Wearing My Faith Or Living It?

Katherine Patterson (prolific writer of books like Bridge to Terabithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins) often speaks about being a Christian and a writer. I think her words have a lot to do with all of us, whether we write, work in an office, teach kids, or do whatever it is God has laid before us. Below is her answer to how Christianity informs her writing and comments on religious content in children’s literature in the last fifteen years.

Katherine Patterson (prolific writer of books like Bridge to Terabithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins) often speaks about being a Christian and a writer. I think her words have a lot to do with all of us, whether we write, work in an office, teach kids, or do whatever it is God has laid before us. Below is her answer to how Christianity informs her writing and comments on religious content in children’s literature in the last fifteen years.

I think it was Lewis who said something like: “The book cannot be what the writer is not.” What you are will shape your book whether you want it to or not. I am Christian, so that conviction will pervade the book even when I make no conscious effort to teach or preach. Grace and hope will inform everything I write.

You’re asking me to comment on fifteen years of 5000 or so books a year. Whew! We live in a Post-Christian society. Therefore, not many of those writers will be Christians or adherents of any of the traditional faiths. Self-consciously Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) writing will be sectarian and tend to propaganda and therefore have very little to say to persons outside that particular faith community. The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.

I look at my life and I wonder if people see grace and hope informing everything I do. Do I even see it? There is no way to get it into my “bones and sinews” and live it, if I am not really breathing it in and out every day of my life. I confess that I can get so busy, so confused, so lazy, so ignorant, so human that I can’t seem to live the life I know is there. When it’s not in my every fiber, then I still want my Christianity to show. So, I grab the Christian dress out of my closet and throw it on. What else is a girl to do?

I am ashamed to see myself wearing my Christianity at times rather than living it (a distinction that is more likely to stick with me now that Patterson has pointed it out so elegantly). So, here’s the naked truth: we must eat, drink, and breathe our God, not hold Him out in front of us. It’s not that far off from what Christ suggested in the Bible through Communnion (Matthew 26:26-29). And, it could be the most attractive thing we’ll ever do.

For more on Katherine Patterson: http://www.terabithia.com