Writing With Blood:

Despair and Faith in the Writer’s Process to Be.

(this is a re-write of my Craft talk from VCFA in 2008)

In a small café in Roma, just a few days after the love of his life, Lou Salome, had rejected his second marriage proposal, gathered in the ashes of his now dead philosophy career, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche sat down at a table by himself and words began to pour forth from him. In the midst of his deep heartbreak and despair, Nietzsche wrote, in one sitting, the first part of his Thus Spake Zarathustra, in two weeks he had written the first three parts. Zarathustra, arguably the greatest work of existentialist philosophy ever written, is the story of a lone seeker in search of self-understanding in a seemingly nihilistic world. Facing his broken heart, his shattered sense of what it means to be a thinker, his complete disbelief in an interventionist God, and what is required of him now that he has lost everything he once thought had mattered most, the words that flowed out of him were an appeal to, what he called a “higher person,” someone strong enough to overcome the crisis of finding one’s self besides themselves in despair.

Certainly, for Nietzsche, there is no going back, the events of his life have brought him, his work, his passion, to this key point in time where he must reinvent himself or fade into dust. As we all know, reinvention is why many of us have chosen to become writers.

Nietzsche starts his masterpiece by asking a very simple question, “what does it mean to be a creator?” Nietzsche’s crisis, often depicted by philosophers as a conflict between Enlightenment era philosophy (what can we truly know?) and Early Modern Philosophy (who is it that wants to know?), often depicted by Historians as a crisis between technology and religion, often depicted by theologians as an assault upon Church authority like no other, is in fact a work that transcends these a-historical questions. What it means to be a creator, a person who reinvents themselves through their creative work, to let all the superficial attachments to identity, to abandon the romantic notions of what it means to be an artist, to live in the creative moment, NOW, with a true Love of art for the sake that there is nothing else you would rather do but create, here and now, that being an artist is about loving life in its fullest form: this is the long journey of Nietzsche’s wild character.

The deep search for meaning in life is to become a creator, a creative person, in the fullest most vibrant and life-affirming sense. This creation process is not a simple one. Raise your hand if you have had to make great sacrifices to be creator (in Nietzsche’s terminology), sacrifices of your life’s security, the sneering puzzled looks of friends and family members, if you have had to watch your safe relationship explode into flames, if you have sat in front of your computer struggling with being clever enough to sound like a writer only to realize that cleverness has nothing to do with being a writer, and then disappointed that your high notions of being a literary genius did not come instantly into your fingers, or if you ever laid awake at night disturbed by the thought: am I really good enough to be a writer? I can tell you that you are in good company if you have asked, these, in the words of Nietzsche, “most abysmal thoughts.” Nietzsche’s first thoughts on being a creator are ones from a deep abyss within him: Am I brave enough to face their mocking and laughing? Should I really have thrown everything away for this wild dream within me? What does it mean that my old life of codependency is over and I now must rely on my connection to my art? Who am I to do this?

These were the questions I asked myself when, in the midst of a promising Ivy League theological career, disturbed by a growing notion that my real passion in life was writing, I sent off a flotilla of MFA degree applications, and a few months later, after having just presented a paper on the Canaanite origins of early Israelite burial practices, I opened that letter from VCFA, saw my acceptance, walked down to my advisor’s office, and dropped out of my theological doctorate program, then laid awake all night with the worst panic attacks I had experienced in years…what the hell did I just do? I woke up the next day, and every day since, with these doubts, these questions of Nietzsche, these questions of myself, and, in the words of my then-guru Laurence Sutin, “I crawled away from Harvard and into a writer’s life…but I crawled.”

