Having written a memoir filled with confessions, I can attest to two things. First, it’s much easier to confess someone else’s sins than one’s own.

Second, I’d rather confess my own sins—when I must—to a faceless assembly of readers, rather than a living, gasping person. I most certainly prefer literary confession to looking the person I have wronged in the eyes and naming my sin.

But I think I can justify, in this instance, my predilection for the written confession. I think in the case of this confession, which I am about to lay out before God and you, writing it out makes sense. Maybe it’s even poetic.

So here is my confession: I have joined the coven of gnostic readers.

Don’t laugh. It may be a graver sin than you imagine.

You needn’t be theologian or historian to grasp gnosticism: disdain for the flesh, and a faith that there are secret, spiritual understandings that only the smartest and best flesh despisers can divine. It’s a spirit very much alive in modern American churches, and it’s in keeping with what many outside the church think the church really is.

It is, further, the reason many of us—especially artists—stay away from churches, out of a sense that our whole art, the wrought fusion of spirit and mind and body, is unwelcome, devalued, suspect. Art is the rendering—and rending—of heart and soul in physical space, and so the artist is never really at home in places where physicality is decried.

Let me juxtapose my literary gnosticism — before I’ve even teased it out into the open—with my three year-old Isaiah’s adoration of WordWorld , a PBS program. In WordWorld, things are words, and words are things. A house, for example, is comprised of the letters H-O-U-S-E, all mashed together with the end letters shortest, so the whole thing looks like an actual house. The same goes for P-I-G-S and A-N-T-S and near everything you can imagine.

This morning Isaiah was mesmerized by an episode in which the WordWorld characters invented an assembly line to manufacture pies. True to form, they put the letters P-I-E into pie tins. As they passed through the heat, the golden letters browned and then fell into the rounded, curved shape of pies, releasing little steam puffs as they relaxed into their final forms.

Here is an incarnate word a child can understand. A word that is not merely a symbol, but embodiment and purpose and action. When Isaiah hears that in the beginning was the Word, that the Word was with God and the Word was God, he gets it. Of course words have time and place and person.

Isaiah’s not yet learned to differentiate words from reality, not been versed in enough literary theory to gather that words not only don’t mean things, but that things themselves don’t even exist, not really, but are instead simply concepts shaped by the many not-things at which we grasp in order to signify the thing we wish existed but can’t really for the life of us, if French philosophers are to be believed, name.

Bad literary theory has much in common, as it turns out, with bad theology.

My son adores words that take physical form. As he gets older, and realizes that the cartoon images in WordWorld are not really houses and pigs and pies, he will embrace instead the physicality of the book—the smooth-cut cover, the ink-pressed pages, the weight and heft of dreams bestowed physical place.

What the words describe is at best gone, if it ever was—Binx Bolling never ambled down the streets of New Orleans; my teaching Isaiah to eat Cheerios is a thing of memoir, of memory, of not now.

The physicality of the book, however, mediates between the absence of the imagined and the presence of the imaginer. It acknowledges that the body aches to grasp as the mind grasps, that they are a whole, this mind, this body, and not to be separated by theologians and literary theorists.

I haven’t really told you my sin yet, have I? This is in keeping with the modern religious confession, and with bad writing (again this connection between bad theology and literary habits!), which is to mutter the general, rather than embrace the specific.

What makes Cormac McCarthy such a powerful writer? In part his naming of things, of the grasses and trees and horses. McCarthy’s writing is WordWorld for adults, and I suspect Isaiah will one day enjoy him, at least if I have anything to do with it.

Now, where were we? Ah yes, my sin: I’ve purchased a Kindle. I have replaced specific books in my specific hands at specific places and times with bytes and lights, infinitely reproducible and therefore immaterial. I have made the act of reading, which can already tend toward passivity, even less physical. I’ve replaced the grasping of a spine, the fingering and slow turning of a page, with the awkward cradling of plastic, the push of a button to erase words as fast as I can devour them.

And in keeping with my preferred form of confession, I’m making it to you, instead of my friend and Eighth Day Books owner Warren Farha, from whom I’ve stolen the whole Kindle-as-gnosticism idea, which is irony or perhaps bastardy or maybe both.

I suppose I’ll tell him sooner or later. And if it’s any consolation, I’m only a partial gnostic. I like to hold a book in my hands, opting for the Kindle only on trips, or when I want some “cotton candy” reading on the cheap.

I suppose I’m just carnal enough to like the incarnate word. It may not be to the salvation of my soul or my writing, but it’s something.