A voice descended

After John 12:20-28

A voice descended,

descended from heaven,

sounding the glory

of its name, the glory

that would sound again.

Some called it thunder,

some called it a choir

of angels. All knew

what it was, is, will be.

Photograph by Nick Lissone via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Speaking Voice

I loved the Gospel of St. John. It was the first Bible text I was directed to read after becoming a Christian, and I have returned to it over and over again in the intervening years.

It was quite a few years after that first reading when I learned something I found fascinating about the “Word” of the first verse of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I knew the “Word” meant Jesus; what I didn’t know was the Greek word for “Word” literally means “spoken word.”

Before the written word was the spoken word. And the written word did not replace the spoken word. The spoken word still is. As A.W. Tozer writes in The Pursuit of God, “His world-filling Voice…antedates the Bible by uncounted centuries, that Voice which has not been silent since the dawn of creation, but is sounding still throughout the far reaches of the universe.”

When I learned that “Word” was literally “spoken word,” I was just starting what became my speechwriting career. The understanding has a profound impact. My small, pale, tiny, faint echoes of the spoken voice of creation was indeed small, pale, tiny and faint, but it was also an echo. What I was doing in my day-to-day work was my human imitation of speaking something from nothing, because every speech begins in chaos, and it begins with a blank page.

Simply learning that literal meaning of “Word” transformed how I considered, developed and judged my work. What I was doing mattered, if for no other reason than it pointed to the original Creator. And I had a compass for looking at the speeches of others. I could transcend political and policy differences and look at what was being said and how it was being said, and learn to write better.

Granted, this career epiphany happened at likely the last possible moment it could have happened. This was before PowerPoint destroyed speech texts, replacing them with bullet points, and before media training had burned “stick to your three key message points, and only your three key message points” into speakers’ brains. This was also before everything in society and culture was viewed through the lens of extreme polarization, at least within the last 100 years.

The Word of God is still “sounding through the far reaches of the universe.” All we have to do is listen.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. This week and next week we’re covering chapter 6, “The Speaking Voice.” To see other posts on the chapter, please visit Sarah’s site, Living Between the Lines, for her own post and the links to those by others.

Hearing the Voice

Have you ever heard the voice of God? Have you ever heard the voice of God speak directly to you?

In Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption by Katie Davis and Beth Clark, Katie hears the voice of God. And He specifically tells her that the name of the next child becoming part of her family will be Sarah. And – it is. A grandmother returns again and again begging Katie to adopt her two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, who is unable to walk. Katie keeps refusing – she already has too many children she’s adopted. Or so she thinks.

The little girl’s name turns out to be Sarah. Katie accepts her, and changes her name, since there’s already one Sarah in the family. The little girl’s new name is Grace – Amazing Grace (the title of this chapter).

It’s a story that brings tears to your eyes. The little girl who couldn’t walk is going to learn to walk.

Miracles do happen. And Katie does hear God’s voice.

I asked myself if I’ve ever heard God’s voice speaking clearly and directly to me. (And I asked myself that if I talked about it here at this blog, would people wonder if I’ve lost my mind.)

The short answer is no, at least not like Katie did when she hears the name of the child.

I’ve talked before about an experience I had in Erfurt, Germany. I didn’t hear a voice, but something happened in that church there, something I still can’t really explain.

I was once sitting in a school board meeting (yes, a school board meeting), and suddenly felt surrounded by what I can only describe as dark, dark shadows. It was short-lived, but it was definitely one of most disconcerting feelings I’ve experienced.

But I can’t say I’ve ever heard a voice speaking plainly in my head.

I can’t count the times I’ve heard people – often certain televangelists – talk about God speaking to them like He was sitting across the table.

And I’ve read dozens of times about writers who believe they have been specifically called by God to write. I often wish I had that kind of assurance. I’m a writer, but I have to confess that God never called me to write. Writing is something I do, it is both my vocation and avocation, and I want to honor God in what I write. But I can’t say I ever heard God tell me to be a writer.

What I have heard or experienced, however, is God speaking in circumstances and through other people.

You hear a missions director at church speak of the need for sponsors for children overseas, and while there’s normal human compassion involved, you also know – really know – that you’re supposed to step up.

Or you hear about someone’s physical or emotional or financial need, or you see and elderly and infirm person struggling, or you see someone’s spirit crushed, or you learn that this stranger sitting beside you on the airplane has just lost a loved one and is struggling – and you know you’re being called to do something. Perhaps it’s only to listen, or to provide some temporary assistance, or just be there, but you know.

