Photo by John Brundage

“Writing is the closest a man will get to knowing what it’s like to give birth!” Several years ago I heard a speaker give this retort to the suggestion that writing is easy. Unsurprisingly, this analogy resonates more with men than with women. As someone who will never have to give birth, I find great comfort knowing that this is the closest I’ll get. But that doesn’t make writing any easier. Having a deadline and accountability has helped me get into somewhat of a natural rhythm for my posts here. But with my school work, personal blog and other writing projects, coming up with ideas and making progress sometimes feels like squeezing water from a rock.

I face similar difficulties when preparing talks. All too often I’ve left talks to the last minute, or a few days before. Part procrastination, part trust in my experience and natural abilities, part trust in God’s providence, I’ve gotten away with this strategy on all but a few occasions. It’s worked, but at a price. It’s made the process far more stressful than necessary, and the quality of the talks has sometimes suffered. Each time I’ve narrowly avoided bombing a talk, I’ve thought to myself, “next time I’ll prepare in advance.”

This past week I was given the privilege of having yet another ‘next time.’ I gave two talks (the same talk on two different nights) in Montreal for a parish mission hosted by us seminarians. Unlike other talks, I began serious preparation nearly two weeks in advance. I was looking forward to having a finished product within three days, and not having to worry about the talk for the rest of the time leading up to the mission. But after three days of banging my head against the wall, I arrived at the first run-through with a talk that felt completely flat. I simply could not figure out how to effectively fit my ideas into a coherent whole.

Fortunately this wasn’t my first rodeo. I’ve written enough and spoken enough to realize that this is a normal part of the creative process. Ideas and inspiration are a boom and bust business. In one of my seminary philosophy classes we read some of the work of Hungarian-British polymath Michael Polyani. He wrote about the process of scientific discovery, and how “eureka!” moments happen. More often than not, these don’t occur during active investigation, but outside of it. Polanyi argues that while our active work primes the pump, it’s when we allow the idea to marinate in our subconscious that true creative insight typically happens. 

From a spiritual standpoint, I also recognized an opportunity to trust in God, and not in my own ideas. Recognizing that I was spinning my wheels, I decided to take the next day off of my preparation to clear my head. The next day, during a sermon on the life of St. Phillip Neri, several ideas that had been floating in my head suddenly clicked into place. I now knew what I was going to talk about. For me, this was an opportunity to trust in God. Are there any areas of your life where you are stuck? Benjamin Franklin famously said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. If you feel like you’re getting nowhere, consider leaving the problem alone for at least twenty four hours. When we give up control, that gives God room to work. 

John Brundage is a seminarian with the Companions of the Cross. He also writes a Substack Newsletter called Integrated Prayer.