So this morning, I pressed ‘Send’ and the last chapter of the new book went winging its way to my editor in New York.

There was a brief glow of accomplishment.  A full-body glow, all shiny and radiant.  “Finished!” I thought, even as I knew this was untrue.  Books are never really finished.

There’s a final edit to be done, and then copy-editing, and then the dreaded “author’s questionnaire” will arrive from the marketing department, and as on just about any questionnaire I’ve ever encountered, I just won’t fit.  Among other things, it’ll ask me (in slightly different language) to “please describe in 200 words what just took you a whole book to say.”  I’ll agonize over these 200 words, and never manage to get them right.

And then I’ll wait, heart in mouth, for the pre-publication reviews, which will determine whether ‘Agnostic: a Spirited Manifesto’ — yes, that’s the working title — will thrive in the big wide world.  And then for the post-publication reviews, in early 2016, which will determine if it survives at all.

Yet since there’s probably a certain masochistic element to being a writer, I’m looking forward to it all.  In the immediate future, though, what I’m looking forward to is getting back to posting here on The Accidental Theologist.  Some people manage to write short and long (post and book) at the same time, but I’m not one of them.  That’s why I’ve been relatively silent over the last several months, restricting myself to brief squibs on Facebook and Twitter.  It’ll probably take a while to get back into the rhythm of blogging (some of you will be able to tell I’m not back into it since I just mistakenly pressed Publish instead of Save), but with months of thinking stored up, who knows what might happen…

Less than three months to go before I hand the new book to my publisher, and I recognize the signs.  This afternoon I drove through Christmas traffic to the market, filled up a shopping cart, got to the checkout counter, and discovered I’d left my wallet at home.  (The next stage is finding that I’ve locked myself out of the house, which is why spare keys are judiciously distributed among my neighbors.)  My head is not quite in this world.  Close friends tell me this is how I always am near the end of a book.  “It seems worse this time,” I say, only to have them remind me that this is what I say every time.  I reluctantly acknowledge that they may be right.

The checkout guy knows me, so he let me put the cart to one side and hold onto the freshly-made warm frites I’d bought, or would have bought if I’d had any money on me, reminding me to save the price tag for when I got back with credit card in hand.  The frites were perfect, thin-cut and salted just right, and I dealt with the traffic by devouring them as I drove home, where I gulped down a glass of water (the salt!), grabbed my wallet, and set off back to the market, only to realize that the car now stank mightily of frying oil, and so, therefore, did I.  The glamor of the writing life continually amazes me.

Since I’ve been tussling with big, undefinable things like God, consciousness, and infinity, I guess it was a bit much to expect that I be a normally functioning member of society at this point.  It should certainly have come as no surprise that even as words accumulated in presumably satisfactory numbers, they turned out to be slippery, slithery creatures.

I’d already done all the right writerly things.  Per the admonition to “kill your darlings” (Hemingway? Woolf? — it’s one of those “variously attributed” sayings), passages waiting to be lauded as beautiful writing had been duly slain, a process that left virtual blood all over the keyboard since I find it far harder to delete than to add.  But the surviving words still displayed an alarming tendency to slide around from page to page.  Stubbornly refusing to stay in place, they were acting like a pack of unruly schoolkids.  I could practically hear them shoving and poking each other:  “Here’s where I want to be!”  “No, here!”  “That’s my place.”  “Tis not.”  “Tis too.”

By last week, I’d had enough of it.  “Take charge of the words!” I wrote on an index card, in all caps, and pinned it over my desk.  Forget “being a writer” — I’d become a sergeant-major, and order these green recruits into shape.

I printed out the most troublesome chapter, pushed the computer monitor aside, shoved the office chair out of the way, and stood over the desk, leaning in like a commander about to ream out a subordinate.  I set to, marking up the pages with slashes and arrows, dictating what went where, giving insubordinate words what for.  And though it took a few days, they caved.  They fell into place.  Lined up for inspection.  Reader, it worked!

At least I think it did.  I can’t be sure of it.  How could I be?  This is an agnostic manifesto I’m writing, and it hinges on imperfect knowledge, on the importance of doubt, the inhumanity of certainty.  As William James put it (he of The Varieties of Religious Experience):  “So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes.  Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe.”

I love James despite his peculiarly Victorian assumption that only men “stand for anything,” and this quote from him survived the slashing.  But there are still times when the writer in me needs that inner sergeant-major to let me know in no uncertain terms exactly what I can do with my maybes.  I suspect James had one too.

