You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.
—Alan Watts
I once had an idea for a book.
I’d never written a book.
I was a pastor at the time and I’d been giving sermons week after week and I noticed that certain ideas and stories seemed to connect with people in a unique way. I began to see themes and threads and wondered whether I could bring them together to make something people would read and pass along to their friends. I already had a job, so I figured the only way to write a book was to hire a stenographer—the person who sits in a courtroom and records everything that is said during a trial—and speak the book out loud in one sitting while he typed what I said.
So that’s what I did. I stood there in a room and I spoke the book out loud while KevinTheStenographer typed away. It took an entire day.
And it was awful. Seriously—it was so bad.
There was a moment in the middle of the afternoon when I was talking and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t even listening to what I was saying. I had somehow managed to stop paying attention to myself.
A few days later Kevin sent me the typed manuscript of what I’d said and I started reading it, but it was like a mild form of torture. It just didn’t work.
It was my words, but it wasn’t me, if that makes sense.
All of which led me to the shocking realization that if I was going to write a book, I was going to have to actually write a book.
Which sounds obvious, but at the time it was a revelation.
I remember sitting down at my desk, opening up a new word-processing document, and staring at that blank page with that blinking line in the upper left-hand corner. I wasn’t prepared for how intimidating it would be. Other people are writers—actual, you know, authors. And there are lots of them, many who have been doing it for years.
I thought about Christopher Moore’s book about Biff the thirteenth disciple
and Annie Dillard’s line about physics labs
and everything Nick Hornby has ever written
and Dorothy Sayers’s words about Trinitarian creativity
and anything by Dave Eggers …
I was now going to try and do that? The blinking line on that blank page kept blinking, like it was taunting me.
There’s a reason it’s called a cursor.
We all have a blinking line.
Your blinking line is whatever sits in front of you waiting to be brought into existence.
It’s the book
or day
or job
or business
or family
or mission
or class
or plan
or cause
or meeting
or task
or project
or challenge
or phone call
or life that is waiting for you to bring it into being.
Do you see your life as something you create?
Or do you see your life as something that is happening to you?
The blinking line raises a compelling question: What are we here for?
For many people, the world is already created.
It’s a fixed, static reality—set in place, previously established, done. Or to say it another way: finished.
Which usually leads to the question: What’s the point of any of this?
But when we’re facing the blinking line and we talk about bringing something new into existence, we’re expressing a different view of the world, one in which the world is unfinished.
There’s an ancient poem about this unfinished world we call home. In this poem there are stars and fish and earth and birds and animals and oceans, and they’re all in the endless process of becoming. It’s not just a tree, it’s a tree that produces fruit that contains seeds that will eventually grow new trees that will produce new fruit that contains more seeds to make more new trees. It’s a world exploding with life and beauty and complexity and diversity, all of it making more, becoming and evolving in such a way that tomorrow will be different from today because it’s all headed somewhere. Nothing is set in stone or static here; the whole thing is in motion, flush with vitality and pulsing with creative energy. (This poem, by the way, is the first chapter of the Bible, in case any of this is starting to sound familiar.)
And then, right there in the middle of all of this unfinished creation, the poet tells us about a man and a woman. The man’s name is Adam, which means The Human in the original Hebrew language. It’s not a common name like you and I have, it’s more like a generic description. Same with the woman, whose name is Eve, which means Source of Life or Mother of the Living.
They find themselves in the midst of this big, beautiful, exotic, heartbreaking, mysterious, endlessly becoming, unfinished world and they’re essentially told,
Do something with it!
Make something!
Take it somewhere!
Enjoy it!
The poet wants us to know that God is looking for partners, people to help co-create the world. To turn this story into a debate about whether or not Adam and Eve were real people or to read this poem as a science textbook is to miss the provocative, pointed, loaded questions that the poem asks:
What will Adam and Eve do with this extraordinary opportunity?
What kind of world will they help make?
Where will they take it?