Sean the Baptist

Yesterday in a staff meeting, we were trying to develop a course that would better equip preachers for the task of preaching.  A key element in our thinking was a fundamental commitment to enabling people to be themselves in the communication of the Christian faith.  Throughout, I was reminded of an article by Zadie Smith in the Guardian this past weekend on great writing and what it means to be a writer.  Here are a few selected quotations that connect to the reason why, in the end, I can not simply believe as a Christian, but needed to try and articulate (as scholar / theologian) and communicate (as minister / preacher) the faith I profess (as disciple), and that challenge me about how to do it better and with greater authenticity and integrity.

'To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.'

'For writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. If that sounds woolly and imprecise, I apologise. Writing is not a science, and I am speaking to you in the only terms I have to describe what it is I persistently aim for (yet fail to achieve) when I sit in front of my computer.When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language. This single duty, properly pursued, produces complicated, various results.'

'A great piece of fiction can demand that you acknowledge the reality of its wildest proposition, no matter how alien it may be to you. It can also force you to concede the radical otherness lurking within things that appear most familiar.'

'Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision'

The whole article can be found here.  I wish I could write like that.  Smith is one of those novelists whose essays and non-fiction (to this reader at least) have an even greater quality than the novels themselves.