Once upon a time, many years ago, my now-husband sent me a four-page letter, single spaced. Its purpose? To ask me to go out on a first date with him. Since he is now my husband, you would be correct to deduce that the letter—epic in more ways than one—was successful.
There are many reasons to write. Every season of life grants its own genres of composition to writers who may find themselves more or less enthusiastic recipients of these assignments. School papers for the young. College and job applications follow, perhaps along with increasingly longer school papers. Unending paperwork for every task in grown-up life and work. (I once had to fill out paperwork while in labor! The hospital somehow hadn’t received the electronic version I had dutifully submitted beforehand, so before I was allowed in L&D, there I was, filling out paperwork about my insurance and health history between contractions while my husband was parking the car.)
And then there is love—the kind that motivated my now husband to send me his letter or that motivates my not-quite-fully-literate five-year-old to leave notes all over the house with hearts and names of family members. I am firmly convinced that we do our best writing when we write because we love—people, ideas, books, stories, and (most of all) God. By way of wrapping up this series on writing better, here are just three (very subjective) examples of writers whose works have enticed generations of readers, enthralling them with that same love that had originally led the authors to write.
Perpetua: For the Love of God
Perpetua was an ordinary young Roman aristocratic woman—until she met Christ. While in prison in AD 202, awaiting execution with Felicity, a slave and fellow convert, Perpetua writes a powerful account of her arrest and trial. She also includes the three visions she experiences while awaiting her martyrdom.
Love is a central theme in her story. She loves her family—especially her nursing baby (who stays with her in jail for a time) and her father, who cannot fathom her decision and keeps pressuring her to renounce Christ. She also loves her brother, who had died earlier, and whom she sees in a vision, healed at last. She loves the church and her fellow-converts and is grateful to die together with those dear to her. Most of all, though, she loves Christ.
I first read Perpetua’s story in a college class. It was the spring semester of my first year of college, and I was taking a survey of Roman history. Having grown up in a secular Jewish home in Russia and Israel, I was not a believer at the time. And yet, I could agree with the professor’s description of this text as “stunning.”
But why is it stunning? It took me decades to understand fully. It is only as a believer and a mother that I now see the full extent of the love that Perpetua must have felt for Christ above all others—and her conviction that this was the one love that redeemed all the rest.
Bulgakov: For the Love of Intellectual Honesty
October is a great month to (re)read Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece, Master and Margarita, about that time “The Devil Went Down to Moscow” (as
aptly titled his review). Personally, though, I’m no less partial to Heart of a Dog, a novella I first read as an elementary schooler, still living in Russia.Banned for a long time because of the author’s obvious disdain for the Soviet regime, Heart of a Dog is a story about a doctor who experiments with transplanting various glands, looking for a secret to youth. By transplanting the heart of a highly unpleasant deceased drunk into a street dog, however, he discovers something unexpected.
But that’s only the surface level of this tale. Ultimately, what unites all of Bulgakov’s writing is his love of intellectual honesty—something that he finds so obviously lacking in the Soviet regime. Can people truly flourish unless they see and acknowledge truth? Furthermore, if the truth is hostile to human flourishing, what is the writer’s obligation in response? For Bulgakov, the answer was: write it, no matter the cost.
Wendell Berry: For the Love of Human Flourishing
In 1934, the same year when Bulgakov finished writing Master and Margarita, Wendell Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, where he still resides today. Berry’s life and writing are remarkable for many reasons, but one of them is his self-fashioning as a bridge between a world of technological simplicity and one of increasing technological complexity that threatens to subsume and destroy us all. This is a duty he also bestows on so many of his fictional characters, including Jayber Crow, a barber who keeps doing his work with his own two hands, with simple techniques and appliances, even as the tools of modernity threaten to destroy all he holds dear in his small town.
So often we idealize technology, but Berry repeatedly reminds that maybe slower is better for our souls, for our land, for our communities, for our flourishing.
He has been making this case in writing for close to seventy years now—in stories, poetry, novels, essays, and longer nonfiction projects. Through it all, his love of humanity comes through—a love for the well-being of persons over machines, a love he expresses now just as seventy years ago, by scratching a pencil across paper every day.
This is why in my new book on motherhood and human flourishing, Berry is the (perhaps unexpected) subject of the final chapter, an example of a powerful voice of life in our culture of death.
Conclusions
Words are powerful. Words we read, words we write, words we speak—they all shape our hearts, minds, and souls. Perhaps this is yet another reminder of the imago Dei we all bear—another reflection of the Word become flesh.
We too become over time the words we speak, write, and think.
Elsewhere This Week: The First Review of Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic is out!
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic comes out 10/15, and what a wonderful surprise it was to see the first review of it—from John Wilson for First Things! A taste:
…the ground note of Williams’s book—“In Christ, every human life is precious, not because of anything a person might do or because of a person’s sociopolitical status or any other factor, but simply because a person exists”—is a challenge to us all. And the stories Williams tells to flesh out this truth and its burden for us—of Perpetua, for instance, martyred in A.D. 203—are as relevant today as they have ever been. We know Perpetua’s story from a journal she kept (very unusual for her time and place), and from there Williams jumps to the journal kept by a New England midwife, Martha Ballard, between 1775 and her death in 1812. (You may have heard of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s fascinating book A Midwife’s Tale.) Williams’s account of Perpetua and Ballard as “writing mothers who most likely never thought of themselves as writers first” exemplifies the distinctive appeal of her book.