If I can have a moment of your time, let’s thing about this: creatures love created things. Maybe that is ingrained and automatic. Maybe it is due, in part, to shadowy affection cast from our love for one another, creatures though we be. In sin, we’ll even love created things in spite toward the Creator! Now the devil even attacks that, presumably to tone down even our materialism lest creatures catch a whiff of actual love or Creator. So, isn’t this ripe stuff for a theology toward fiction?
Are you getting sick of me rhapsodizing? It just keeps hitting me on my pillow. I wake up and its still there, wanting to be written, and who am I to not write what wants to be written? (Maybe when my thinking about this is spent, I can get back to my other projects! Sigh)
Creatures love created things. Whether we humans love stories and words because they reflect a bigger reality, a more microscopic perception, or an exercise in human imagination and creativity, so many of us love fiction. Not only stories and words, but characters. These fictional things are that needed step removed from all the things that can trigger our disassociation and compartmentalizing.
That which isn’t real can seem safer, more soothing, yet more delightfully wicked and dangerous. Fiction offers the thrills and promises of lies without making an actual lie or falsehood. (Granted, books can lie, do lie, and some thrive to lie, but I consider that a reflection much more on the author than the medium.)
As writers, let’s love creation with our words. Let’s write against gnosticism and lies, even if we are mostly telling a story. Let’s love the material God gives us, even if loving—and being—a sinner is heartbreaking. Let’s aim for our writing to encourage real world love, compassion, and mercy, and let’s pray that God uses our writing as only He can and to His glory.
And, writer, love your creations in the beautiful light that the Creator loves creators, too.
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