A prayer for writing, when writing
(The case for why everyone, even atheists, should pray before they write and as they write)
There are some elaborate, idiosyncratic prayers in my life, like my “Go bother Leonard Cohen” prayer. The first one to write about here, though, is what I call the "The* Sing Muse Prayer.”
Invocation of the Holy Spirit before addressing an audience has a lot of precedent in the Bible, from the Hebrew Bible with Moses pushing back on God’s request that he lead his people because he is not a confident speaker, when God then assures Moses that He will provide the speech, to the New Testament with Jesus telling the apostles not to plan what to say but to have faith that the Holy Spirit will give testimony through their speech when the moment calls on it.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey begin with invocations of the Muse, and forever on afterward through the history of literature out of Europe writers would riff on* (is it riff on or off of?) this. You could even see a continuation of this in the instinct to distance oneself from creative work by acknowledging a false origin or alternative authorship in prefaces. The most glib or cynical or ironic play on authorship is still in some way a recognition of an uncomfortable truth, or, more reverentially worded, it is a recognition of a mystery that is fundamental to creative works: they are never solely their creator’s. This is in part because the works belong in a tradition, but also because they are the Creator’s, and speak to each of us in turn, together with Creation, which no one author can be fully conscious of. There is also some truth to the understanding of all texts as incomplete until encountered by their readers, their audience finishing them through their engagement with them.
I find myself longing for writers to not only invoke the Spirit but put their invocations in writing.
There are a lot of related reasons for invoking the Holy Spirit before sitting down to write, and then again in the process. Two main reasons come to mind: maintaining humility and focus. Humility helps battle writers’ block by keeping a healthy distance between what one writes and who one is; staying focused on the meaning of writing, the purpose of the act, which, again, is not to glorify one’s learning or mastery of a craft, but to benefit oneself and others through the presentation of truth and beauty, makes writing bearable and more interesting.
Why write? For art’s sake! If you must go beyond that, to make a map or lay a groundwork, to heal wounds, to connect — to love.
But writing is often miserable work. As Viktor Frankl said, despair is suffering without meaning. If we restore meaning to the task of writing, the suffering it (I think inevitably) brings is just fine. Giving up seems unnecessary when I remember I’m doing something difficult but possible and purposeful. That said, my ego is a little tiny baby of a baby velvet edge of the tiniest faint pink urban flower petal, and, somehow, also huge. So, I need to write in a way that is not about me.
Think of a book right now. Open it up in your mind. What do you see after the title page? Typically, a few pages in, before the book proper or even its preface begins, you will find the acknowledgements. (Some authors or publishers place this at the back of a book, and that’s so much the worse for the point I’m making, but for the record I don’t think it’s a bad thing.)
Acknowledgements keep us honest, and they also bring the readers into witness the meaning of the work for the author. One of my favorite tropes in the acknowledgements pages of books is when authors say, everything good found here you can credit to my mentors and helpers, and all faults and errors you can charge to me. It is not false modesty, but virtue that such a principled statement shows. If we all hold this standard in our hearts with a purity of purpose, so much the better for humanity.
Years ago when I read Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, my heart warmed before the opening page as I learned that he wrote this work of political philosophy for his daughters while he was dying from motor neuron disease.
(Here’s how The Guardian described it: “This book is in part the product of the author's night-time ordeals, using his mind and memory to get through the immobile loneliness of the hours of darkness, and then dictating to an assistant the thoughts assembled on his private Calvary.”)
We, thank God, do not need to be in physical pain from a terminal illness to recognize that what we do here with our time is for our loved ones, for everyone, radiating out from the core of our most intimate circles to reach all people from now into the future (and, if you ask me, the past, but I won’t get into that now).
So, too, when I write, I seek to communicate what transcends my ability to comprehend at any given moment. I seek supernatural understanding and connection with others in the transmission of that understanding, because I believe in the holiness of the Word and in the grace of the Holy Spirit to inhere in my actions.
I’ll end with a joke. I didn’t need to say any of that, did I? Not really, since, given that we should pray unceasingly, given that we should pray ceaselessly, of course we should pray before we write and while we write. When shouldn’t we be praying? Indeed, deep in our hearts, when aren’t we praying?
Citations/quotes referenced here:
From Torah:
But Moses pleaded with the LORD, “O Lord, I'm not very good with words. I never have been, and I'm not now, even though you have spoken to me. I get tongue-tied, and my words get tangled.” Then the LORD asked Moses, “Who makes a person's mouth?
…
Now go! I will be with you as you speak, and I will instruct you in what to say.”
Exodus 4:10,12 NLT* (I’m playing around with which translation I’m using here. I don’t know much of anything about translation choices, but the USCCB webpage notes that the literal statement here is, “I will be with your mouth.”
Moses, please, who even gave you that tied up tongue?
From The Gospels:
And when they bring you before the synagogues, and the rulers, and the authorities, be not anxious how or what ye shall answer, or what ye shall say: for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.”
Luke 12:11, ESV
The Iliad:
*Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that impos’d
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls los’d.
— Chapman’s Homer, which so moved our beloved homeboy John Keats, doesn’t really ring with that punch he poetized about, for me. - Courtesy of Project Gutenberg
Samuel Butler favored the word goddess, too, which makes me wonder when “muse” came into use — but that’s another little writing rabbit hole for another day:
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
The Odyssey (Samuel Butler translation):
Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.
Bonus:
I first recall encountering “meta-fictional” prefaces when I read The Call of Cthulhu in the 7th grade and it opened with this parenthetical:
(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
Indeed, this trope is so common that when I read Fernando de Rojas’s Calisto y Melibea, a.k.a. La Celestina (1499) with The Catherine Project this summer, I had to triple check with the professor leading our reading group that Rojas did indeed find Book 1 of the novel and continue writing it himself, and he did not make up this fact.
But who can blame me for reading an old Spanish book considered one of the first novels and assuming that the author made up the story of finding part of the book, when that’s exactly what Cervantes did for Quixote, the much better-known example of such a text?
Finally, one more ancient Greek reference for bad measure (but likely good meter):
The muses appeared to Hesiod while he was tending his lambs, giving him a laurel staff and imbuing him with a poet’s voice.
“We start then, with the Muses, who delight / With song the mighty mind of father Zeus / Within Olympus, telling of things that are, / That will be, and that were, with voices joined / In harmony.” (Lines 39–43) - Courtesy of Lapham’s Quarterly
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*While I never much listened to The The, bless the whole post-punk scene for a band name like that.