Know-Love-Obey God

High Calling Blogs Book Club:
The Right to Write:
An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life,
by Julia Cameron, Chapters 7-9
Laura Boggess leads our discussion (and links to other posts) here.

**********

In her chapter called “Mood,” Cameron teaches us that we cannot wait to be in the mood to write before we write. The chapter begins, “I am not in the mood to write today. My thoughts are cranky and resistant. I feel sluggish, irritable. I do not want to write.” The same chapter ends, “I did not want to write this morning. I am delighted that I have.”

All of life is like this. Often, persistence in doing what I don’t want to do at the moment, leads to loving the very act I didn’t want to do. We used cloth diapers for our babies. What if I only changed them when I was “in the mood”—when I felt like it? Knowing what life would be like if I neglected diaper-changing and diaper-washing, I came to actually enjoy those processes.

Cameron describes a man who, at Venice Beach, daily swims, then writes.

Richard, by virtue of his writing and swimming practice, is a trained optimist. Whatever mood he has to begin with becomes the building block of a better mood. “I act my way into right thinking,” Richard says.

- Cameron, p. 35

This sounds a lot like . . . the Scriptures:

. . . for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

- Matthew 6:21

My treasure is how I spend my minutes, where I place my efforts, my time. And wherever I place my treasure—wherever I direct my actions—there will my heart follow. And if my heart goes there, then, because I treasure those things, my future actions will coincide. What a beautiful, God-designed, internally strengthening cycle. Like a self-sharpening paper cutter that hones its own blades every time it is used.

C.S. Lewis knew this secret, too. In the “Let’s Pretend” chapter of Mere Christianity, he writes:

What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretense is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretense leads up to the real thing . . . Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 161

There are certain people I find difficult to love. My decision, then, is to live life as if I really do love them (the “good” kind of pretending)—calling them on the phone, asking “How are you?” and then truly listening to the answer, showing them acts of kindness and honor. Then perhaps, following (or accompanying, right then and there) the love-actions will be the true “I feel like it” love. When explaining this to others in the past, I’ve heard the objection, “But that’s insincere hypocrisy!” And I counter, “There is no such thing as hypocritical actions of love.” On the contrary, hypocrisy is characterized by the lack of actions.

So it is (Cameron says) with writing. If I am not “in the mood” to write, I pretend I am and write anyway. And in that writing, I suddenly and magically find that I am actually in the mood!

Now, after writing this, I am drooling for more. I want to spill ink from my pen, to spill it profusely. I want to write!

As for loving, I feel an urge to clarify, as C.S. Lewis clarified in the same chapter quoted above:

I have been talking as if it were we who did everything. In reality, of course, it is God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us.

- C.S. Lewis, p. 165

Here enters the beautifully paradoxical truth that life as a Christ-follower is a mysterious mix of God and me, of God in me and I in Him. “Abide in Me, and I in you,” Jesus said. True, my heart will be where my treasure is. It is also true that it is “God who is at work in us.”

And little did I realize that this Book Club would also give me insight on how to love better, too. So I live, placing the right kind of gems in the right place, the right treasure chest. And you know where to find my heart.