Why I Write [here]

playing with puzzle pieces ...

In a recent post from Anne Lamott’s Substack, she was encouraging writing, and within that post, she wrote:

….. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

This quote resonated deeply for me. I write to decrease our sense of isolation. I write to deepen and widen and expand our sense of life, and to [hopefully] feed our souls and our minds. It is my way of whistling a bold tune whilst walking alone, or, as Anne Lamott puts it: “singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea.” In a way, I write to build up a wider, increasingly anonymous community of readers with words which I hope will be thought provoking, encouraging, and decrease a sense of isolation [for myself and others].

My writings often include or allude to Biblical stories, theological concepts or spiritual things, leaving lots of room for personal interpretation - wiggle room to create one’s own meaning within the scaffolding of that which has been written.

But there is more. Sometimes, my writing is simply an expression of gratitude - I do not mean to write only when there is loneliness, or a terrible storm, or something that troubles me. In fact, often the act of writing itself may form a movement for me (and some readers have shared they experience this effect too) from difficult emotions and states of being to more comfortable states of being.

I am a pastor. My Substack is shared on the website of the community I serve (laamb.ca) as a means of populating a pastor’s blog there. But my posts are not intended to be sermons - and if they are sermons, I will usually indicate somewhere in the post that it was a sermon from a given service or assigned set of readings. Sometimes, the posts here will be a catch-point for the things I only thought of after a sermon was delivered, or following a discussion after service(s). Sometimes the posts are short stories, which stand alone, or may be connected to other short stories via embedded links within the story (click here for an example).

The posts here are not finished theological expositions - and I offer this observation (confession?) as a bit of a disclaimer. I intentionally choose to leave theological terms undefined much of the time so that you, the reader, have scope for interpretation. I encourage feedback via comments or notes, and will do my best to respond if a deeper conversation will be helpful.

This leaving room for interpretation is in the tradition of an Anansi story or a Nanabush story. Or perhaps in the tradition of parables of the Bible. There are relationships to things we understand or know in some way in the world we occupy (church, language, social norms), but there is also an invitation embedded in the manner of storytelling and writing I seek to employ - and that invitation is:

• to perhaps call into question your own assumptions and understandings about terms I may use.

• to encourage the creation of space around how we look at things, so that there is opportunity for other perspectives.

• to open our eyes to another point of view.

Anansi and Nanabush stories allude to concepts and approaches by presenting a storyline and a trickster character whose antics give us room to think, as individuals and as communities, about how we approach things. These stories may take accepted norms and invite another look at them, or they may take a jumbled pile of puzzle pieces and bring our focus to one image, or one piece within that pile.

My hope is that my writing may encourage readers in similar ways: to take a second look, to focus differently, to witness, and recognize the power of bearing witness in some way that may be life-giving. That it may help open our eyes to the fact that we have varied perspectives on complex puzzles, in which we all hold pieces and a role in putting together the bigger picture.

I make no claims on holding all the pieces, no claims on being able to put that bigger picture together on my own.

But, as Anne Lamott said in her piece: “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. ... We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.”

May we remain unsquashed, or at least build our collective recoverability from squashing episodes :)

The recommendations on writing on Substack are often geared towards helping writers to create an income from this portal. Income from writing (though nice, and I encourage support of writing with monetary subscriptions) is not my primary goal from Substack. That may change somewhere down the road, but for now, this is a space in which I seek to share reflections on things that resonate within my soul and everything available on my substack is free.

---

Graffiti - Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Jigsaw Puzzle - Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash