Writing About the Abyss of God

compulsions of theology and art

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I can’t stop writing about God.

I want to. I want to quit theology and write about life and love and art and Azaleas, but I can’t stop all these words about God. For the majority of my life, I’ve dedicated vast amounts of mental energy to thinking about God, to theology. I’ve read countless books, written thousands upon thousands of words in sermons and bible studies, dedicated myself to the study of the Christian scriptures, and generally been consumed with the process of—the processing of—and the chase after theology and good doctrine.

So, perhaps all this writing about God is just a regurgitation of what I have fed on for over twenty years. Maybe I feel the need to write about God simply because that’s all I know to write about. Maybe it’s a simple truth that I have trained by brain to think in this way, about these things, and so my neural pathways are entrenched, and I can’t help but spill some sort of poetry and prose about God.

But it feels more than that, more than a compulsion from habit and expectation. There is something in me that keeps turning to God when I have questions. Not for answers—God isn’t in the business of answers and resolutions—but as someone, or something, to test my questions against. I keep looking for better questions, questions that get to the heart of what existence means, what it means to love, and those questions, those good questions, I find myself echoing off the abyss of God.