The Truest Sentence

“He said, ‘Thecla, my betrothed, why do you sit like this? What is the emotion that binds you in passion? Turn toward your Thamyris and be ashamed.’ And her mother also said the same things to her, ‘Child, why do you look down and sit like this, answering nothing but acting like a mad person?'” (The Acts of Paul and Thecla, Chapter 10)

In 1986, a year before his death, at a lecture in Amherst on the responsibility and role of the writer in society, James Baldwin said, “The reason that Plato wanted no poets in his republic is because a writer is, by definition, a disturber of the peace.”

I was never confused in divinity school and seminary that I would ever become a minister. I knew without yet having the confidence to claim it that I was studying to become a theologian so that I could write. So that I could write about god. So that I could disturb and disrupt our ideas about god. So that I could find new ways, or articulate in new ways, very ancient ideas about god; so that I could be a voice for a love that includes all of us. 

My mom was a social worker. Clearly this impacted me. But also, traditional concepts of being in service, of working to help others, impressed me. Made me feel worthy. Made me feel like I was a good person doing good. But only from the outside. 

When I write a sentence that says something real to me, I feel a sense of completion I can’t even explain. Like hearing a sudden gospel choir within me, I feel this immediate and immeasurable praise. No external or financial compensation compares to it. It’s this inner state of knowing I am doing exactly what I am meant to do.

The greatest challenge I had in becoming a writer was recognizing that it was the only thing I did that made me feel fulfilled. I kept superimposing this expectation that I needed to be in direct service to others to be fulfilled. I worked as a childcare counselor on a Navajo Reservation in Gallup, NM at 18. I volunteered at a shelter for children waiting to be placed in foster care on breaks during college. I worked as a teacher’s assistant at a lock-down facility for severely emotionally disturbed children after college. And I worked as a childcare counselor for pregnant teenagers as a young adult. And as good as all this work truly felt, I never felt fulfilled. Others praised me externally, but I never felt that sense of praise inwardly. It was skin deep. 

And if I ever mentioned my writing, I said it with this horrible mix of shame, feeling both selfish and inadequate.

Ernest Hemingway’s directive to writers is simply (profoundly) this: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” And for me, my one true sentence is this: 

Our purpose is to love and be loved.

So, for me, writing is what I’m meant to do with my purpose. Because writing asks me to bring love to where I am most human. I am the most vulnerable, the hardest on myself, the most critical, and the most insecure in my writing. So, the depths of the love that I might be also is called on for me to write. 

Writing conjures an inner battle. A fierce struggle begins every time I sit to write. A voice of doubt, a sense of failure, a disbelief that I can ever say anything worth reading overwhelms me. Writing conjures the egoic powers in me, but if I don’t write I am riddled with anxiety; a lurking restlessness gnaws at me. I struggle inwardly with this deep desire to write and also the egoic belief that I am not good enough to be a writer.

In order to write, and to keep writing, I have to practice being merciful with how imperfect my writing is. Over time it has meant referring to myself as a writer with less and less judgment. It meant doing work that pays the bills as a counselor but identifying as a writer, and holding that intention, creating space for it no matter how crowded my life becomes. And no matter who I might disappoint in the process. Saying no to holidays and staying in my various small apartments to write instead. Saying no to people and events that distract and derail me from hearing the still small voice that I can only meet with here in this silence writing creates. The voice that quells the anxiety, the voice that is true power because its truth silences any internal critic that tries to silence me from within. 

Thamyris and Theocleia, Thecla’s fiancé and mother, are mourning the “loss” of her. By refusing to marry, Thecla is no longer in relation to their needs or their expectations of her. By refusing to marry, at a time in the Roman Empire when a girl was required to by law, Thecla is turning away from tradition, from the expected, from the patriarchy. She's turning away from becoming her husband's property, from being used like currency in an unholy exchange; as if her worth could ever be equated to her family's financial gain. By refusing to marry, Thecla is daring to become her own. In truth, of course, they haven’t “lost” her. Thecla is sitting right there in front of them. She hasn’t moved. But inwardly, she’s gone to where they can’t follow.

Thamyris suggests Thecla should turn toward him and be ashamed. That she should feel shame for having the courage for being who she is rather than being who he needs her to be. And Thecla’s mother calls her “a mad person,” which feels so familiar to me; really to anyone who tries to do what they feel called to do versus what their family, friends, or community expect them to. We’re called crazy. Crazy for wanting more, or not even more, just for wanting what’s meant for us. What we’re meant to do, that singular thing that forces us to forgive and love ourselves fiercely in order to do it. 

And then they both cry, desperately, for losing what they felt was owed them; for Thamyris a wife, and for Theocleia, a dutiful daughter. Thecla of course is right there, still seated in front of them. But she’s existing now outside of the conditions they had set for loving her, for being in their lives. Thecla was fixated now, riveted to the words of Paul. She had stepped outside of the conditional love she had known before and entered the realm of what’s unconditional. The love she’s related to now doesn’t come from outside of her. It is there in the stillness within her. 

Professor and author Brene Brown writes, “I am here for my purpose. I’m not here to make people comfortable or to be liked. My purpose is to know and experience love. This means excavating the unsaid. In the world and in me.” Our purpose is to love and be loved; to find what asks us to grow in love, to become more loving toward ourselves and others. 

Our purpose is not to prove to others that we are lovable; we are not here to live out someone else’s expectation of us, to fit into the conditions someone else has set for us in order to be loved. Our purpose is to know love, from the Greek gnosis, meaning knowledge gained from direct experience. We are here to know and experience love directly. 

And this means, as Brown directs, excavating the unsaid from within us. It means disentangling from all those lures cast in our direction from people and positions of power that might suggest we will be loved if…or then. 

Our purpose is never lost to us or outside of us. Our purpose is to confront the voices within and around us that suggest love is conditional. Our purpose is to stand up amidst the doubt, the name-calling, and shame-throwing, and remember the love we are called here to be and to know. 

I love this moment of Thecla’s story because all she does is sit peacefully listening to Paul, but she disrupts the peace by refusing to spend another second of her life bound by conditional love. Thecla demonstrates how real transformation begins–by going within. 

With only more love,
​M.