If you knew me in my first residency you would have met someone not so much crawling as dragging his corpse behind him. I was admittedly someone who thought I knew what it meant to be a writer, when in fact, I was still in what I can only call the diagnostic section of my re-creation process; the leaches had not begun to suck the poison from my body, I was cut, but I hadn’t yet realized how deeply. I was not an enjoyable person to be around. First off, I thought I was far smarter than everyone here. Second, I thought no one there had suffered the way I had suffered or was willing to ponder their suffering in the word. Third, I thought I knew more about being a devastatingly powerful writer than anyone else: then I heard Mary Rueffel read (I still don’t have the courage to introduce myself to her). Fourth, I thought I knew what it was to be brave. Fifth, I thought I knew what it was like to have peers, more so, friends, then I spent two years of residences with the most brilliant writers (you know who you are, as does my liver). I thought I knew what it was like to be shaken at the foundations of my cold heart. Then I found and lost Hope. Finally, I thought I knew what it was to have brilliant professors and mentors who were masters of their craft. The truth is, until left my Ivy League world and its “famous Intellectuals”, until I left my old self behind, my old life, until I stopped covering up and covering over my life, embraced the call to be a creator, I knew nothing of what it meant to be a writer. I am still learning. A few brief stories that gave me the trail of what learning to be a writer would mean/have meant.

Early on in his masterpiece, Nietzsche, in the form of his untimely prophet (for prophets, like great writers and artists are always untimely) is giving a series of lectures to the masses gathered around him in the marketplace, when he offers a sermon entitled: On Reading and Writing. The sermon begins with these words:

“Of all that is written I love only what a person has written in blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit.”

When I first read this line from Nietzsche I recognized instantly, not just a kindred soul, but why in fact I wanted to be, had to be, a writer….I had a lot of blood to offer, a lot of bleeding I wanted to do, or at least I thought I knew what it meant to bleed for my writing. Certainly, within the pages of my philosophy and theology papers prior I made sure that alongside Bardht’s undeserved grace, Rahner’s privation of evil, Schliermacher’s lonely God creation, I inserted stories about my own life, about how this theology was not just an intellectual game for me, that it was wounding me deeply, that I had a past of great wounding that wanted to speak through this theology and philosophy. My professors in Grad School, or more often, their TA’s, would strike out the personal elements of my writing, placing comments such as, “stay focused,” “level your attention on the theology here not on the memoir elsewhere,” and my least favorite, “you are not really doing work here!”

So my bloody writing was reserved for the safety and darkness of my dorm/apartment. There, with my atmospheric Gothy music cranked up high, candles lit, my school books laying all over the floor like lifeless corpses, I poured my heart and soul into my stories, my bad Vampire poetry, the occasional song. I was living in two worlds back then, the world that I was rapidly seeing as the mundane world — the world of academics and intellectualism which was rapidly sucking the wonder out of my life — , and the creative world, where I was a “writer” and an artist.

Quickly I begun to think of the former as God-like and the other as Luciferian (I was an aspiring theologian and minister after all). Writing was my dark and dirty secret. To make matters more theologically dense, growing up, I watched my father, an amazingly gifted painter, hide his painting, never really let down his guard enough to be a painter, behind a career in cooking that he hated, which eventually resulted in a crippling addiction. I watched his brother, hide his brilliant poetry behind a career in psychology that he hated, which eventually resulted in frightening anger. Both of course share in common my grandmother, who thought that painting, poetry, sculpture, music — pick an art — was what lazy people do, and real people must “work” for a living. She was always quick with an “I told you so” or a “why can’t you be like your cousin Brian, he has a house and a wife and two cars,” she was always quick with her theology of mammon (money) and not an appreciation for the ekstasis(ecstasy).

So I was hiding my work from my theological career, from my advisors, from my family, from my friends, and in many ways, from myself. In the dark I was bleeding for my writing, in reality, I was too terrified to bleed for it publicly, and unless you are brave enough to say the name of the LORD publicly, you haven’t yet earned your claim to faith in the LORD as of yet. Think of Jeremiah here, naked on the street, showing people a model of Jerusalem made out of his own excrement. People thought HE was the crazy one but he was the one chosen to speak with the branded tongue for GOD. I wanted the moral claim of being a writer, an artist, but wasn’t brave enough to embrace the existential claim. In many ways, I still am lacking that branded tongue myself.

