It’s not entirely true. One can learn a discipline and convey it to others, but if you want to convey love of the thing, you must love it yourself. So people who do not love the faith can teach the tenets but because they do not love the One who is the essence of our faith, there will be something amiss.
The lack of passion comes through, just as surely as the passion for a thing is inescapable. When a person loves a particular text, or sport, or cuisine, they want to share it with everyone, but especially those who show the potention to love the text, sport or cuisine with equal or greater ardor. So it is with Christ, so it is with writing, so it is with all things.
We want our students to surpass us. We long for our children to supercede us. We cannot supercede God, but God longs for us to fall ever deeper in love with Him.
Driving to work, I listen to the daily mass. Sometimes traffic or life zones me out while it goes, but ultimately, I find myself praying and preparing and hearing God’s voice somewhere in the mass. Lately, I’ve been asking, beseeching when it comes down to it, to show me what I should do next.
I am a writer, but as of late, I’ve been more of a teacher of writing. However the perpetual fear of being a poser, a pretender, lingers. If I do not write, I cannot call myself a writer. If I do not live out a life of faith with works, my faith is dead.
Preparing slides for the next week of teaching writing, I felt my own heart be scratched. You need to get back to this, and not use work or life or anything as an excuse not to get to the five hundred word count. It’s rather like praying the rosary. You fall out of the habit. You must let yourself fall back into it. It must be willed. It must be wanted. As of late, I’ve felt too tired to want. I found myself praying, “give me the will to will.”
Similarly, I pulled into the parking lot to pick up my youngest. The Adoration chapel is right there. I sat in the driving seat, thinking, torn between napping and going into the chapel. I looked at my watch. I had twenty-five minutes to spare. I could rest. Alternatively, I could pray. It occurred to me, I could go into the chapel and if I fell asleep while praying in Christ’s presence, it would at the very least, be imitative of the Apostolic.
Going into the chapel, I felt surprised by how easily I slipped into prayer. Iron sharpens iron. Practice encourages practice. The prayer, the preparation for others, pushed me back to the computer even though it was late. You need to write until you don’t think about needing to write because you must write and the need is unspoken and unnecessary to say even to yourself. I could substitute pray, exercise, and prepare to teach, any pursuit in the sentence rather than write, and if it mattered, it still rung true.
So I finished my five hundred words and my rosary, and it didn’t feel so hard, so bad, so impossible as the blank page had before I began. Bead by bead, word by word, step by step –all of it was process. All of it was grace. And all of it was a reminder, that God gave to me, and does every day, offer a blank page on which I can write my response to His gifts.
So thank you God. Thank you for today, and for all the prior todays, when you presented me with the promise of a day, no matter what I did with it. Thank you for letting me again today, to begin.
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