Nathan observes that a lot of popular fiction with the “Christian” label is unfortunately cheesy and simplistic. Brian McLaren’s books, such as A New Kind of Christian, use a fictional narrative to put across some sophisticated ideas in an emotionally accessible way, but are not well-crafted as novels. The same might be said of The Shack, an unlikely bestseller about the Trinity, which I admit I enjoyed despite its clunky plot.

In the modern naturalistic novel, it’s a challenge to dramatize complicated abstractions without turning one’s characters into speech-makers. The rules of the genre also make it difficult to represent the supernatural in anything but a subjective and fuzzy way. The author who throws in a miracle seems to be cheating, unless he leaves open the option of material causes. The take-away lesson of the book may then become more about the virtue of having faith than about the content of that faith. (Did you clap your hands to save Tinkerbell or not?)

Nathan’s essay discusses his own struggles to solve these problems, leading him to the conclusion that too much conscious purpose on the writer’s part can thwart the emergence of well-rounded characters. He’s inspired by N.T. Wright’s message that salvation is not merely personal access to heaven but a project of improving this world here and now. Thus, the novelist can spread the kingdom by depicting what a community based on gospel values would look like:

The three aspects of this that [Wright] discusses are justice, beauty and evangelism. He talks about
justice in terms of the setting right of the world as a sign and symbol of what’s to come. He talks
about beauty in terms of us creating things that reflect simultaneously the beauty of the original
creation, the scars of a fallen world and the hope of the new creation. Evangelism, then, is the
invitation for others to join in the kingdom life, and it needs to reflect the kingdom focus and
hope for renewal of the Earth.

A community-centered literary vision presents its own challenges, Nathan notes, because the novel is a product of Enlightenment individualism. It tracks particular characters rather than groups. “The focus on the individual and the individual’s
consciousness pushes the novel toward individualism and mere spirituality.”

Since my own novel is about a fashion photographer’s faith journey, I was especially interested in Nathan’s suggestion that a novel can reorient our standards of beauty in a more Christian direction:

…[B]eauty has a new shape for a community living in
the kingdom. So, how might beauty in fiction be transformed by the practices of the Christian
community?

There is an obvious and trite answer – for a start, the upside down values of the kingdom
challenge the world’s idea of beauty attached to slim, young models. We might also strain
ourselves and insist that prose is more ‘beautiful’ when it describes a world of God’s presence,
rather than one of his non-existence.

Perhaps in the diversity of the body – the breaking down of racial barriers in the church as a
proclamation of Christ’s victory over the powers – we might also be encouraged to find beauty
outside our cultural comfort zone.

I would like to think that Nathan’s right that prose is more beautiful when it describes a God-infused world. But I’m not so sure. What is beauty, anyhow? Literary tastes vary as much as theological ones, and maybe for similar reasons. Because I’m already a believer, a gorgeous style wedded to a nihilistic vision will seem false to me, perhaps more of a turn-off than if the bleak content were matched by austere prose. On the other hand, that same book might satisfy someone who’s looking for transcendence in art because he doesn’t find it in religion.

I do love Nathan’s notion that a Christian book could bring our aesthetic and moral judgments more into harmony, so that goodness and reconciliation seem more attractive than conventional beauty standards based on inequality and extravagance. My fabulous protagonist, however, hopes there is a place for both, because Vogue is paying his rent.

It was hard choosing just one passage to quote from his Image essay, since the whole piece is as rich and compact as a poem. Here are two samples to pique your interest:

…I once believed in some notion of a pure ambition, which I defined as an ambition for the work rather than for oneself, but I’m not sure I believe in that anymore. If a poet’s ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self—except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself. That is noble ambition. But all that comes after—the need for approval, publication, self-promotion: isn’t this what usually goes under the name of “ambition”? The effort is to make ourselves more real to ourselves, to feel that we have selves, though the deepest moments of creation tell us that, in some fundamental way, we don’t. (What could be more desperate, more anxiously vain, than the ever-increasing tendency to Google oneself?) So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.

