The most important lesson I teach in my college writing class is a surprising one: You never know what your idea is until you’ve written through it. Even though you might begin with a sliver of a thought, it’s impossible to know whether the inspiration for a piece of writing — an essay, report, short story, poem, film, podcast — is really true until you’ve incarnated it in words.
What I don’t include, for the sake of morale, is the follow-up: Even after you write it out, you might still never know.
My spiritual practice, like my practice of writing, is steeped in uncertainty. During my time making the Spiritual Exercises, my intense experiences of God’s love frequently became mingled with deep anxiety: Was that prayer yesterday from God, or was it really from me? Did the Holy Spirit actually move me in this way, or did I misunderstand something? Is God helping me out of a problem, or am I tricking myself into taking the easy way out? In principle, the power of Ignatian spirituality is to answer those questions by finding God in the deepest parts of ourselves — our emotions, our excitements, our desires. Nowhere is this notion clearer than in the Discernment of Spirits, Ignatius’ process for judging the movements in your spirit to see whether a course of action, or a practice, or an attitude, or anything, points toward or away from God.
In practice, though, there’s an inevitable quagmire: My spirit is a mystery even to myself. There is no way of being exactly sure of how, or what, or if God is speaking into the depths of our being, even in the most powerful prayer experience. Great joy can be a sign from the Holy Spirit, but it can also be an illusory path away from God. You might feel confirmed in a decision one day, then feel completely wrong the next day. That changed feeling might itself be either a call from the Holy Spirit or a false sign from what Ignatius calls the Evil Spirit.
As I made the Exercises, this second-guessing became an agonizing routine. I would have an experience, then try to discern the experience, then try to discern that discernment, and so on and so on, until I was left lost in the fractal labyrinth of my own mind. There is no answer key for the movements of the spirit, only the ineffable, dynamic, human relation with God.
Writing is strikingly (hauntingly) similar. There is no point in the writing process, not one discrete second, immune to questioning. My mind brushes against an idea for a project, but I’m always left asking myself, is this idea the right one? Is this argument really true, or does it just seem like it could be true? Is the idea actually about how hard it is to come up with an idea, or is that an easy cop-out? The questions abound and superabound, swirling together until the very world seems to lose its mooring.
Thankfully, not every project feels like an existential crisis. But still, no idea comes with a how-to manual for translating it from thought to reality. Such is the challenge that’s nipped at my heels as I write my dissertation’s (as-yet in-progress) third chapter, on Robert Browning’s massive 19th-century narrative poem “The Ring and the Book.” I sense, buzzing in me, the feeling of something, some electric charge of meaning that wants to burst forth from my mind. The poem is certainly fitting material: It comprises 13 monologues telling the story of a murder in Renaissance-era Rome, and Browning is explicit about the book’s spiritual aim — he wanted to “write a book shall mean beyond the facts, / Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.” Suffice the eye and save the soul: how could I not have something to say? And yet I’ve pondered (still am pondering) what I should be saying.
I can feel the idea just beyond the edge of my fingertips, can see it in my mind’s eye like a light behind a cloud, but when I try to fix it in word, it drains away like sand through my fingers. I’ve asked, as I’ve written, if I should be zooming out to discuss the poem on the whole, or if I should zoom into the microcosm of a few sections or if I should discuss what makes it heartbreaking or if I should talk about why it’s spiritually powerful or if I should be talking about something else entirely. I don’t know the answers to this question. And in fact, I never will know. I’ll never be exactly certain if the words I’ll write will be the right ones to capture the incandescent burst of inspiration I received when I came up with the idea.
This is, I think, because spirituality and writing are both a little too big for the human brain to handle. Both practices grasp for the ineffable and try to rivet it before us — but we are mortals, and if there is an exact right way to speak the unspeakable, it’s above our paygrade.
One day, midway through the Exercises, my spiritual director reminded me of a crucial fact: The goal of discernment is never to find the right answer.
Ignatian spirituality does not ask, Did I understand God’s will? It asks, How has trying to understand affected my relationship with God? Discernment is not about resolution but rhythm, not completion but communion, not optimizing ourselves but finding God in the very act of searching. This kind of activity is powerful, but it can’t be anything other than a leap of faith, an act of entrusting ourselves to the ground of being from which our lives spring.
As I’ve written further into my dissertation, I remain unsure if I’ve arrived at something really Real, if I’ve captured that prismatic flashing idea that inspired me at the start. But as I’ve written about Browning — I see now, as I reflect — this very fallibility has cleaved me to God. In developing my idea, I felt the electric movements of my own mind, a pattern that buzzed mystery of my own God-given individuality. In planning out my writing, I connected with other people — like the advisors in whom I found both caring support and the maddening-but-really-quite-needed care to push back against my ideas, and my wife, whose (blunt) critiques left me feeling both stung in my pride and wildly full of love.
In figuring out how to anchor my ideas in real human experience, I confronted what genuinely matters to other people in their fragile humanity. I tested my attachment to my ideas, discerning if, indeed, the act of writing wasn’t just a form of pride. In feeling my way through the poem, itself underpinned by pain and despair and hope, I felt the brittle force of Browning’s humanity reaching across the gulf of history. None of these things brought me absolutely clear answers. But over and over, my uncertainty, limitedness and mortality brought me before God — from whom all ideas flow and who escapes all human words.
And so, if we’re left with uncertainty in our writing, it’s because that’s what writing is about — the human act of reaching out, in our mortality, towards that which is beyond us. Though we might not find the right words, the process of trying can open us to a shower of holy graces. We face our own limitations, we find solace and comfort in others, and we come closer to that deepest, darkest, truest part of ourselves, where God resides.
A contemplation for writing in uncertainty.
Place yourself before God in quiet and peace. Share the desire for your writing — the eagerness of inspiration, the frustration of uncertainty and everything in between. Ask: Where have I been taken by searching for this idea? What language have I found? Who have I met? What struggles have I faced? Where are you, compassionate and creative God, in that uncertainty? Give thanks to God for the dark light of inspiration; give thanks for the fumbling act of expression. Ask where God, who resides in the deepest part of yourself, is calling you.