My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard bears the marks of a well-used life, much like the photo of him in today’s New York Times. The cover is torn and tattered, the linen boards worn and faded, the pages yellowing at the edges. The end pages are full of scribbled notes to myself, the text scored and marked in the margins. This is a much-read book.

I’ve placed it high on the reading list of every writing course I’ve ever taught, tracing the intertwining of its parallel journeys: on the one hand, into the hidden inner sanctum of Dolpo on the Tibetan plateau, in search of the elusive snow leopard; on the other, into the mystical and equally elusive peacefulness of Zen Buddhism.

There were far more than two hands, of course, which is why I read the book so many times and never tired of it, entranced by the intense lyricism of its descriptions of landscape, and the sharp contrast with the pared-down writing about Zen practice.

I have most of Matthiessen’s other books too, both fiction and nonfiction, but this is the one I keep coming back to (in a way I suspect would have deeply disappointed him — no writer cares to be defined by one book above all the others).

I didn’t know much ‘about’ him other than what he revealed in his writing, which was carefully calibrated. I had no idea he worked a naively youthful two years for the CIA, for example, using the Paris Review as a cover, though I did know he’d become a Zen priest, that he was fiercely involved with environmental issues, and that he was… well, not exactly good-husband material. No matter: the writer was more important to me than the man.

Yet much as I love and admire his writing, I haven’t ordered my own copy of his last book, a novel called In Paradise. Instead, it’s waiting for me at the library as I write.  And has been waiting a few days. I delay picking it up because even though it’s Matthiessen, something in me doesn’t want to read it. It’s set at a meditation retreat at the concentration camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz, and the very idea of such a retreat seems, at least to me, a horribly ironic oxymoron. Which may indeed turn out to be his point. I’ll find out soon enough.

Matthiessen died yesterday, at age 86. “I don’t want to cling too hard to life,” he’d said, and by not doing so, I suspect he arrived again at the place he described in this quote from The Tree Where Man Was Born, which serves as the ending of the extraordinarily timed piece on him in today’s NYT magazine. Here it is:

“Lying back against these ancient rocks of Africa, I am content. The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without having discovered what it was.”

What is this if not pure Zen?

“You’re a Muslim, so why would you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

That’s how Fox News’ Lauren Green began her challenge to Reza Aslan’s right to write about Jesus.  The video of her interview with him instantly went viral (in fact, several accidental theologists sent it on to me — thank you!).  It inspired several spoofs, including this one here.  Aslan’s book, Zealot (my San Francisco Chronicle review of it here) was already #2 on the Amazon bestseller list;  by the next morning, it was #1.

“Gotcha, J. K. Rowling!” Aslan responded.

But aside from the small detail that Christianity was founded by Paul, not Jesus, Green’s question may not be such a terrible one after all.

I’ve been there, and often still am — from the other side, as it were.  The first time conservative Muslims asked why I’d decided to write a biography of Muhammad, I spluttered in amazement: “But you don’t think he’s worth writing about?  This man who carved such a huge profile in history?  He’s your prophet, how can you even ask?”

It quickly became clear that this was not a sufficient answer, and that the question was not about my decision as a writer.  It was about my decision as a Jew.  Just as Green focused on Aslan’s Muslimness and assumed that his real agenda was to attack Christianity, so certain conservative Muslims focused on my Jewishness and assumed that my real agenda must have been to attack Islam.

Let’s get one thing straight right away:  just as many mainstream Christians have welcomed Aslan’s book, so many mainstream Muslims have welcomed mine.  It’s the conservatives we’re talking about here, those who cannot tolerate any deviance from received orthodoxy.

In the context of Fox’s Islamophobic politics on the one hand, and of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the other, perhaps such suspicion is inevitable.  But since Aslan’s book and mine both draw on scholarly resources but were written for general audiences, there’s another less obvious factor.  Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam.  Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief.  Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

But what if Green had interviewed Aslan not with the desire to criticize, but with the desire to know?  What if my conservative Muslim questioners had been more curious than judgmental?  Without such knee-jerk defensiveness, the question of what a non-Christian brings to the study of Jesus or a non-Muslim to that of Muhammad becomes an interesting one – a question, that is, about the value of the ‘outsider’ point of view.

