Writing in the Shadow of the Word

I wish my life to be spent in words—that beautiful, true, and good words might flow from me, not merely as ornament, but as lifeblood. And in their flowing, may they awaken questions, spark wonder, and grant life to others.

Writing is never simple. It demands the solitude of the study and the vulnerability of the open page. It feels private, just the author and their words, but in truth it is always dialogical. An audience is never absent. Sometimes it is the imagined community of readers; sometimes it is a single friend; sometimes it is one’s own future self. Most often, it is another text—a book, a sermon, a fragment of poetry—that provokes the reply.

To write, then, is to enter conversation. The author is both speaker and interlocutor, both writer and first reader. Even before others ever encounter the words, the author has already returned to them, re-reading, questioning, editing, finding in them something given both new and old.

The paradox of benefit

Here lies a curious paradox. We often write in order to serve others, to make ideas plain or to offer encouragement. And yet, even our best attempts to write for others accrue more benefit to ourselves. The act of writing reveals not only what we can say, but also the limits of what we know.

This is why the process so often feels like failure. An idea shimmers in the mind with clarity, yet when we attempt to fix it in words it scatters, partial and unsatisfying. Is the failure in the idea itself? In its weakness? Its obscurity? Or its opaqueness? Or is it in us? In our inability to find words adequate to the task?

Perhaps both. Plato already told us that ideas are shadows of the real; and words are shadows of those shadows.¹ Were words to perfectly match ideas, and ideas to perfectly match reality, the distinctions would collapse—we would not need speech at all. Augustine lamented this distance, calling words “signs” that can only point to things but never be the things themselves.²

And yet, this “failure” is also a gift. The very gap between thought and word is what makes writing fruitful. Where words fall short, questions are born. Where questions are born, the possibilities for creativity and knowledge grows. Theologians and poets alike have discovered that the moment words falter is not the end of thought but the beginning. Rilke counselled young poets not to rush toward answers, but to “live the questions.”³ And Gadamer described genuine understanding as a “fusion of horizons,” born in dialogue that changes both the text and the reader.⁴

Something this plays out daily in the digital age. A single sentence on social media can feel luminous in the mind, but when fixed in the blunt frame of a tweet it shrinks, misunderstood or flattened. We feel again the distance between thought and word. Yet even that disappointment is generative, forcing us to clarify, to find better words, or to embrace the limits of brevity. The struggle of expression, whether in Plato’s cave or on X’s feed, is the same: language can only ever gesture, but the gesture itself becomes a teacher.

The wound of words

To write is therefore not a smooth exercise in communication, but a wound. It is costly. Words are drawn from us with effort, sometimes with pain. The prophet Jeremiah spoke of God’s word as a fire shut up in his bones—he could not keep silent (Jer 20:9). Paul cried, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16). Writing, preaching, testifying—these are not optional extras for some people but necessities, even when they burn the one who bears them.

And yet the wound is also life giving. Like blood from a vein, words poured out can quicken others. They awaken wonder, stir imagination, provoke repentance, kindle faith. The lifeblood of words is both a sacrifice and gift.

Our current fascination with AI-generated text casts this into relief. Machines can now generate streams of plausible words at dazzling speed. But what they lack is the wound; the costly labour of thought, the vulnerability of expression, the dialogical wrestling with another mind or text. Without the wound, the words are fluent but bloodless. Their very ease reminds us that true writing is not only production but participation in truth, beauty, and goodness.

Writing as participation

Writing is not only dialogue between author and text, or author and reader. It is, at its best, participation in the divine Word. Christians confess that “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), and that this Word took flesh and dwelt among us. Every human word that strives for truth, beauty, and goodness participates—however falteringly, however brief—in that eternal Word.

This changes how we think about both failure and gift. The inadequacy of our words does not mean futility; it means they remain open to grace. Our language can never perfectly capture reality, but it can bear witness to the One who does.

To write is to bleed, but it is also to live. In the space where words falter, questions rise, and from those questions comes communion—between writer and reader, between thought and world, between human longing and the God who speaks.

I wish my life to be spent in words, not because they are mine, but because in their brokenness they may still point beyond me, toward the Word who gives life.

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¹ Plato, Republic 514a–520a (the Allegory of the Cave).
² Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, II.1–3. see https://ccel.org/ccel/augustine/doctrine/doctrine.iv.iii.ii.html
3 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Four (1903).
4 Brown, Jeannine K. Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics. Baker Academic, 2021. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ridley/detail.action?docID=6676496, E-Book Version p. 55. See also Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method.Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004) p. 340