This experience is one I think many people who leave their old lives behind to become writers experience, especially during those early years when they are too afraid to go after the dream of being a writer, an artist of any sort fully, brave enough to only bleed privately, but too ashamed to bleed publicly. What does God do with his prophets after he calls them and burns their mouths so that they can be fitting vehicles for his word? He humiliates them! Your, and by you in this piece I mean, me — but feel free to insert yourself anywhere — private bleeding is, and I mean no offense by this, cowardice, not heroism, the leap of faith has not been taken, you are making phantom cuts with butter knives, you haven’t put the straight razor to the major artery of your life as of yet, at least, this was my experience, standing at the edge, and no leaping, all frosting and no beater.

Another story I wrestled long with was the story about the father of existentialism, the great Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, set the model for how many existentialist philosophers (Kierkegaard wrote long and short stories, memoir, psalms, prayers, poems, Nietzsche wrote fiction and nonfiction, Dostoevsky wrote Novels, as did Kafka, deBeauvoir, Camus, and Sartre, who also wrote plays, Heidegger spent most of his time thinking about and playing with poetry as well as being a jerk) wrote and thought about their lives: as writers and artists first, human beings second, philosophers third or fourth — they would arguably have placed being lovers up there as well.

The story of Kierkegaard is one of heartbreak on the deepest of levels. Kierkegaard had, at a very early age, the notion drilled into his head by his father, that the only thing worth being in the world was a greatly regarded and highly successful theologian. In a world which was still God-centered, where the Inquisition, although winding down, was still occurring, being a theologian was the “Oh yeah, well my son is a lawyer!” of its day (strange how we used to build Churches everywhere, now we seem to be building law schools everywhere, although writing programs seems to be slowly catching up — I’m still a fucking theologian).

So Kierkegaard focused his studies, became the accomplished young theologian and great thinker he had originally set out to be when one day, across the plaza in the market, he saw the young and beautiful Regina Olsen. Instantly, the two fell in love, he secured her father’s permission to marry, they moved in together, and set their wedding date, and then, the voice of Kierkegaard’s father kicked in. Soren began to think to himself that if he were ever going to become a great theologian his first love had to be theology, not Regina. If she was to be in his life she would have to be fourth or fifth on his list of “what matters” in life, and since he knew she deserved better, and since he had a destiny to fulfill, he ended their engagement, broke up with her, completed his PhD, and went on to become the great theologian his father always wanted him to be, accept, in a way neither he nor his father could have imagined.

Devastated by the break up, Kierkegaard goes from writing traditional style theological and philosophical tracts to writing memoirs of how he met Regina, to stories about how he stalked her and watched her from a distance (it’s creepy in all the right ways), to eventually turning his entire approach to theology into a literary attempt to reconcile this loss within his life. His theology is filled with the voice of a broken heart, what happens when you don’t tend to your true calling in life (and Regina WAS his true calling), what happens to you when you don’t “balls up” (to use a theological term) to who you are. Kierkegaard turns to writing (and at first he publishes under a series of pseudonyms, too embarrassed to be writing prose for such a distinguished theologian) as an attempt to reconcile his language with his experience, reinventing himself as a writer, painfully, and humiliatingly, before the public eye. Kierkegaard is perhaps most famous for dying from a broken heart at the age of 42, but also, for the notion that what is required of us in life is that we need to make a “leap of faith,” something he didn’t make.

A leap of faith involves a movement towards that which is our greatest truth without the certainty that success or even a safe landing will be possible. His whole life, certain of his future as a great theologian, assured by the success of philosophical skills, his viscious attacks on Hegelian philosophy, his safety in his belief in Jesus, the one thing he regretted most (that he constantly tried, but failed to achieve) was that he ultimately could not take the leap of faith into his life with Regina. Regrets like this are devastating at the ends of our lives, they are consuming in the course of our lives, they push us from behind: “go ahead, leap, pursue your dream, pursue your art, go after her, whatever it is that calls you, just go after it already,” and often times we, meaning me, stand leg-locked by the precipice, fumbling for the handrails, all Epicot and no Eiffel Tower.