Still, there is something that any artist is in pursuit of, and is answerable to, some nexus of one’s being, one’s material, and Being itself. The work that emerges from this crisis of consciousness may be judged a failure or a success by the world, and that judgment will still sting or flatter your vanity. But it cannot speak to this crisis in which, for which, and of which the work was made. For any artist alert to his own soul, this crisis is the only call that matters. I know no name for it besides God, but people have other names, or no names.

This is why, ultimately, only the person who has made the work can judge it, which is liberating in one sense, because it frees an artist from the obsessive need for the world’s approval. In another sense, though, this truth places the artist under the most severe pressure, because if that original call, that crisis of consciousness, either has not been truly heard, or has not been answered with everything that is in you, then even the loudest clamors of acclaim will be tainted, and the wounds of rejection salted with your implacable self-knowledge. An artist who loses this internal arbiter is an artist who can no longer hear the call that first came to him. Better to be silent then. Better to go into the world and do good work, rather than to lick and cosset a canker of resentment or bask your vanity in hollow acclaim….

****

…The question of exactly which art is seeking God, and seeking to be in the service of God, is more complicated than it seems. There is clearly something in all original art that will not be made subject to God, if we mean by being made “subject to God” a kind of voluntary censorship or willed refusal of the mind’s spontaneous and sometimes dangerous intrusions into, and extensions of, reality. But that is not how that phrase ought to be understood. In fact we come closer to the truth of the artist’s relation to divinity if we think not of being made subject to God but of being subjected to God—our individual subjectivity being lost and rediscovered within the reality of God. Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us. It follows that any notion of God that is static is not simply sterile but, since it asserts singular knowledge of God and seeks to limit his being to that knowledge, blasphemous. “God’s truth is life,” as Patrick Kavanagh says, “even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.”
…

I’ve had students complain to me that they aren’t writing enough, and when I ask them if they’re writing, they say, “Well, no…” To this I respond: writing begets writing. There is no way to write but to write. There are no tricks, though there are plenty of diversions. One of the points I make in my book The Writing Warrior is that any structure someone provides for your writing, or any structure you create yourself, is only as useful as your ability to work freely within it and to stay centered and focused. The structure or the concept doesn’t make the writing work. Your discipline, practice and flexibility make it work. When structure of any kind (relationship, job, religion, writing, city) becomes a prison, it’s time to move on.

Now, what writing practice does is illuminate. It yanks out into the open everything that the writer has been trying not to look at. And so the writer goes away. This is normal, but a book about writing, or a class about writing, can’t address the nuts and bolts without addressing the real reason writing is hard. It holds up a mirror to your own demons. It dares you to look, dares you further to write about it, then dares you even further to share it publicly. Yeah, is it too late to change majors to something safer like Pyrotechnics in the Middle East?

Writing practice brings up your limitations. This is a gift, not a problem. The more you know about what you do and why, the more room you have to make authentic decisions. Writing practice shows you your belief systems about yourself, your family, your world. It shows you where you need to be right and where you feel invisible.

Writing, for Herring (and for me), has some parallels to meditation. Both practices help us cultivate non-attachment to fixed concepts, replacing them with open-ended interest in whatever actually occupies our minds. And both are made more difficult by the common fear of discovering that our true selves are “unacceptable”.

That’s why, these days, the intentionally Christian aspect of my writing is more about process than content. The two are intertwined, of course, because until the experience of grace and forgiveness becomes more embedded in my consciousness, my novel characters won’t be able to reach that same resolution in their lives. However, I’ve tried to shelve the perpetual question “Is this preaching the gospel?” In an odd way, last year, the agenda of “the gospel” came to feel like a false artifact, a mask of God, no different from the manufactured images that are my fashion-photographer protagonist’s stock-in-trade. He and I despaired of finding The Real. But don’t worry, because we both have a short attention span for sitting on the pity pot, eventually we’ll grow bored with that and commit to some imperfect instantiation of the divine. Or as he would say, get over yourself, girl.