Precisely because he or she does not come from a place of belief, what seems obvious to the insider is not at all so to the outsider.  It demands to be explored, to be understood on the multiple psychological, cultural, and political levels on which history takes place.  Done well, this process can create important new insights into otherwise received versions of history, opening up fresh ways of seeing and understanding, and finding new relevance in old stories.

As with Jesus, so with Muhammad:  by placing him in the world he experienced, in the full context of place and time, politics and culture – the ‘outsider’ biographer honors the man by honoring his lived experience.

Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith;  it humanizes it.  And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

Back when, I wrote here that I was going into hermitry for “just a few months, probably,” in order to focus on the final draft of The First Muslim.  Hubris strikes again!  I now realize it’s been nearly a year.

But I’ve finished the book.  All 99,901 words of it.  (Actually, a few thousand more if you include the end notes, bibliography, etc, but hey, who’s counting…)  And it’ll be published in January, which suddenly seems just round the corner.

“We gotta celebrate!” friends here in Seattle said after I’d pressed the Send button to my publisher.  Champagne all round, heels kicked up, nights on the town — all that good stuff.  But nights on the town require energy, and I had none left.  I was too exhausted.  The book was finished, and so, it felt, was I.  Instead of celebrating, I did what I’d known I’d do come this moment:  I collapsed.  The sofa and I became one.

But as days passed with me cradled by that sofa – well-worn dark green leather, thoroughly scratched up by the resident feline – I realized that this wasn’t a painful exhaustion.  It was a happy one, the kind you feel after an arduous hike through magnificent landscape.  You’ve forded streams and clambered up mountains you never thought you could manage.  By the time you get home, everything is aching.  You can’t wear shoes because of the blisters.  The muscles in your legs are so sore it feels like you’ll never be able to walk properly again.  But who cares?  You know, at a far deeper level than skin and muscles, that it was absolutely, totally worth it.

That was a few weeks ago, and now my energy’s coming back.  I’m up off the sofa, ready to interact with the world again and resume this great improvisation known as life.  So here’s a big thank you, fellow accidental theologists, for your understanding, patience, encouragement, and support over this past year.  Now that I’m back, on with the conversation!

Sometimes, writing is just damn hard.  Okay, most of the time.  Like now, as I’m trying to pull together the vast mass of rough pages for the new book, a biography of Muhammad, into a readable whole.  The research has been great, and reading through what I’ve already written has been exciting.  But now it’s time for craft — time to shape and rewrite everything into a coherent narrative that makes sense to others, not just to me.  And that’s a whole different ball game.  I’ve been tussling with just the two opening chapters for the past two weeks, approaching them this way and that, ‘solving’ the problem at night only to come back and totally unsolve it all over again the next morning.   Just now I came across this video, and that kitten could as well be me, the two perfect green apples the two perfect chapters I know are there but can’t quite get my hands on:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/8-1F-CokXNU]

All of which is by way of saying that I think I’m going to have to take a break from posting here on the AT for a while — a few months, probably — and really focus in on getting a full draft written.  Because though I know some people are capable of stunning amounts of multi-tasking, I also know I’m not one of those people.  I need to become what any writer mid-book really is:   the most boring person in the world, totally mono-focused, all but unaware of everything else that’s happening.

The problem is that writing this blog is a wonderful and (to me, at least) surprising exception to that opening statement that writing is hard.  I find blogging a delight, and somehow even when I write out of anger, it’s still fun.   And your responses and comments are part of the delight and the fun, as well as enormously encouraging.   It really does feel like an ongoing conversation, and one I will badly miss.  So not-blogging (unblogging?) is going to be hard.  Which of course means that if I can’t resist, I may still post something from time to time.  Just not with any regularity.  Not until I have a full readable draft of The First Muslim (yes, that’s still the title).

There’s an upside, though:  not only will the book get written sooner, but when I come back to regular blogging (like three times a week), it’ll be with a huge amount of pent-up energy and appetite for the fray.  So this is absolutely not a farewell — not least because I’ve only just begun to touch on all the things I wanted to explore when I began the AT fifteen months ago — but just a temporary au revoir.

So please, bear with me, and wish me luck and bon voyage.  I’ll send postcards from time to time, telling you where I’m at.  And I’ll be back!  — Lesley

No kidding.  I’ve already tweeted this, but for a writer, it’s such the perfect antidote to a bad work day — rip it up and laugh! — that I think I need to post it right here on the Accidental Theologist.   To be filed, of course, under ‘existence’:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4abiHdQpc]