Having enjoyed the
time-out in 2020 for my awesome wedding, fabulous honeymoon and below average
DIY projects, I’m back to editing the books. Focusing on just one book has been
helpful. It’s not as much fun, as I love the variety of multiple forays, but
present James thinks future James will be glad I was more singularly focused.
Recently, my wonderful wife gave me some sage advice regarding my writing (this is especially pertinent for writers of non-fiction). She said: "Prioritise the book that only you could write". Yes, how right she is. It's great advice for all writers, so we can protect our time and allocate those precious writing hours to the projects that we were born to write. This gentle nudge brought me back to a particular project I'd been dabbling in for years, about God's Genius. Although I'd had lots of fun writing about all kinds of subjects - because let me tell you, there are few things more liberating than the luxury of knowing you're free to write about absolutely anything you like, and that there are no artificial constraints on you - I figured that it was unlikely that anyone else would be writing exactly the kind of book I'm writing about God and Genius, so that was where I should return and focus for now. It's going well.
One of the perpetual joys about the Christian journey is that a relationship with God is forever invigorating the mind with fresh and exciting perspectives. In fact, one has about the same inevitability of discovering profound new truths every day as a man walking on a beach has of finding new grains of sand. There are so many conduits through which God can speak to us; through prayer and scripture, through direct revelation, through friendships and relationships, though our own inner thoughts and reasoning, through our life experiences, and through the multitude of great writers out there, that it's almost impossible for a devoted heart and a dedicated mind to fail to find new treasures every day.
If you want some good Christian philosophy, Kierkegaard is one of my favourite Christian thinkers – a rare brilliance not seen in many writers. Pascal had it in patches, so did Dante, and Milton, and Blake. Shakespeare had shadows of it in another, different, sense, as did Proust, and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky had it in a different way, still. But at his best, Kierkegaard takes us into some deep theological contemplations that are unequalled in any writer I've read. Yes, sure, Kierkegaard is flawed (aren’t we all?), with some inadequate expositions (especially around subjectivity's relationship with truth and morality), but in writings like Works Of Love, Fear and Trembling, Either/Or and Sickness Unto Death he tapped into a way of thinking that has, in my view, rarely been surpassed.
Of course, in a fallen world, the flaws and the genius have an inextricable entangling - you can't have the latter without the former. For as Blake shows wonderfully in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for the genius, his flaws are very much a part of the brilliance, acting as a counterpoise. What is it he says: improvement makes the straight roads, but the crooked roads are roads of Genius – which, even in itself is a conflicting expression of brilliance and flaw.
Finally, here's a piece of advice to end with. In life, I'd say there are only three necessary things we should be doing:
1) The things we are compelled to do.
2) The things we have to
do.
3) The things we do for fulfilment.
The things we are compelled to do are things related to morality and ethics, like being good citizens and doing what is right. The things we have to do are things related to survival and proprietary, like eating, drinking and wearing clothes. And the things we do for fulfilment are things like being creative, learning, building relationships, distilling pleasure and finding purpose. Alas, so many people do things for reasons other than those three. They do things to court cheap status, or to follow a trend, or to beef up their public persona, or to appear more intelligent than they are. Spend your time doing the necessary things and not the expedient things and you'll give yourself the best chance of a blessed and authentic life.