A theology, an artistic stance, is lifeless, literally, unless it is lived. Maybe this is why the Buddha ends his margas of the “right courses” one must take, with “action,” for without right action, the rest of the eightfold path, the entire four noble truths, crumble into lifeless theory and contemplation. I was, for so much of my life, a writer of lifeless theory. Maybe this is why the action of writing may not be enough to be a writer. I mean, writing is what we do, we are writers, but is writing enough action to be called writers? Is writing an action unto itself or do we take another sort of action when we are becoming writers, bleeding and leaping for writing?

Both the theologians Saint Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Merton wrestled with the idea with what Merton called, “the beautifully stupid fiction of choosing a writing career.” Merton wrote that,

This (call to be a writer) refers to a deep implosion which may even go against the grain of one’s conscious inclinations. It entails a fight. There is a considerable amount of doubt and resistance, a great deal of questioning, and at times the whole thing seems absurd. Yet you have to push on with it. There is a sense of one’s destiny and identity involved in this struggle.

I have heard smug writers, burnt from their own dreams say to aspiring writers, “you don’t actually have to write, no one is waiting for you to be a writer.” That sort of Bad Faith (to use another term from Kierkegaard) missing the urgency that the agreements we make with ourselves and others ultimately do matter, as do the compromises, as do the submissions. You know who is waiting for your next story, poem, play, movie script? YOU ARE. And guess what? YOUR WRITING MATTERS BECAUSE YOU AND YOUR LIFE MATTERS. If someone tells you to stop writing or that your writing life is anything less than an ultimate concern that’s not a statement of judgement on you unless you believe them. Ultimately, such dismissive advice from “professional writers” has more to do with being inable to access their prostate (or G-spot), not their ability to be a good mentor. In existentialism, according to Kierkegaard, we either choose ourselves or choose against ourselves, so, choose wisely.

There is accomplishment in the writing but the real existential comes in choosing to be a writer, against great odds and criticisms and censorship, when you realize that if I cannot do this, then I cannot do anything else with my life. Conversely, when the Inquisition first came to see Aquinas about ceasing his aspirations for a writer’s life, Aquinas reportedly told his biographer, Reginald, “that if my days as a writer are over, then I want to die, and fast.”

Back in my Ivy League days I knew at some point that I too was dying by not writing. Inside of me, I have died so many times by not being the writer and artist I have always wanted to be. I have long admired the prophets for this very reason. It is said in academic circles, by the prophets themselves, and by Nietzsche (who speaks in Zarathustra with a prophetic voice) as well, that a prophet is untimely and unwanted. Untimely because they come when you just do not want to hear their prophecy. No one wants their party crashed by someone reminding them that the LORD has been angered by their idolatry. So disagreeable are the listeners of the prophetic message, that they conspire to silence and kill the prophet, the truly elect of the LORD. I think that we can call our attentiveness to anything other then what we are meant to do a form of Idolatry.

The prohibitions against Idolatry were, in ancient Canaan, prohibitions about placing idols on the family altar ahead of the image of Yahweh, eventually it was a prohibition about turning one’s face away from Yahweh and toward another God, then to simply arrange any image as a substitute for Yahweh, and finally, that turning away of the face from the Divine became a turning away from one’s identity as an Israelite, someone who was pure before the LORD. We can either turn our faces toward what we are, writers and artists, or we can turn our faces away from who we are. If we turn, if we touch, we will be turned and touched, there is risk here, I’m not saying there isn’t, but how much more the damage if we do not reach out with our writing, if we do not turn toward the ineffable? Really, a miserable job, a rotten marriage, an aluminum foil wrapped title, our ashen sense of self-inferiority will often dangle promises of a future reward for our great betrayal, and many times we, meaning me, will, and have, betrayed the Divine, our need to be writers and write, for fear of standing out and identifying as a crazy person in our time, with the fiery message of what we are called to attend to most. Lest you want to get thrown into a well with Jeremiah, you better say that all is fine and well between Yahweh and Baal, your passions being checked by your cowardice.

This cowardice in the face of being who and what one is supposed to be was Lutheran Theologian, Paul Tillich’s definition of existential despair, but the good news was that if you would only be brave and chase after your fears, instead of allowing them to chase you down, your fears would lead you back to God. I was done with despair by the time I read that. My fears weren’t leading me to my writing, they were leading me hide myself from myself.

