What’s going on here? Why bother talking about something as abstract and anachronistic as sin? Why open myself up so obviously to charges of spiritual dilettantism (from people who are more serious about religion than myself), and cranky irrelevance (from people who are less so)?
It’s hard to ignore questions like this, as I sit here at six o’clock in the morning, staring out at the Northern New England darkness, wondering how much there is left to say about “wrath”, “greed”, and the whole abstract mechanism in general. I mean, even if we grant that there are certain types of human behavior that God doesn’t like (an idea that must remain securely rhetorical for some people), how can we seriously believe that a list of seven words, translated and misappropriated from Greek and Latin traditions, can be anything more than the barest of placeholders for these types of behavior? And how can we pretend that any thought about them is something more than an exercise: a way to make ourselves seem more serious than we are, by harvesting the philosophically-intriguing categories of a religion without really taking seriously the whole heaven-harps-halos mythology that makes those categories so significant to the vast majority of the people who use them?
If I was raised with any sort of religion at all, it was the WASPy Protestantism that encourages me to cherry-pick spiritual truths so long as I accept the radiant basement-dwelling of a home-made spiritual world. In this way, I don’t think I’m that much different from the rest of America. Talking about things like what happens after we die, or what it means to be a good person, my voice inevitably lowers, and my shoulders hunch. I begin to feel like I’m walking through a hushed pine grove, or maybe hidden beneath a pile of cushions. I remember an old Teddy Ruxpin adventure when the gang is shrunk down to the size of chess pieces and then left to wander around the underside and interior of their apartment sofa. The landscape is lunar – full of galloping bugs and pennies the size of wagon-wheels – but still, at the same time, deeply intimate. Strange as it may be, it’s still their sofa: an object that they’ve lived with their entire lives. Which is kind of how I feel when I start talking about these things.
Does it sound ridiculous to say that I get that same intimate/strange feeling when I talk about certain aspects of writing? Probably – but there’s no way around it: at this point in my life, writing is the most undivided form attention that I practice. It’s the way I access the world: the door that leads most reliably to the inner chamber. Other processes (I am tempted to say all other processes) may allegorize it – sex, for example, or chopping wood or restocking hospital supply closets – and therefore give me helpful ways to think about what I’m doing, the same way that studying a painting can help us understand something about the symphony we’re writing. But when it comes down to brass tacks, writing is what I’m interested in. Or not writing, so much as making, in all these fields (and here, I think I’m going to pull a Tolstoy and say, simply, and in full confidence, that you know what I mean).
When I think about sin, then, it is as a writer who believes that the problems of writing are the problems of life, and that, if we stay open-minded and attentive enough, an observation of our left hands will always help us understand what our right ones are doing. The Old Testament contains two things, stories and laws; but what the New Testament reminds us is that both of these are tools for understanding and manipulating that strange border in each of us where our behavior in the outside world shapes, and is shaped by, who we are inside ourselves. Religion as primitive cognitive behavioral therapy? To my mind, there’s nothing even remotely primitive about it. On the contrary, what we’re talking about here is a highly-sophisticated piece of spiritual technology, which furthermore is continually evolving and being updated by its users, generation after generation. Like all living languages – like the natural world itself – it is open source, in the truest sense of those words.
But even admitting this, the question remains: what does it help us do? Well (to begin with, since even my leviathan-sized ego has to admit that its attempts to plumb the depths here are cursory and limited), like any book, the Bible can be seen as a sort of virtual reality, which allows us to imaginatively experience certain difficult situations in a very refined form. In refining these situations, I would argue, it also poses, or at least invites us to understand them. Osip Mandelstam linked this with the domesticating culture of the ancient Greeks (Hellenes):
“Anyone who feels himself a Hellene must be on his guard now as two thousand years ago. You can’t Hellenize the world once and for all the way you can repaint a house. The Christian world is an organism, a living body. The tissues of our world are renewed by death. We have to struggle with the barbarism of a new life, because there, in the new life which is in full bloom, death is unvanquished! While death exists in the world, Hellenism will be, because Christianity Hellenizes death…” (Pushkin and Scriabin, Selected Essays, p. 127)
In other words, Christianity takes the most terrifying and difficult thing in the universe – namely, death – and makes it just another part of our emotional living room. The Bible – ostensibly the most victorious book ever written – is full of failure. If you don’t believe me, read for yourself: you will be amazed, I promise, by the sad epilogues of almost every one of the Biblical heroes, from Moses to Noah to David, to Christ himself. They live in God – and then again, taking the writer’s point of view, it is impossible for me not to see this as translating into something like “they live in a creative spirit, their inner and outer worlds line up in a way that makes it possible for them to create”. But that window of creation, like a square of sunlight in an overcast afternoon, only lasts so long. The question, then, is what to do, not with our blessed moments (since in those moments, we don’t need to ask any questions: we just write), but between them, when they have gone away. How to live without God, or good writing, or happiness, or work.
Or, how to make these things come back. With this turn, I think, we move from the desert of the Old Testament, with its disasters and exoduses and late-night angel wrasslings, and into the New Testament’s hemmed, though flourishing garden. Sin in the OT is a matter of disobeying laws: eating pork is a “sin”. But Christ as I understand him both refines and, more importantly, relocates the spiritual battle: now, in addition to our behavior outside, there will be our behavior inside. Sin is “soul error”, to use Montaigne’s phrase: a disalignment, or malformation, which alienates us from our own creative instinct (Hmmm....). Gripped by greed, for example, we are not empowered but consumed. We quite literally “miss the point” of what we are doing, not to mention life in general: we pursue things that do not make us happy and husband traits or habits that are self-defeating. And the result is that death takes over, in a way that is frustrating instead of fructifying.
If I’ve spent far too much of everyone’s time here thinking about all this, it’s because I find it immensely applicable to any creative work, but particularly to writing, which is after all what we spend all day doing or trying to do. Greed, for example, is what I see in the way I load some of my paragraphs with imagery. I’m like a kid in a candy store: I legitimately love comparing the material of life, finding resemblances, how this looks like that. In and of itself, this is, I think one of my greatest strengths as a writer. But when I indulge it too much, the page begins to sag. My reader’s attention gets lost; my own attention gets lost even, or stopped, like water attempting to make its way through a clogged pipe. The piece as a whole fails, because a larger proportion has been sacrificed for miniature workmanship. So what was started, ostensibly, as an act of communication turns its back, not only on its audience, but also on the very thing that it is trying to communicate. Insert your own indulgence here.
(not that there’s anything wrong, in and of itself, with working Joyce-like all day on a sentence. But the result has to be something that fits in with a larger pattern.)
I’ll stop here, for today. For your own indulgence with all this hooplah, attentive or not, I can only offer my thanks and sincere belief that what I’m talking about here is worth looking into. Life is a constant creation; the Bible is a record of creation; writing is our own creating, our profession and vocation. There’s nothing holy about it. At least, there’s nothing any holier about it than there is about picking your nose, or getting stuck in traffic or going skating. Books help us transform the world into something useful. In a very real and tangible way, they allow us to join in the fun.
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