WHY I WRITE — free as the sky

While there were certainly other entries that were personal, this week’s entry is just as personal, and I feel vulnerable. I debated whether to share this entry. In the end, it is my way of being accountable to myself and to you as readers and active sojourners in my life.

Just as a heads up, Grace and I will be embarking on our longest trip overseas starting next January 20 through June 30 out in Asia. I will share more in detail at the beginning of the year (January 3 post) what the trip is about. In the meantime, as this week’s entry suggests, I look forward to immersing myself in writing in new environments and as life evolves.

For a while now, I have been asking myself why I write or more precisely why I want to write. I allowed the question to percolate and observed in me what rose to the top. Today, I decided to capture some of my reasons. . .

I write to better audience myself, what is going on internally in relation to the external worlds I happen to be navigating. I know I see, feel, think, ask, and imagine. I want to explore my interior depth by giving words and expressing myself through writing. It is a medium that I had not taken advantage of until lately. Much of the time I know I am the one writing, but there are a few moments when the act of writing takes over my act of writing. It feels like a divine-friendly takeover, working through my mind and imagination. It feels mysteriously addictive.

I write sometimes out of anger and dissatisfaction. I see things most of the time not as they are but as they should be according to the grand narrative of God’s kingdom articulated and lived out by Jesus. I see the chasm between what should be and what is, thus being a source of my great dis-ease. Certainly not to say that what I see or want to see is in line with the living vision of God’s kingdom, but it has become crucial that I try. I see and think in “systems” in big broad strokes. The big picture is important because it tells me where I am and where I need to go.

I write to remember. It is laborious work for me to write details, to “caress the divine details” according to Vladimir Nabokov. It has been an invitation for me to explore deeper and finer details and colors this season. It is a learned lesson for me to meet God in fine and divine details, that is my life, my life always in context. God is not only big and magnificent but also intimate and generous. God is not only a generous Father but also a caring Mother. Unless I learn to capture the details, I know the details will elude me over time and thus be forgotten. I want to cherish how God came to me and count on every detail of God’s intimate motherly caring.

I write to communicate. I know I possess a perspective and a voice of freedom and God’s generous love. I want to be a voice of God’s radical inclusivity and expansive love; everything else pales in comparison. I love the “soft opening but radical launch” of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee that is captured in Luke 4: 16-30, upsetting the religious status quo. It seems that love that is not perfectly free is not love at all. I write to invite others to lift up their eyes and see the blue sky beyond the clouds and even the intermediate darkened sky.

I write to let the world know I exist and my voice matter. My life is now well entrenched in the second half of the life stage. I know what I want to do. More precisely, I know what I do not want to do in life. I am less attached and far less attracted to institutions and systems. Hopefully as a result I am less entitled. While my ego is still very much alive, I am at least aware of how my ego functions most of the time thus hopefully being able to limit the ego’s selfish reach.

I write to know God as a knowable God, which can only be subjectively experienced. God comes to me disguised as life, as Paula D’Arcy says. I also know I see and know God dimly—there is a God I cannot ever know. God is unknowable and thus remains a great elusive mystery. I want to explore the depth of this profound mystery and wonder through the human finite act of writing, hoping to catch a glimpse and insight into an unknowable God who can be knowable.

Finally, I write because I want to write. This is new for me. What I had experienced while staying at Yangpyeong both in the spring and the fall revealed something in me that I had not known before. The writing was not only fun and something that I looked forward to almost every day as part of my pleasure and discipline, but it also changed how I began to “see” things. When we strip religious clothing down from the kind of “unadorned” spirituality Jesus talked about, I believe spirituality is essentially about seeing and hearing—the kind of seeing and hearing that is not based on ego building and defending but seeing and hearing based on what is and what should be according to the standard of the kingdom Jesus taught. In short, writing has become a sacred act of grounding myself in this world but also offering a gift to the world as I continue to explore what I consider to be the early stage of my vocational calling.