I remember thinking, at some point between discussing the Merkebah (the Divine vision of the Chariot found in the Ezekiel literature) with hair-twirling sorority sisters in my Jewish Mysticism class, and shuffling together the sources to defend the writings of the Desert Fathers as “authentic practical theology” that although I still loved this literature very much, that what I really loved was the courage these writers had to write these things, to stand up in their time, take up their writing implements, and actually pour their hearts out into what they had to say. These were not scholars writing for a scholarly audience, they were not well recieved, these were people of real blood, bleeding, literally, for what they had to say. As for me, I was using these great writings to hide from my own writing, discussing a theology and faith-life, which I didn’t really practice. If I was to truly embrace the prophetic message of Ezekiel or the faith writings of John Cassian, I too had to be willing to give of myself, in a way that risked everything I knew my life to be. A Sufi teacher once said to me, “unless you are willing to jump into the fountain, you will never get wet.” I have thought about that revelation too often from dry land.

One last story I would like to use in my lecture here about the courage to be who you are, to bleed for your writing, is that of how the Sufi poet, Rumi who met his spiritual teacher, friend, inspiration, beloved, Shamz of Tabriz. One day, Rumi, the greatest living Islamic theologian at the time, was teaching a group of students by a fountain in his home of Konya, Turkey. Rumi was thirty-eight, married with several children, a well-dressed and distinguished man of his community, when suddenly, around the corner appeared this wild Dervish. A Dervish is a mountain mystic, someone who gives up the comforts of the world, the security of the safe and mundane world, to wear a brown wool cloak, to spend their lives wandering through deserts and cities, to struggle with the language of the Divine, to deserve in the most self-less ways, a deep humility, so that they can encounter God, become one with Allah, through word, song, wild abandon, and dance.

The story goes that Rumi and Shamz see each other from across the plaza and Rumi instantly knows that he is done. Rumi says about this encounter, “I was raw, then I was cooked, then I was burned, then I was consumed.” Shamz comes running up to Rumi, pushing his way through the throngs of students and admirers and family members, and then he grabs Rumi’s theology books, his father’s theological papers, and even his Quran, and then Shamz threw them into the fountain. The students were shocked. What had this unkempt mad Dervish just done? This was Rumi’s question as well: “You threw all of my life’s work into the fountain, everything of value to me! Why did you just do that?” Shamz leveled his gaze at Rumi, got right in his face, and said:

“Because now you will have to live what you’ve been pretending to teach!” Rumi was silent. His whole life, theology, expertise, religion, his understanding of God, his understanding of who he was, all thrown into the fountain, all drowning in the waters behind him. Shamz broke the silence: “If you want, I can get the books out of the fountain for you, they will still be just as dry.” From that moment forward, the two men were inseparable. Rumi became a student of Shamz, and Shamz taught Rumi many strange mysteries about wine, poetry, helplessness, passion, longing, the true meaning of what it means to be a Muslim, a “submitter,” for Rumi was now submitting, humbled, by what truly matters in one’s life.

The story goes that Rumi’s students, concerned for their teacher’s reputation murdered Shamz and buried the body in the desert. Rumi, in his grief , propped his hand on a pillar in the orchard behind his home. Slowly he turned around and around, spinning around the pillar, and then, suddenly, poetry began to pour forth from him. At first his students thought their teacher had gone mad, their teacher was speaking the most intimate and unguarded Love poetry about his missing friend, and how Love of the friend, if it is real, is self-less, and how this self-less Love tells us about the true nature of the Divine, which tells us why we are here, and by “we” I of course mean, “me,” but, you too as well. The more Rumi spun, the more poetry he recited, the more poetry he recited the less he was afraid to confess his true feelings, the more he confessed his true feelings, the more he became who he was. In his Masnevi, arguably his poetic masterpiece (a love poem that is 25,000 couplets) Rumi gives us the voice of his doubters and accusers:

“You must be drunk
Going house to house
Wandering street to street
Who have you been with
Who have you kissed
Whos’ face have you been fondling?”

