Soul Friends 0 comments

By Daniel Taylor

I once wrote a short story about an abortion clinic. I could not have written it in the way I did without my extended community of faith. But I also could not share it with them. So when I published it in a secular journal, I refrained from identifying myself as a teacher at a Christian college, for the college’s sake and my own. This experience is emblematic of the tension I feel, but have learned to live with, between the various communities in which I live.

No work of art is created alone. Communities, mediated through individuals, create works of art, and each work of art then defines a new community. The community that makes the work possible and the community that it defines are rarely identical (though they often overlap). Artists therefore may find themselves at odds with their existing communities, which both nurture and confine them, and, at the same time, not yet feel the support of the new communities their work eventually creates.

When I think of the communities that form and receive my own writing, I think of them as the community of kindred spirits. I have of late been following the Celtic saints around to their little islands off Ireland, Scotland, and northern England. These medieval believers argued that everyone needed an anachmara— a soul friend—a notion that combines mentor, spiritual director, confessor, and boon companion. The Celts thought no person was complete—or safe—without one. A person without a friend, they say, is like a body without a head. Such a friend does not merely make your life more pleasant, he or she makes your life more possible. I believe the same is true of the kindred spirits who make my work possible. It is not primarily that they give me encouragement or other psychological support, it is that they allow me to think and feel and write.

The Celtic Christians maintained soul friendships over great distances. They sometimes spoke as if such friendship even transcended time. Patrick and Brigid were portrayed as friends even though their lives barely overlapped and they never met. This echoes my own sense that most of my best friends, members of my community, were dead long before I was ever born. They include many who share my core commitments of faith and thought, but also many who do not. They lived in all times and all places, and among them are people like Columba, More, Pascal, Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Eliot (both George and T.S.), Bulgakov, Camus, Hurston, O’Connor, Solzhenitsyn, and Wiesel. The only thing I share with all of them is that each is, in one sense or another, a kindred spirit.

I would call this a virtual community, but it’s more substantial than that name suggests. It is more real to me than the contemporary world I live in, because it is more rooted in permanent things. This community speaks to me with a varied but authoritative voice. It teaches, corrects, and admonishes me and encourages me that I might have a part to play. Because I feel this historical community— this cloud of witnesses—so strongly, I feel less acutely a need for a tangible local community to support my writing. I believe I could live in a northern Minnesota anchorage and still sense my community of kindred spirits close about.

There is, in fact, an anchorage feeling to a lot of artistic creation. The community makes the work possible, but the work is usually created in isolation. Artists are often like monks who pray and fast in their cells but then come together for common purposes. Sometimes they actively help each other in creating, or help by critiquing; more often they run into each other at conferences or readings or art shows, trade war stories and pats on the back, and then return to their cells.

I do not want to exaggerate this monkishness. I have flesh-and-blood friends who support my work, without whom my life would be diminished and my writing thinner. These people, scattered here and there, read my manuscripts, critique my trial balloons, and laugh at my jokes. They pretend I am smarter than I am, that I write better than I do, and that I am stout, not fat. And I do the same for them. It doesn’t keep them from telling me when something isn’t working in a piece, and therefore they are true friends of my writing as well as of me.

The fact is, I live in multiple communities, and they do not always get along. Many in my community of faith (which I also conceive of as both local and stretching out in time and space) do not care about or even like my soul friends. When I wrote my first book, my mother read it and said, “Well, son, you didn’t write that book for me.” She was right. Similarly, there are those who love some of the writers and artists I embrace but do not understand why any intelligent person here at the beginning of the twenty-first century would root his life in a 2000-year-old story of birth and death and resurrection.

At one time it bothered me that my friends did not all get along. I would have tried to explain my abortion clinic story to my faith community, tried to help them see that some of the language was necessary and that the uncertainty in the story about who was good and who wasn’t reflected the real world. These days I tend to save that energy for the writing itself. I am not writing for everyone in any of my communities. I often write books that fall between the cracks, as my sales demonstrate. I am writing, it seems, only for a few people. But those people are kindred spirits, and I prize them wherever they may be and wish them well.

Daniel Taylor is a nonfiction writer who teaches at Bethel College in Minnesota.
His works include Tell Me a Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories, Is
God Intolerant?, and a forthcoming book on spiritual pilgrimage.