I hear God’s voice in the Bible; it’s hard to avoid God’s voice in the Bible, because that’s where it’s the most accessible.

No, I can’t say I’ve heard God’s voice speaking like Katie Davis did in the case of Amazing Grace. I believe it happened exactly the way she describes it.

Things might be simpler – or possibly more difficult – if I did hear “the voice” telling me something very specific.

But I believe anyway.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Kisses from Katie. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Voice, Part 2: The Passion of Place

In writing, as in life, a sense of place is important. I define “place” as geography – real and imagined. In my novel Dancing Priest, place stretches from Edinburgh and London to Athens, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In particular, San Francisco occupies an important place in the story, both the “macro” environment of the city itself and the “micro” environment of the area around the fictitious St. Anselm’s Church.

I have been to San Francisco many times, but I’ve never lived there. I’ve been in the approximate area where I located St. Anselm’s Church, so I had a general sense of the location – the warehouses and the nearby shops. San Francisco will be the major setting for the novel’s successor (as yet untitled).

Place is important. And the odd thing is that, the older I get, it’s becoming more important.

I was born and raised in New Orleans, a city that’s unique in the United States. I could and probably would argue that it’s the least American city in the country, more like a Caribbean city. And I was always something of an exception – a Protestant raised in a largely Catholic city; a father from north Louisiana, not a native New Orleanian (and a father with a slight Southern accent that had been largely ground out of by World War II); and my distinctly non-New Orleans accent. My New Orleans-accented mother and my Southern-accented father produced a child who sounded like he was from the Midwest.

Another exception: the suburb I was raised in was the most American suburb in this less-than-American city. By the time I left elementary school, new names were mixing into the classrooms that had previously been full of Thibodeauxs, Charbonnets, Heberts, Melancons, and Chenovas. New names were coming in – Clarks, Pollocks, Pells, Smiths, and Wells – children of the engineers and scientists coming from all over the country to work at the huge NASA facility in the city.

The kids spoke American English instead of New Orleans English, adding to the gumbo of dialects saturating the city. Their parents, who invariably spoke Yankee English, were not quite prepared for a place like New Orleans – and always managed to offend the natives by asking why everything seemed so dirty, like the blind date I had with a girl from Arizona who said the French Quarter resembled the slums in Phoenix.

And it was a time of social change. I can remember as a child separate water fountains and restrooms marked “white” and “colored.” There was a color line on the buses – you knew without being told where to sit. Motels and restaurants were segregated. I attended all-white elementary and middle schools – and an integrated high school. My parents were frantic to get me into a private high school, until I told them I was going to the public school, ending a family trauma that looks rather ridiculous in hindsight but which had been incredibly intense. I was a junior in high school when Dr. Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis; panic gripped New Orleans but nothing happened.

I went to Baton Rouge for college and never again lived in New Orleans. The jobs weren’t there. Like so many of my college friends, I ended up in Texas. And we’ve lived in St. Louis for the last 33 years, and in our current home for almost 26 years, longer than anywhere else.

Yet New Orleans still has a hold on me. I’ve lived in St. Louis longer, and St. Louis is similar in many ways (the same immigrant groups settled both cities; both situated on the Mississippi River; both part of the Louisiana Purchase), but St. Louis is different. For one thing, so much of it is red brick.

New Orleans had much to do with shaping me in numerous ways, perhaps most of all as a writer. The city instills in its natives a certain attitude, a combination of laissez-faire, manners masking an array of social mores, an offbeat humor, and a longstanding mistrust of authority and experts long before it became a national characteristic.

I can still speak the New Orleans voice. I can do a pretty fair imitation of the “Nawlins” accent, and even a Cajun French accent (appropriate for reading The Cajun Night Before Christmas).

But I write in a voice that has been influenced by coffee-and-chicory, Mardi Gras king cakes, the three seasons of summer, July and August, a mother born and raised in the Ninth Ward, finding my way through social upheaval, the most important place in Pirate’s Alley being the Faulkner Book Shop, an elementary school always smelling like steamy thick mud after a heavy rain, streetcars running down the middle of Canal Street, the business district reeking of strong coffee grounds, strange homes called shotgun houses and camelback houses, the beauty of the residences along St. Charles and Esplanade avenues, and the French Quarter itself, with the tackiness of Bourbon Street and the magnificence of St. Louis Cathedral.

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist has been leading a discussion of Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing by L.L. Barkat. This weeks’ discussion is about “voice,” about which Barkat says this: “To have voice, a writer must have passions and a sense of place.”

