God wears shorts

Boy, that’s a weird subject line.

Once I heard Brandon Sanderson (who, if you haven’t heard of him, writes very complex epic fantasy novels) say that his process for writing series of novels is akin to throwing his future self “hail Mary” passes and trusting that he’ll catch them when the time comes. There’s the setup, and there’s the conclusion.

So I won’t explain the joke, because there isn’t one to explain. Yet. God’s shorts will reach fruition in the future, as long as I don’t fumble the catch. (Note that, from inside my head, this is very much in doubt right now.)

Oh, hi there. You’re reading this. Ok, uh… I had a very busy and hectic couple of weeks (in a good way) and didn’t budget enough time to actually tap into a powerful creative process for writing this email. This is effectively a cram session. So there’s that.

I take full responsibility for the resulting quasi-rambling. I will do better in the future. But, also, I’ll probably mess up again, too. Seems likely.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t start One Fire planning to talk about God. Maybe that was naïve, given my goal of—oh, right! I should put that little note in here now:

So, yeah, I was saying… given my goal of a world no longer divided by religion. Probably it was inevitable that I would have to talk about God.

I just realized something, though. I have been thinking that I was uncomfortable talking about God. But that’s not quite right. Taking a closer look, I think what I actually want to avoid talking about is theology.

I don’t have a super honed definition of this right now, but my intuition is that theology is the thing we talk about when, either because we’re uncomfortable, or afraid, or ignorant (or all three), we don’t want to (or can’t) talk about God.

Looking at it now, I think I’ve always wanted to talk about God, and most conversations have been disappointing and disillusioning because they’ve ended up being about theology.

That’s like craving a big bowl of ice cream and instead getting a paper cup of frozen yogurt.

One Fire is not theology. I’m not trying to say anything at all about “the way things are.”

Except, of course, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Anything that can conceivably be said is about “the way things are.” There’s no way to get outside of “the way things are.” So what’s the distinction I’m trying to point to here?

This seems like a terrible place to stop, but my deadline is approaching. I’d probably be a terrible epic fantasy writer. I bet Brandon Sanderson never does cram sessions.

Have a great couple of weeks!