Today I feel like writing more about me. Of course. Sigh. The trouble with my writing, or one of the troubles, is that I get caught in an endless loop. I tell people I'm not doing it because I have nothing to write about. They, being friends all of them, say that of course this is not true, and they are right. I don't know much about much, but I do know about being me. I could write about being me every day. To tell the truth, being me feels like a hard job most of the time and only getting harder. That's interesting--to me. But does it contribute to the wider world? Hard to say. I will confess that I like reading about other people much the way I like seeing their living rooms and kitchens, just to see what it's like to live somewhere else, and, often, to see what I can do better. Somehow details about others' lives turn out being about me too (how self-centered can I be?), so maybe my writing about me turns out to be about others for them (if I ever let other people read what I write, but that's another topic.) I hope so. May God's grace make it so sometimes because I don't have much else right now. Maybe I'll grow out of this phase that's been going on for 36 years. Maybe.
My goal for this week, and for the last few weeks, although I hadn't moved toward the goal at all until two nights ago, was to get better at prayer. Some weeks ago I had checked out a book titled, simply, Prayer by Richard Foster. While reading chapter one, it occurred to me that my prayer life has many of the same troubles as my writing life. I don't want it to be all about me, but if I take me out, there isn't much substance there, just some well-wishes, really. Not really a relationship. No depth. And then there are plenty of things about me that I don't want to either write or tell God about. Of course, if there is a God and God is who we think God is, God already knows. And then there is the concern that I'm just so darn not good at it. My attention wanders. I don't know what to say. I fall asleep. I just stop and stare blankly at whatever is before me. Who am I to be writing or talking to God? There are so many people who are so much better it almost seems silly to put myself out there at all.
The book starts out by giving permission for all of those things to be true. It says to start out with Simple Prayer, in which all of those problems are OK, maybe even good. For example, it may be good to be bad at prayer: "Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto-mechanics. That puts us in the 'on-top' position, where we are competent and in control. But when praying, we come 'underneath,' where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent" (Foster 7-8.) Oh boy. That hits the mark. I do not like to be underneath, to be clearly and humbly incompetent, and I never have. How ironic that in thinking myself too lowly to pray or write, that the thing that is shutting me off is out-of-control pride. Foster says it's OK to have some selfishness mixed in with the altruism when it comes to prayer. As Foster explains, you can see it like a child talking to parents. Just because my children have crazy and selfish and confusing requests, how much better to have them tell me than to have them be afraid to tell me. Foster says that prayer begins wherever we are because wherever we are is the only place God can meet us. Simple and obvious. He writes, "We must never believe the lie that says that the details of our lives are not the proper content of prayer" (Foster 12). He makes sense, and I think, as I read about simple prayer, I can do that. To make matters better, we believe, and scripture promises, that God's grace makes even a lousy prayer holy. Even the worst prayer is still prayer.
When I sit down to write something and find the same old inhibitions haunting me--I have nothing to say worthy of being read, it's all about me, this may not be any good, etc.--I wonder if maybe I should give myself permission to continue on with my simple writing, as Foster gives permission for simple prayer. To just write from where I am with the stuff I have and allow it to be shoddy or laughably bad or ignorant or boring. What, after all, do I have to lose? Pride perhaps, but I'll admit here that pride isn't serving me very well. I am risking the low opinion of others, which is very scary to me, but the opinion of others is not something I can ever control. Their opinions are their problems, not mine. They can stop reading at any time. I may suck at writing and have only drivel to contribute, but for some reason I am drawn to it. I feel little tugs. I feel better while I'm writing. Maybe it's worth being mediocre and self-centered and vulnerable. Maybe good will come of it. Maybe it's OK to be simple. The alternative, it appears, is to be nothing, and there doesn't seem to be nearly as much room for redemption (or blind luck or grace or whatever we want to call it) in doing nothing.
"'Tis a gift to be simple. 'Tis a gift to be free. 'Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be." --Shaker hymn
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