More Prose!

Blessing, Grace and Mercy: our body recieves life's blessings, our soul lives off of the presence of grace, our spirit is remade through God's mercy. Inspiration is a mercy. It is a gift that is given not just to our bodies, or our souls, but to our deepest being. Mercy works on the part of ourselves that is being remade from nothing by God, the part of ourselves that is closest to the death that is nothingness. Mercy, therefore, can have the aspect of the terrible and tragic. It can be a mercy to be shunned, to have your friends die, to die yourself. When we say "Lord have Mercy", we do not actually know what we are asking for. I think repeating this prayer is an important way we Orthodox writers can make room for the Spirit to work.

Inspiration asks a man to put himself at the mercy of God's will. It doesn't matter if what is being written is merely one sentence. If God is indeed the prime mover of our pen, we will be asked, if only for a few minutes, to give our full attention, our heart's lifeblood, over to the work. For the sake of our writing we must forgo every little hope. That is, personal ambition must have nothing to do with it. We should say to ourselves: "Maybe it will be perfected, maybe not. If I remain in prayer, it will be the Spirit that brings this to fruition in me" . This patience with the process is not gained in a day. We must constantly remind ourselves of the fact that God does not give us beautiful ideas to no purpose.

Clarence Bottums
The Art of Writing in the Christian East pg.33