Rumi ignores these questions, turns his words to the ghost of his missing lover and replies,

“You are my soul
You are my life
I swear my life and love are yours
I am not afraid anymore
To burn my mouth and throat
I’m ready to drink every flame you offer me.”

Special note should be made to the “burning” here, just like the prophhets of old.

As a graduate student at Yale I had heard this story and it horrified me. One’s entire identity could be picked up and discarded, and then you would have to live your theology, your philosophy, your bullshit, and that was something entirely different than what I was learning to do at the time. When I walked out of my doctorate program at Boston University some two years later, when I first realized that I wasn’t going to drop out of this program here at Vermont after my first week, when I decided not to hang myself from a particularly large oak tree behind my home because my theology failed to prevent me from actually being able to bare living it, I knew that my worst fears had come true: I had to die in a way that was greater then I had ever considered.

Most of my time in my MFA program at VCFA, and already in a second program at Newport, has been this process of cutting and bleeding, taking the leap of faith and missing the mark, spinning and falling, casting out and drowning, dying and being reborn. Maybe this is what Annie Dillard meant when she said, “Write as if you were dying.” For us writers, it is a slow bleeding to death that comes with the territory, but what a beautiful place it is to be bleeding so defiantly for who we are. I don’t think I need to go into an exegesis here on Jesus, blood, and redemption, another lecture perhaps, another audience.

This pull towards being a writer has not always been an enjoyable experience. I don’t think anyone ever brags because they are suffering for their art and anyone who brags about their suffering has either never truly suffered for their art or is bragging about someone else’s suffering vicariously. The myth of the romanticized, tortured artist is, in the words of Flannery O’Connor, “an intellectually bankrupt ideal.” There is a lot of suffering in the world, more isolation then we ever learn how to deal with, and the struggle to embrace ourselves in the face of oppression, doubt, and pain makes even the most dreamy-eyed romantic think twice about chasing that vision of a number one best seller.

So, knowing that this conflict will confront our call, knowing that we must be writers, we must write or face the existential backlash, that we must be prepared to deal with by no longer hiding behind the distractions which life has so graciously given to us, why choose this bloody life in the end? Returning to our friend Nietzsche, he provides us with a possible answer. He writes that:

“Why the world is here is not important, but why you are here this question you should ask. And if you have no solid answers which settle the question as to why you are here then set for yourself goals, high and mighty goals and be willing to perish in the pursuit of them. I know of no other way to live then to perish in the pursuit of the impossible.”

For Nietzsche, by answering our own call to write we are dealing with the utmost of important things in our life, we are in the search for meaning, and I would argue that the search for meaning is why we write. The appeal to deep meaning, through our pain and joy, this is how we learn who we truly are, this is how we express to others through our art, who we are and what we know this world to be. One awakens to meaning, awakens others to their own deep meaning in the world.

A similar line of thought can be found from Charles Bukowski:

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start.
This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs, and maybe your own mind.
It could mean not eating for three or four days.
It could mean freezing on a park bench.
It could mean jail.
It could mean derision.
It could mean mockery. Isolation.
Isolation is the gift. All the others are tests of your endurance. Of how much you really want to do it. And you’ll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds. And it’ll be better than anything else you can imagine.
If you’re going to try, go all the way.
There’s no other feeling like that, you will be alone with the gods and the nights will flame with fire. You’ll ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

The investigation into meaning through being a writer has long fascinated the great writers. For example, Tolstoy, said that he became a writer because he was concerned with the most important of things: “why are we here and what are we to do with this life of ours,” questions that demand an attentiveness to meaning. For Tolstoy, he became a writer because he was interested in the meaning we find in life, in our hearts, through our writing.

What do I mean by “meaning through our writing?” Indulge me in a brief phenomenology if you will.

