disturbed as I am by what I realized at the end of my last post ?  You should be, especially if you are one of my students.  Because if my (or anybody's) ability to write depends on being able to do something that, by definition, only the brilliant and/or hard-working can do, then what hope do you have that I am ever going to be able (not to mention, willing) to teach you how to do it yourself?  Answer: none . Which is yet another of Prof. Boice's destabilizing insights (or, rather, carefully tested hypotheses†) about why academics don't write, having to do with their operating assumptions about what it means to be able to write.   In short: they have themselves never been taught how to write; they have only ever been rewarded for demonstrating their ability to do so.  In consequence, they consider writing not only as something unteachable as such, but also something that to teach would diminish their capacity to recognize brilliance in their own st...