The First Word

It turns out I am not the kind of person that can just write a blog about a book; the creative process; or even the history of the words that fascinate me. It only took a year or so – probably less, for all that focus to peter out and disappear from my eyesight.

It turns out that the first word that caught my attention, that swiveled my head and always will call to and captivate me is the name of an unseen being. It’s in my relationship with that being where most of my attention is focused. My soul exists there and wants to stay there always. When I lose sight of that word, that soul space…

I ache.

I exist in half measures with heaps and heaps of anxiety.

I have hesitated though. To change this blog’s focus. To write about the truth of who I am. What my soul longs to write about is also the thing I’ve got all kinds of insecurities and fears about exposing to any public space – even if its only filled with one or two people. I thought I could separate – that I could compartmentalize my soul space from my public writing one. It’s advised by many to do so. To not be too real, to not show too much. Ever heard the phrase pearls before swine? The public is harsh. We become a mob so easily. We are divided and polarized and when there’s no face to face talk it’s easy to yell and criticize and hurt each other. To misunderstand.

Let me whisper the truth to you:

Who I am… is a lover of Jesus.

And oh gosh, his name is a loaded, full-of-connotations name. The term Christian is a label held in all sorts of different lights – whether it be jaded (by those who’ve walked away from it like me); ambivalent towards its “myths” and superstitions and silly, violent tales; put on a pedestal; viewed with cautious optimism; or frankly, hated for its role in history, used by people in power to oppress and squash differences in all corners of the globe. There are some thinkers and poets and writers who seek to find the hidden parts that might be restored inside it. I’m not sure how much I identify with them or others that use it. But. I’m not sure if I identify with those that don’t either. If I could toss out theology entirely I would. Ask me any question about it and I will tell you I don’t know. Or worse, I will have a too passionate opinion that might stem from ego; or that jaded space of skepticism where I cry out I am not that or them. It might even come from naivety – childish over-the-top hopes and expectations. And all of these areas of myself are places that make me afraid to voice anything at all… in case I, too, add to the misunderstanding of the meaning of that first word. To the skewing of anyone’s perception of who Jesus is.

I could just step away from it all. The only problem is that I adore one part of theology. One name. One person. I have danced around mentioning his name – tried to make excuses for why I keep him out of my writing, even gone so far as to try out different names, different genders in my conversations with friends – names like Divine, Universe, Love. (There’s nothing wrong with using any of these except they don’t work for me.)

I told myself Tolkein wrote about him in secret. Narnia is just a picture of him without the religion. Rumi knows who he is. So do many others from different religions and spaces. All our different attempts to find out who God is are full of words and names that are limited. So when I started writing I told myself I didn’t have to include his name. Just the feeling of him, the essence of what I know of him. But. In my effort to disassociate – in my fear of the legalism, the judgement, the narrow-mindedness, I started to define myself by what I am not. And I tried to define him by what he is not. In my need to stand apart from the things I don’t like about religion, the subtle twisting of his character, and the sabotaging of self, the more I drifted further and further away from the personal, the passion, the secret, and the safe space of my heart. The longer I hid who he was to me, the less I wrote, the less I felt.

The more my longing grew to say his name, to breathe it like a prayer, to inhale it like the cool refreshing spring I know it to be.

Hiraeth is an old welsh word I heard about – a longing for home, they say it can even be a longing for a place you’ve never even seen. I know that word with every fibre of my being. It’s the place inside me where Jesus fits as much of himself into as he can in order to be with me. He scrunches his huge self right down into my heart – crowding into every corner and hidden nook, and he does it knowing that it can only hold a smidgeon of who and what he is. He does it knowing that there is where I will find him. Be known by him, fall in love with who he is and find all the treasures he hid inside of me. And with him doing that for me – squishing himself into a space much smaller than he is – my soul whispers, and sings, and vibrates like a plucked string, one phrase over and over:

this one thing I know. Jesus loves me so.

So I am going to write about my soul space. And this is hard. So hard. Because I’ll fail. I’ll inevitable expose some of the ugly pieces of my prejudice and my own misunderstandings of who he is. But in the end nothing else is as real to me and so I will do it anyway. So. Here. We. Go.