The word meaning is derived from the word mean. Mean first appears as we know it in the epic Beowulf, the Old English word is maenen, and its definition is to say or to tell. In fact, the Indo European root is mei+n, appears in most Indo European derived words with definitions including: to think, to wish, to desire, to take to be, to say what is on the mind. The relationship here between saying and being is the first thing that leaps out. Meaning is an appeal to being, not only being in the sense of the verb, as in the existentialist philosopher’s claim that we are in a constant state of being in the world, but also as in the noun-verb sense, the conjoined and unified idea of Being-in-the-world. Meaning finds its origins in the ideas around the unifying of thought and speech, to be able to say how one really feels, desires, thinks, loves, longs, suffers. If we take meaning to be what a story or a poem or a piece of artwork is really trying to investigate, beyond any simple utilitarian usage, than the meaning of the thing is what the thing really is, it is its “really real real-ness,” in the words of Dewey, and everything before the real is an obstacle, an illusion, it is maya in the Hindu sense, dukkha in the Buddhist sense, it is the carved block of Taoism, the uncarved granite slate of masonry and alchemy. It is said that a sculptor does not simply scrap away marble or wood or clay, but allows the object to reveal itself, to be known as it knows itself to be.

So, that is meaning, but what does writing mean? The word “write” finds its meaning in Old English, writan, (a word that is hauntingly close to the word “Witan,” the wise one, the origin of the word for “Witch”) and it has two meanings. The first is to draw out the body of. Note that this is the language of creation, it is the language of being able to raise a body from out of the void, this is Genesis, this is God territory. A writer brings being, life, and thus meaning into the world with what they set themselves too. The second meaning for “write” is to scratch or tear. To be a writer was to be someone who fleshed out the body through scratching or tearing symbols or signs into an object. This scratching system, the earliest writing system of the Old English was the system of writing in runes, a primal magickal form of writing that first developed amongst Indo European peoples but which ultimately culminated amongst the Old English and Old Norse peoples. The root word for rune is runen, meaning to bleed, to make red with one’s blood. One scratched or tore words into an object, fleshed out the meaning of what they wanted to say, sometimes a magickal spell, sometimes an epic poem or story, and then literally cut into their skin and bled into the letters. The writing was thus a product of blood, of the deep meaning that the writer wanted to offer his/her audience and was then covered in the very blood of the writer. Lest you think this is casual, writing and bleeding are joined together in their very origin, in their original practice, in their very being and purpose. To write is to seek meaning in bleeding, and for a writer, to bleed is to have meaning is to write.

Bringing my attention out of the phenomenological and into a few examples of this relationship between writing and meaning, the importance of blood in the writer’s process of becoming a writer, I am immediately reminded of Medieval heretics willing to bleed and burn for their voice, for some sort of struggle against the removing of deep meaning away from their lives. I am always haunted by Mechthild of Magdeburg, the thirteenth century Christian mystic who, despite several visits from the Inquisition, and the constant destruction of her writings, held to her need to write about the language longing to escape from within her:

“If you want me to leap with abandon,
You must intone the song.
Then I shall leap into love,
From love into knowledge,
From knowledge into enjoyment,
And from enjoyment beyond all human sensations.
There I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still.”

Would Mechthild’s visions have continued if she did not write them down? Who is to say. I would suspect though that if she were to have not written what she was experiencing, I think she would have lost some of what it meant to be in the meaningful experience, would have lost that ecstasy that only comes to those who risk a dialogue with who they are.

More examples of this connection between being a writer and finding meaning reveal themselves with just a scan of history. Plato risked his life in returning to Athens to pen the Republic and take his home city to task for the death of Socrates. Giordano Bruno went to the funeral pyre for his Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, the writings of Julian of Norwich were confiscated and burned, as were those of Margery Kemp, both of whom were told to stop writing or face death, they kept writing. Both San Juan de la Cruz and Hildegard Von Bingen were bricked up into towers for their writings. Haffiz and al-Halaj were both martyred for their writings. Shakespeare was questioned by the Inquisition, Voltaire ran from the Inquisition. Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for his writings. Marquis deSade’s writings gave him imprisonment, a lobotomy, and eventual death. Jewish mystics, Jewish authors in general, have a long and tragic history of being persecuted just for, in comparison, what the Maori people of New Zealand call their own, rangatiratanga, the “fundamental right to exist,” which is also the word associated for the sacredness of their (the Maori) facial tattoos, their deep, bloody, beautiful, Western Culture-defying, marking process, a process that gives them life in the tribe through accepting who they are. Maybe this is what T.S. Elliot meant by, “Poetry is a raid on the inarticulate.” Writing engages meaning in its fundamental existence, in a way that allows us to speak about the meaning we find within or are seeking so seriously. Writing allows us to do that most important of all things, in the words of Nietzche, “Werde, der Du Bist!” — “Become who you are!”