Related: Voice, Part1: Almost Losing It.

Photograph, bottom: St. Louis Cathedral from Pirate's Alley, French Quarter, New Orleans.

Voice, Part 1: Almost Losing It

“To have a voice,” L.L, Barkat writes in Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing, “a writer must have passions and a sense of place.”

I think of Wendell Berry, with his passion for a kind of neo-agrarianism and his region of Kentucky. I think of William Faulkner and his passion for a way of life that had disappeared in his native Mississippi. I think of Charles Dickens in Victorian Britain and all of the passions that coursed through his novels (mostly centering in questions of social justice).

We don’t have to be a Berry, a Faulkner or a Dickens to have a voice.

But for a long time, I wondered if I indeed had a writing voice of my own.

From about 1975 to 2006, speechwriting was a significant part of my career. In those three decades, I wrote for 12 CEOs, numerous other corporate executives, people running for office, a school board president and a few non-profit executives as well.

To write a speech for someone else, and to do it well, you have to essentially assume their voice – both their speaking voice and their “personal” voice. Over time, I learned to “channel the speaker” and write in their voice – their stories, their ideas, their hopes, their favorite quotes and authors, their speaking patterns and their idiosyncrasies. I read what they read, I listened to their taped speeches, I watched their videos. I talked with them and listened to them in meetings and conversations.

Most PR people hate speechwriting, and with good reason, Speechwriting is never about you.

The best speeches I wrote sounded exactly like the executive who was speaking. My own desires, messages, thoughts and hopes tended to be suppressed. The time to articulate them was in conversations with the executive about the speech. If he or she liked them, they became the executive’s.

When I stopped writing speeches for others about five years ago to do other things, The thought was in my mind that my voice might be permanently locked up. It was probably no coincidence that I started doing a lot more writing for myself – the series of novel manuscripts, one of which became Dancing Priest; this blog (now three years old and counting); writing for The High Calling, The Master’s Artist and TweetSpeak Poetry; guest posts and articles; and speeches and presentations for myself.

It turns out my voice had only been on the back burner, but it had been there all along. It has been wrapped together with my passions and my sense of place.

I’ll have more about that on Thursday.

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist is leading a discussion of L.L. Barkat’s Rumors of Water. She’ll be posting on the five short chapters comprising the section on “Voice” on Wednesday. 

Fire in the Voice

I was all of 24 years old when I stumbled into speechwriting, the discipline that would shape my career for most of the next 35 years. I was working on a special project, a major issue facing the company, because I had just changed jobs and was the only person available to do it. Some months into the project, an executive needed a speech on the issue. I had never written for someone else, but I did it. It worked, and soon I was writing speeches.

Some years later, I became aware that no matter what else I might be doing, I was at heart a speechwriter. It’s a practice/profession/job that most communications people avoid for many reasons, not the least of which is that someone else always gets credit for your work.

But I liked it and enjoyed it. I liked learning how executives spoke and what mattered to them, the words they used and avoided (or needed to avoid), how their personalities and deepest hopes and fears would come slipping out of those outlines and speech texts and blossom into policies, programs, initiatives and programs. I liked playing with ideas and translating them into human speech.

I found myself often climbing into executives’ heads, which could be both joyful and discouraging (and often both at the same time). A speechwriting friend who was considerably older told me once that I would know I was doing my job right if only the executive’s spouse knew him or her better than I did, and that it was a power and influence to be used carefully and with sober judgment.

And while most of my work was helping executives find their voices, I discovered that speechwriting also helped me find my own voice.

Poet David Whyte would say that finding one’s voice, a familiar enough concept to writers, is also vitally important to anyone working in a corporate or organizational setting. Even a timid, tentative voice is important, for it is through that timidity that we can begin to learn “to treat the world or the organization as a mythological equal, a peer instead of a parent, a co-partner on the path instead of an all-powerful provider or persecutor.”

Is such a thing as equality even possible?

Not only is it possible, Whyte would say, but also necessary for the good of the individual and the organization. Even the “mouse” sounds of timid speech are important, Whyte says: “Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.”

Writing for some 12 CEOs and dozens of other senior executives, I learned quickly which ones were the best to work for – the ones who had that compassionate understanding, who knew that truly courageous speech arises form humility.

We’re reading David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America over at TweetSpeak Poetry. This week, we’re reading chapters three and four. My post on chapter three, “Fire in the Earth,” was Monday.

Related: 4 poems inspired by “Fire in the Earth.”