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Posted: May 7th, 2008 at 12:50pm By: Rev. Rebecca Schlatter
A few days ago I finished the draft of the book I’ve been writing for almost three years now. It’s a great milestone, but this isn’t the end: now I get to see whether it will have a life of its own as a real, published book. It’s sort of a Velveteen Rabbit philosophy, I suppose — considering a book “real” only if someone loves it enough to publish it.
The spirituality of such a process is fascinating. There’s a lot I can’t control, and much less that I can, other than the writing itself. Even that is mostly a mystery — the creative process is hard to pin down.
The psychology of this process is also interesting. At every step, self-doubt intermingles with confidence. Right now Doubt’s favorite question to me is, “Out of all the people in the world who have something to say and creative ways to say it, why would you think people want to listen to you?” Wouldn’t they rather listen to someone else?
Indeed, why me? In this context, the question has a different ring to it. It’s more commonly asked when life has taken a turn for the worse. Why did I receive this diagnosis, experience this accident, lose the job, lose the relationship? Why me? Why couldn’t it have been someone else?
For people who have navigated their way through such life-changing difficulties, they often talk of a point of acceptance, when they began to ask “Why not me?” All the time, people are getting sick, having accidents, undergoing horrific, unbearable losses — why not me?
Many of us live with faulty cause-and-effect thinking, such as, “If I do the right thing, I will avoid things I don’t want to face.” Self-centeredness and self-righteousness make us believe we should get a free pass through life — until something happens that makes us that idea untenable. Then we ask, “Why me?” What did I do to deserve this? What could I have done differently?
Apparently God doesn’t think about “deserving” the way humans do — thank goodness, or we’d all be out of luck one way or another. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “[God] causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). This is a far cry from the way humans tend to think about rewards and punishment: Only the good should get the sun, only the righteous should get the rain.
When I got married, I worked so hard at doing marriage “right,” unconsciously believing that I could somehow “cause” only the good and avoid the unthinkable. So, when I was losing my marriage, I visited the land of “why me” sometimes. It was hard to stay there, though, because I knew so many people who had undergone divorce and even greater losses, who shared their stories with me.
Now, as a pastor, one of my first questions to someone going through a difficult time is, “Have you talked to anyone else who has gone through this?” Support groups are based on such shared experiences. On the other hand, sometimes we avoid such support precisely because it makes it impossible to maintain our self-centered pity and the illusions that people get what they deserve, and that we deserve what we want. When we accept that that’s not how God or life works, it becomes easier to forgive our circumstances, and ourselves. “Why not me?” helps us become actors in our own lives, instead of victims of them.
Which brings me back to the book. There is no shortage of books being published, and only a small proportion get read in any great quantity. Why would anyone read mine? I’m not sure how to “cause” that, other than to keep exploring possibilities, taking risks, and talking back to Doubt. Right now the most effective answer I’ve found is, “Lots of people publish books — why not me?”
— — —
Rev. Rebecca Schlatter is an ordained minister in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Reno, Nevada. You can contact her at newhousesfromoldbricks@hotmail.com. © copyright 2008 by Rebecca Schlatter
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A few days ago I finished the draft of the book I’ve been writing for almost three years now. It’s a great milestone, but this isn’t the end: now I get to see whether it will have a life of its own as a real, published book. It’s sort of a Velveteen Rabbit philosophy, I suppose — considering a book “real” only if someone loves it enough to publish it.
The spirituality of such a process is fascinating. There’s a lot I can’t control, and much less that I can, other than the writing itself. Even that is mostly a mystery — the creative process is hard to pin down.
The psychology of this process is also interesting. At every step, self-doubt intermingles with confidence. Right now Doubt’s favorite question to me is, “Out of all the people in the world who have something to say and creative ways to say it, why would you think people want to listen to you?” Wouldn’t they rather listen to someone else?
Indeed, why me? In this context, the question has a different ring to it. It’s more commonly asked when life has taken a turn for the worse. Why did I receive this diagnosis, experience this accident, lose the job, lose the relationship? Why me? Why couldn’t it have been someone else?
For people who have navigated their way through such life-changing difficulties, they often talk of a point of acceptance, when they began to ask “Why not me?” All the time, people are getting sick, having accidents, undergoing horrific, unbearable losses — why not me?
Many of us live with faulty cause-and-effect thinking, such as, “If I do the right thing, I will avoid things I don’t want to face.” Self-centeredness and self-righteousness make us believe we should get a free pass through life — until something happens that makes us that idea untenable. Then we ask, “Why me?” What did I do to deserve this? What could I have done differently?
Apparently God doesn’t think about “deserving” the way humans do — thank goodness, or we’d all be out of luck one way or another. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says, “[God] causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). This is a far cry from the way humans tend to think about rewards and punishment: Only the good should get the sun, only the righteous should get the rain.
When I got married, I worked so hard at doing marriage “right,” unconsciously believing that I could somehow “cause” only the good and avoid the unthinkable. So, when I was losing my marriage, I visited the land of “why me” sometimes. It was hard to stay there, though, because I knew so many people who had undergone divorce and even greater losses, who shared their stories with me.
Now, as a pastor, one of my first questions to someone going through a difficult time is, “Have you talked to anyone else who has gone through this?” Support groups are based on such shared experiences. On the other hand, sometimes we avoid such support precisely because it makes it impossible to maintain our self-centered pity and the illusions that people get what they deserve, and that we deserve what we want. When we accept that that’s not how God or life works, it becomes easier to forgive our circumstances, and ourselves. “Why not me?” helps us become actors in our own lives, instead of victims of them.
Which brings me back to the book. There is no shortage of books being published, and only a small proportion get read in any great quantity. Why would anyone read mine? I’m not sure how to “cause” that, other than to keep exploring possibilities, taking risks, and talking back to Doubt. Right now the most effective answer I’ve found is, “Lots of people publish books — why not me?”
— — —
Rev. Rebecca Schlatter is an ordained minister in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Reno, Nevada. You can contact her at newhousesfromoldbricks@hotmail.com. © copyright 2008 by Rebecca Schlatter
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