Writing
I was thinking about something I wrote not too long ago, a story about a woman who celebrates her birthday daily (a metaphor for what Christians must do – celebrate their baptisms daily) when it occurred to me that one of the more explicable reasons to write poetry or short stories is to invent something that someone hasn’t invented before. That’s not to say that what we write will be unique, since there is nothing new under the sun, but it will seem unique to us in the way a tribe in New Guinea might re-invent something we take for granted. Maybe it would take a mountain of reading to find that particular paragraph or story for which we hunger. What we say may leave 99.99% of humanity cold but if it warms our hearts it somehow seems an invention were inventing. Perhaps it's as simple as the creative juxtaposition of two words... Unfortunately, writers as a group are an extremely unimpressive lot. The Venn diagram of saints and writers wouldn't have much overlap. The inventions of the most inventive writers - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Greene, Joyce - aren't worth a bucket of warm spit if it didn't bring them closer to Christ.
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