Happy Friday, folks! In Atlanta, we have dark skies and wet grass. I love the rain. Raindrops pelting against the porch soothes this writer’s heart. Sometimes I focus better when it’s raining—don’t ask me why.

Today’s inspiration comes from Going on Faith: Writing as a Spiritual Quest, edited by William Zinsser. In particular, let’s ponder the words of Frederick Buechner from the 2nd chapter :

“In the stories of Flannery O’ Connor, for instance, I have the feeling of the author herself being caught off guard by a flash of insight here, a stab of feeling there. She’s making discoveries about holy things, about human things, in a way that she herself says would not have been possible if she had known too well where she was going and how she was going to get there. And as her readers we share in the freshness and the wonder of her surprise.”

Buechner calls The Brothers Karamazov the greatest of all novels, yet a ’seething bouillabaisse’ of a book:

“It’s digressive and sprawling, many too many characters in it, much too long, and yet it’s a book which, just because Dostoyevsky leaves room in it for whatever comes up to enter, is entered here and there by maybe nothing less than the Holy Spirit itself, thereby becoming, as far as I’m concerned, what a religious novel at its best can be—that is, a novel less about the religious experience than a novel the reading of which is a religious experience: of God, both in his subterranean presence and in his appalling absence.”

Buechner probes further: “Is it the Holy Spirit? Is it the muse? Is it just a lucky break when these things happen in a story or in a life?…But as in the journey of faith, it’s possible every once in a while to be better than you are. Saint Paul says, “Do you not know that God’s spirit dwells in you?”

Another thought: “Are novels like mine a kind of whistling in the dark? I think so. To whistle in the dark is more than just to try to convince yourself that dark is not all there is… And in the same way, faith could also be called a kind of whistling in the dark. The living out of faith. The writing out of fiction…”

According to Buechner, what faith and fiction have most in common is that they are a way of paying attention.

“If it’s God we’re looking for, as I suspect we all are, maybe the reason we haven’t found Him is that we’re not looking very hard.”

Like Dostoyevsky’s books, my life seems digressive and sprawling at times. Am I paying attention?

Are you?

Going on Faith: Writing as a Spiritual Quest .
Note: These essays on writing are not all written from a Christian perspective.