Writing and Purpose

I hate writing. Always have.

I remember being genuinely and unstoppably excited about learning to read and do maths in primary school. I was like a sponge soaking up information. Books were a revelation. I remain genuinely grateful to people who write them, so that I can read. I am sorry that I will not ever return the favour.

The worst bit of primary school, maybe apart from painting pictures, was having to write stories. I really struggled to come up with ideas. I did not see the point in trying to make my stories vivid and exciting – they just weren’t, I knew that, so why pretend? I put great effort in trying to convince my poor Mum that homework tasks like turning a comic into a written story were really stupid and futile, since surely everyone could work out from the pictures what was happening and therefore writing any further words would be a great waste of time. She was unimpressed…

My growing interest in maths and natural sciences thankfully helped me to avoid writing as much as possible in my later school and university career until it got to the point of writing dissertations. That was no fun. I pushed myself through writing up my Master thesis, but the perceived futility of spending months of my life writing a PhD dissertation that I knew nobody apart from the two examiners would ever read eventually got the better of me. I gave up on that one.

And then somebody quite seriously suggested I should be a priest. I had no problems at all coming up with lots of reasons why that was a stupid idea. That fact that most priests have to write a sermon every single week, or – horror over horrors – even more than just one, was probably one of my better excuses. It didn’t work though: Here I am, six weeks after receiving a recommendation for training towards ordination from the Bishop’s Advisory Panel, preparing to go to theological college this summer.

Preaching has, of course, happened in the meantime. As part of our internship, we are given plenty of opportunities to be involved in leading worship in various ways, and so I have, helped along by advice and feedback from the ministers I was working with, written an all-age talk as well as a handful of sermons and short reflections – and there are a few more in the pipeline. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed the process. Maybe it is because, for the first time, I feel that I have something important and relevant to talk about. When I sit down to write a sermon, I know what I am doing this for. I picture the people I am writing for and ask myself how I can help them relate to the passage of Scripture I am speaking about. My words matter as soon as there is the slightest chance that they can build a bridge for someone towards a clearer understanding or a closer relationship with God. It seems worth putting in effort when I have the genuinely exciting story of God’s love to tell.

Here’s hoping that that will carry through for a while when the volume of writing work increases. Then I’ll only have to figure out how to extent that new-found enthusiasm to other areas of writing. Essays are relatively fine, actually, because I do appreciate how having to express myself in ways that other people can follow helps me to clarify my own thinking.

But blogging, for example? Why do people blog (unless they are told to) and what for? I have no idea if anybody reads this, who reads it, why you are following our blog, and thus what would be helpful or interesting to you. Blogging feels like writing into a vacuum: Are my words disappearing into the endless depths of the internet or have just convinced a bunch of strangers that I am a complete weirdo? And yet, there might be other weirdos like me out there who can draw something useful out of this. So here you are, help yourselves.