Well, friends, my decades-long obsession with revision has reached a new extreme. I’ve shamelessly messed with another author’s work. Is this even allowed? When my mother died, her study group was preparing to read Teilhard’s Divine Milieu. I picked up her beat-up paperback copy just as I began a two-year formation program in contemplative Christianity. One day my teachers …
Years ago I coached a Buddhist priest in the development of his memoir. Unlike most beginners, Sensei V (as I’ll Christen him) cranked out a crummy but exceedingly workable rough draft in no time flat. Plagued by none of the usual hang-ups (self doubt, insecurity about “not being a real writer,” despair at how terrible his writing …
Perhaps because my first big writing project gave me room to articulate my sexual longings, come out bisexual, and figure out the implications for my Christian faith; perhaps because I’m drawn to spiritual and therefore intimate subjects, my first drafts (and often second and third) I tend to write for no one but me. Of course …
The story itself—the emergent life inside the inspiration—is a dynamic participant in the creative process.
Revision is basically re-vising, or seeing again. The word closest to revision in English is respect. When we look a second time, then a third, fourth, and fifth, we come to know and love the complexity of what we see. There are many facets to any subject, and revision asks of us the forbearance, humility, and creativity to seek out as many facets as possible.
When we see something anew, we come to respect it. Each new perspective, each layer of understanding, deepens our regard. Seen in this light, revision is the most respectful approach to our writing—and to much else in our days.
As writers break apart single stories on the page, they also exercise this muscle of multiplicity, strengthening their capacity to withhold judgment and embrace paradox and remain open to new layers of understanding.
I’ve known many miracles, a few even supernatural and profoundly transformative. As ordinary and as human as they seem, today I want to proclaim the holy miracle of corrective lenses.
Who knows why our bodies are the way they are, fleshy and fit, broken and breaking out, male and female and the spectrum between? Who understands the indomitable nature of our souls? Creation unfurls immeasurable variety, and all of it can be transparent to this unexpected, revising love.
