I've mentioned Twyla Tharp's book The Creative Habit before in this blog. A friend and mentor recommended it to me as the best book on creativity that she's come across. I think it's excellent. One of the things she says is that sometimes when you're blocked on something, it means you haven't done quite enough pre-work, what she calls "research". This was definitely true of me today. I was hitting my head against the wall with this one sermon, until I finally realized that I was trying to gloss over some of the troubling and challenging aspects of the scripture text. Finally I decided, "I'm not going to ignore these challenging places, I'm going to start with them," and I am having the time of my life and haven't looked back.

I took a class in seminary (taught by that same mentor/friend) called "The Preacher and the Poet." The basic premise of the class is that preachers and poets are kindred cousins. Both employ creative uses of language to describe the indescribable. I definitely feel that sermons are my "art"--prose/poems that are written and shared with others. I feel very lucky that, unlike some writers who may labor for years to find an audience, that my thoughts and ideas receive a hearing whenever I climb into the pulpit. (Provided people stay awake.)

The down side, if there is one, is that there is a hard and fast deadline to my writing. One can theoretically work on a novel or poem as long as one wants to, but come Sunday, there's gonna be a sermon. You can have a piece that's decent on the verge of being good, or even decent on the verge of being great, but once Sunday arrives, decent will have to do. So as a writer I struggle with feeling free to let the creative process assume its own pace, while acknowledging the reality of Sunday morning. These five sermons I'm working on for this conference are psyching me out.

My dad wrote to me a few weeks before he died, "To be spriritually in harmony with the universe, whatever happens must be for the highest good of everyone involved. This means we don't force things to happen, we allow them to happen. When I struggle the most with my writing is when I am trying to force an outcome. When I am able to remove my ego and become part of a flow of creativity which neither begins nor ends with me, the work is effortless and much more effective."

Another way of putting this: I read a story recently about the actor Hume Cronyn, who was describing working with Alfred Hitchcock. Sometimes people would have trouble with some aspect of a scene, just be blocked about it, when all of a suddent Hitchcock would come in and start joking and clowning around. Later, after they made it through whatever was giving them problems, Hitchcock would explain why he did it: "You were pushing. It never comes through pushing."

I don't know why I need to hear that message so often and in so many ways, but I do. Last night I was trying to work and all I could see was the deadline. Today I am having a ball.