That's what it really means to keep God at the center of our lives
People become writers for all sorts of reasons. A natural reticence in the presence of others, for example. Some of us may stop talking or think slowly and need more time to come up with an idea than the average conversation can support. Some may appreciate the accuracy of language so much that it is intolerable to risk a clumsy word choice. And of course some prefer the anonymity of the written word, because their ideas are too dangerous to be personally owned.
Coincidentally only one of these people can claim a gift for a creative and engaging composition. Such artists are rare. Most writers are driven to write because of some social infirmities.
I am a writer for at least some of the above reasons. The only role I never imagined for myself was that of a public speaker. However, what most writers discover sooner or later is that if you choose to write, you can't hide behind the page. If you are palatable enough to get an audience, you are ultimately obligated to reveal yourself and own your words in front of an audience.
After a quarter of a century of exclusively printed apparition, I now live in the most precarious territory of the writers who speak. Unlike those who speak even by chance, writers who speak must learn a second language: the spoken word.
The way most people speak is very different from the way we write even the simplest thank you note, sympathy card, or journal entry. What's there to write a thought that suddenly tends to purple phrases? Text messages and emails can be more conversational or merely informative, but the longer they go more elegant. Meanwhile, the sentences intended for the ear rather than the eye must be shorter, cleaner and clearer. Without the comma or useful visual point, we speak with a valuable quality we call timing.
When it comes to a writer like St. Paul, we have no idea how it sounded in person. Except for the highly decorated record in Acts of the Apostles, we know almost entirely Paul from his letters.
It can be grand and poetic, as in this month's "Hymn to Christ" in Colossians, proclaimed the fifteenth Sunday of ordinary time. Paul presents a visionary vision of the church's understanding of Jesus, emerging in real time in Paul's generation. If you sat down and talked to Paul over a first-century beer flask and asked him about his experience of Jesus, his thoughts may have been less eloquent, more intimate.
Only the occasional phrase appears in his letters to betray how Paul might have sounded in person. These are the times when Paul loses control and gets mad at someone: in those moments he stops composing and starts to let off steam. Paul was a writer by necessity, not necessarily by temperament. He had to communicate at a distance and the written words had to replace the man himself for the communities behind him.
Paul is easy to understand when he writes as a speaker. When he growls at Peter for being a hypocrite in eating with the Gentiles or barks at the Galatians for their theological addiction to the practice of circumcision, we have no illusions about Paul's frustration. (Both of these occasions appear in Galatians Chapters 2 and 5 - clearly an unguarded letter written with more passion than his usual discipline.)
It is when Paul writes as the studious Pharisee he is, measuring every word and doubling down on gravitas, that we feel we lose the thread of its meaning. Maybe it's intellectual laziness on our part, but when Paul crawls into his head our thoughts in the assembly can start to wander.
I recently found myself in a rare empathy with Paul as I retired. As a speaking writer, I was struggling to communicate in that strange second language, speaking out loud. At the closing hour of the weekend I offered the group the insignificant theological premise that believers are called to organize their life with God at the center. I supported this claim with the Jesuit father Peter van Breemen's statement that God is fundamental in our life or God is nothing.
A hand went up. "Isn't that pretty sour?" The man objected.
Being a slow thinker, I considered your question for a moment. I didn't expect God at the center to be a dubious premise for believers. Van Breemen's proposition that God is nothing but primary seemed intrinsically linked to this premise - in my mind. Yet another mind has found such an exclusive and extreme proposal.
Did not Paul insist on this centrality with the declaration: "He is before all things and in him all things hold together"? For Paul, Christ is the cosmic glue of reality. Integrity is discovered by grounding our values in its radiant perspective. Paul declares that Christ is first, Christ is head, Christ is at the center, Christ is the beginning, Christ is the fullness. Christ reconciles man and divine, past and future, heaven and earth, binding everyone together.
"Yes," I finally agreed with the man. "It's very hard." The truth can be hard - like loss, suffering, limitation, death. The truth requires us, which is why we prefer to escape it or at least soften it with shades and loopholes. So we accept God as central: except perhaps for family and work, responsibilities and pleasures, political and national conviction. It is difficult to say, without asterisks, that Christ is at the center, that our path is through him and our lives orbit around his will. "I am the way, the truth and the life." Tough, bald and demanding. Without compromise, how worldviews go.
Other theological writers have eagerly sought some space. The case of the good enough Christian has been raised many times. Joseph Champlin wrote a funny book decades ago called The Marginal Catholic: Challenge, Don't Crush. Of course on a pastoral level, we could all use a little bit of room to maneuver, or a lot. However, pastoral encouragement does not take away the power of van Breemen's claim.
If God is God - the omnipotent, omnipotent and omnipotent Alpha and Omega - if God is sovereign, using the word purple, then denying the centrality of God in our life is denying the definition of divinity. God cannot ride a spiritual rifle or be a friend in your pocket for times of need. If God is not the most important, we reduce divinity to a more convenient dimension, dragging God into a discreet role. Once downgraded, God ceases to be God for us.
Harsh? Yes. Deal? Each of us determines it for ourselves.
Faced with the honest repulsion of a participant in the radical centrality of God, I would have liked to start over. A writer can edit relentlessly; one speaker, limited to time and place, not so much.
I would like to emphasize that recognizing God at the center does not always mean praying, spending every waking hour in church or thinking about religious thoughts. For the true believer, God is naturally at the center of the family and work, financial decisions and political perceptions. Divine will becomes the heartbeat so integral in our day that we may not be aware of how it makes everything else possible. All things hold together this constant benevolence at the center. Otherwise, how quickly our plans are revealed and our hopes are gone!