After a reading I once gave at a bookstore in Iowa City, a graduate student asked me if I considered myself a spiritual writer.
“Maybe,” I said after a long pause, disarmed by the enormity of the question.
“Well, what IS it?” she persisted.
“What’s what?” I said.
“What is spiritual writing?” she asked, now impatient. “Isn’t all good writing spiritual?”
“Maybe,” I said again after another long pause, still unsure.
Now, a decade later, I finally have a more coherent response.
For me, the arts of writing and faith are closely related, in that writing is an act of faith in creation. And that act is often a spiritual process, a journey into mystery. It’s also a search for belonging — for ways to reconcile my vast longings with my being, to look out with the eye while looking in at the “I,” to somehow balance self and world.
I call this balancing — this learning how to see and believe and create — a deliberate life. It’s a term I borrowed long ago from the hermit-philosopher Henry David Thoreau, a writer I found incredibly boring and confusing in high school. Back then, I struggled with his elaborate metaphors and the dense detail in his sentences, which meandered like long, slow-moving rivers that never really arrived anywhere. I had not yet learned how to use his periods and commas as little rocks where I could rest and consider the shifting currents and hidden pools of insight that I had missed the first time through. Nor did I recognize that a creative faith is not about arriving.
But that all began to change in my 20s, when I started to take reading and writing more seriously. After completing one master’s degree in creative writing and another in religion, I was drawn to writers whose spirituality somehow converged with their writing practice. People like James Baldwin, Kathleen Norris, Annie Dillard and, eventually, Thoreau.
That was when I returned to his classic nature memoir, Walden, and rediscovered this iconic line: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I soon learned that “deliberate” doesn’t just mean intentional or careful; it means balanced. The word comes from libra, the two-pan scale of justice, which is for weighing and balancing things: ideas, fears, love. Or maybe garlic. I once saw such a scale at a market in a French village. The farmer put two 100-gram weights in one silver pan and the handful of garlic I wanted to buy in the other. The known weight was balanced against the unknown. The farmer’s guess was correct: the two pans, being equal in weight, soon leveled.
For me, deliberate living and writing is about learning how to balance the known and unknown — about using one to understand the other. Which I later learned, from Thoreau and others, is also how metaphors and similes work. An idea counterbalances a focused, concrete example or image of that idea: A long sentence is like a slow, winding river. Writing an essay is an act of faith.
One of my favorite metaphors from Thoreau: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”
But what is the connection between “time” and fishing in a stream? How are we to balance the known and unknown, the seen and unseen? And why would anyone try to define “time” in the first place? It’s an enormous word and idea — in the realm of Truth or Nature or Death. Time is money, and a prison, and a thief. Time is running out. We make time and spend it and waste it and lose it and buy it and kill it. We are never on time, seldom in time, and always of time. We are always in a hurry, because the clock is ticking.
Thoreau’s image of the “river of time” is not a new metaphor, but fishing in it is. Because the heart of fishing is not catching. We don’t go trout catching. At the heart of fishing, like writing, is waiting, and watching — for a bite or nibble, for the slightest tug from whatever comes along — be it a pickerel or a pout or, maybe, an act of love or forgiveness. Thoreau waits and watches amid the quiet stream of time — of consciousness, of patience, of attentiveness.
But where did this idea come from? Where do metaphors come from? Often they come from the writer’s experience. Perhaps one clear night Thoreau saw the stars reflected on the Concord River or against the pebbly bottom of Walden Pond — the convergence of sky and earth in the water — and tried to dream of the world beyond the moving water, to “drink deeper,” to believe in the unseen and the kind of time that cannot be measured. Thoreau’s river of time is defined not by numbers but by relationships, by belonging to the river, to the stars, to the sand. Fishing in it connects the human animal to the whole of Creation.
Such ideas were helpful to me at that point in my life, given that I felt quite disconnected: I had no idea what to do with my freshly minted degrees in creative writing and religion. Neither program was the least bit practical or clearly led to a job. But reading Thoreau and others in both programs got me thinking in useful ways about how these two areas of study might converge — or somehow balance each other.
Kathleen Norris got me wondering about the relationship between poetry and prayer. “Prayer is not doing, but being,” she writes in Amazing Grace. “It is not words but the beyond-words experience of coming into the presence of something much greater than oneself.” Her concept of prayer as beyond words resonated with the sense of attentive belonging I sought when writing. And I felt it when I read her work, and Thoreau’s. They both somehow used language to take readers beyond language, which seems like what spiritual writing is always trying to do, which now seems like the whole point. The Word is beyond words. So just keep writing, and waiting, and listening for it to rise from the depths of everyday life.
Tom Montgomery Fate is a professor emeritus at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where he taught creative writing and literature courses for 30 years. He is the author of six books of creative nonfiction, including Cabin Fever, a nature memoir, and The Long Way Home, a travel memoir.