Father Andrew Greeley - A Voice of Reason in the Catholic Church

Father Andrew Greeley passed away yesterday.  I am not sure how many are familiar with him, but he is an interesting character who played an important role in the Catholic church in the last half of the twentieth centuries.  To me, he is a reminder that religion does not require prudishness, that the ecclesiastical polity is not sacrosanct simply because it is ecclesiastical, and that ethical conviction flouts dogma at every turn.  An apt summary of Father Greeley's beliefs are summarized in his New York Times obituary:

Before religion became creed or catechism, he said, it was poetry: images and stories that defy death with glimpses of hope, and with moments of life-renewing experience that were shared and enacted in communal rituals. 

“The theological voice wants doctrines, creeds and moral obligations,” Father Greeley wrote. “I reject none of these. I merely insist that experiences which renew hope are prior to and richer than propositional and ethical religion and provide the raw power for them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/us/andrew-m-greeley-outspoken-priest-dies-at-85.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

 The obituary is worth reading in its entirety to get a more complete picture of the man.  Noteworthy to me is that Father Greeley was an early advocate for investigating the crimes priests in the Catholic Church committed against children, punishing the offenders, and changing the organizational culture that allowed the criminal abuse to occur.  I was unaware that he contributed substantial funds to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) when it was just getting off the ground, demonstrating that Father Greeley understood that the strength of the Church as moral agent in the world requires transparency and contrition rather than opacity and misdirection.  All who share Father Greeley's conviction that "experiences which renew hope" are primary and form the nexus toward which all right behavior ought to be directed have lost a formidable and pugnacious ally.

Writer's Block

Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite--
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, I.12-14.

While the general purpose of creating this blog was to address the social nature of being and the implications this has for determining ethical behavior and policy, the blog is a product of me.  Hence, I deviate from the stated purpose when my mind wanders over other territories that require its attention.  At present, I am wrestling with the problem of inaction or what otherwise might be called writer's block.  

I have always found the above-quoted words to be an apt manner of describing the state I feel when I am desperate to write but seemingly bereft of the ability to do so.  Sidney also does well to have that fanciful and ephemeral notion of inspiration, personified in the guise of "Muse" reject the idea that writing is an outside-in process.  I suspect any person who writes for writing's sake experiences moments of inspiration in which the words seem to take on a life of their own, flowing from a place that feels preternatural and external.  The metaphor that comes to mind is the writer as vessel.  In some ways, the experience of inspiration is detrimental because, as a preternatural feeling, inspiration seems wholly other and suggests that the writer is not an independent source of creativity.  This feeling of inspiration as other tends, in me at least, to lead to disappointment and lassitude.  When the inspiration vanishes, I sulk and stop writing.  I search for things that might aid inspiration's return:  poignant music, lyrical writing, intense physical activity, etc.

Oddly, the one thing I tend not to do when feeling bereft of inspiration is write.  As Sidney marvelously demonstrates, the feeling of inspiration is, despite seeming to be other, a product of the self.  While inspiration will visit the writer now and again for reasons that are not always clear, waiting to write for inspiration will lead to little writing and much frustration.  The question is:  how does one overcome the lassitude and frustration?

This presents something of an existential question for me.  For reasons I can only intuit loosely, I am cursed (or blessed) with a tendency to imbue the simplest states of mind with significance.  Thus, Sidney's admonition seems less like hyperbole to me than it probably does to others.  In these moments of lassitude and frustration, the desire to get the words out gnaws at me as if it were alive, trying desperately to escape.  Sidney's admonition feels urgent and the self-loathing that follows lassitude is real.  Writer's block hurts.

To overcome the lassitude and frustration requires daring and faith.  Daring because I must write without inspiration, seeking meaning in the act of writing itself, trusting that the very act of writing will give me access to a reservoir of connections and images and thoughts that will free my mind from the paralyzing frustration.  Faith because writing is necessarily an exposure.  To write when the words do not come easily is to trust that they will eventually flow properly.  To write when the words do not come is to risk failure and ineptitude.  To write when the words do not come is to leap into the yawning abyss and trust that the words will illuminate the darkness and carry one safely to wherever it is the words lead.   And so I write, exposed but free.