In Conclusion, I would like to say that this process of becoming a writer, wherever it eventually leads me, is a real blessing. We, and again, I mean, me, although feel free to insert yourself here, are blessed by this painful dizzy bloody defying calling. It is a traumatic experience to wake up one day and realize that everything must change in your world, you have dragged that corpse behind you for too long, but you need to be brave enough to face that traumatic experience, to let that corpse go so that you can be free to be who you are. On the nature of traumatic experience, W.H. Auden said:

“The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting — had it not occurred, it would have found another, equally trivial — in order to find a necessity and direction for its existence, in order that its life may become a serious matter.”

My own life as a writer has become a very serious matter indeed. All of my trauma and abuse and darkness and heartbreak, it is now right out there before me and it confronts my insecurities and self-doubt and fears, and it’s horrible, the most horrible thing in the world, but this sense of horror is exactly what makes it so absolutely beautiful, Grace in the grandest Dietrich Bonhoeffer sense of the word.

Years from now, when you think you have succeeded at becoming, finally, a “Writer,” or should you awaken one day and wonder why you did not become a “Writer,” remember that this art is rooted in blood, it begins and ends ultimately in blood, it demands so much from us, so much heart from us, and a heart only works when it is pumping blood, which means you have to be willing to work it. Your art works only when you reach into the recesses of what disturbs and burns you most, when it stares into the deep abyss of your soul and then bravely, “the deep abyss stares back at you” (as Nietzsche pointed out). This too is Grace.

Which now finally leads me to the vehicle from which this Grace has entered my life, and of course I mean, first, metaphysically, from God, but in the physical sense, the MFA program. An MFA program has the power to grant Grace upon us sinners of the craft. The value of such a program is its ability to allow us to find meaning in who your are, to change our life and change our name, to fall in Love, to have our marriage destroyed, to argue about which faculty are out to get in your pants and which ones want you to be a better human being, to share your best over-inflated faculty impressions, to tell stories about how “so and so’s” books have changed your life, to make amazing friends, or at least “gooder” friends, to push your blood-alcohol content into an alcohol-blood content, to go an entire residency without sleep, to learn from all sorts of people that you normally wouldn’t get to know in your “normal,” life, to explore the parts of yourself that you thought you would always have to hide from the normal world, to get your heart devastated and broken beyond belief via a random affair, to get your chance to wrestle with God alone in your dorm room on your own terms…and there’s the writing. An MFA writing program provides an opportunity to investigate who you are and who said you are allowed to be a writer, for maybe, the first time in your entire life. Although I must say, two years is just too damn short!

Finally, if I were still thinking about being a minister, and I am always — still — thinking of being a minister, I would leave you with a commissioning, something to take back into your world and spread like the good news it is, so, please, allow me to commission you.

Hold this art, this call to be a writer to the highest of self-authorities, let no one, not even yourself, rob you of the importance to engage this call. Turn your face toward your passion, look deeply into yourself, stare down those doubts and fears, get into the fountain, take that leap of faith, be willing to burn for your art, to be ridiculed for being a writer, murder your old self, and confront the stories, poems, plays, and songs that are within you. Write with something great at stake — your very soul — do not be idolaters of the craft, do not bow down to the golden calf’s of fame or abandonment any longer, but make fitting offerings to the LORD, throw your blood upon the altar, and let your sacrifices burn. There is no more pleasing smell to the LORD than your greatest sacrifices. Let your conversion into being a writer serve your need to explore the deepest of meanings. Never lose sight of the importance of Love in everything you do. Become who you truly are.

Thank You.