A Litany of Humility for Writers
I recently came across a startling and beautiful prayer called “Litany of Humility” by a cardinal named Merry del Val, who was secretary of state to Pope Saint Pius X. The final parts of the prayer go like this:
That others may be loved more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it [. . .]
That others may be praised and I go unnoticed,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
But what does a prayer like this mean for writers? The cardinal’s litany is an anti-influencer plea against today’s clamor for followers, likes, and shares. It is a prayer to remain hidden in a writer’s world that operates on the currency of being known. Is the very idea of a Christian writer then paradoxical in nature?
If we are praying to go unnoticed and forgotten, why do we work so hard to publicize our words? In all our platform-growing and hopes for publication, how can we honestly say at the same time that we are hoping to go unnoticed?
Can the serious Christian writer authentically pray this litany of humility?
Walking Beside the Monster
When I made the decision to pursue writing professionally, I confessed to a friend that it felt very much like contracting to walk beside a monster who could turn and devour me at any moment. The monster’s name is sometimes Pride, sometimes Self-Hatred. It wedges itself between my twin desires of wanting to be praised and admired, while equally preying on my fears of being rejected and ignored. It feeds on my fear of man and my insecurities and snickers at my puffed-up ego. It whispers to me in the night that I am worthless and an imposter, and in the next breath offers me temptations of what it might mean to be wildly famous.
The ways this monster affects me look like whole days spent refreshing social media pages to tally up the “like” counts. I’ve peevishly harbored bitterness toward real-life friends who seemingly don’t care about my latest published article. I’ve gone from elated to devastated within seconds, whiplashed by a single comment from a stranger. I’ve tagged and untagged, followed and unfollowed, privatized and publicized, frantically deploying these micro-maneuvers in an endless game to come out on top.
Why do we do this? Most days, I am tempted to call it quits and flee to the caves. To make things worse, writers feel every day the strenuous push toward practical utilitarianism in our culture. Annie Dillard in A Writing Life captures this pervasive voice well when she writes that the shoe salesman is more useful to the world than the writer. “Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already—worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones.” Why, she continues, should we “finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?” (11–12).
Her words are stark because the craft of writing winds through perilous cliffs, always a strenuous swim against the insecurities inside the writer’s heart and the general discouragement from the external world. It is easy to romanticize what it means to be a writer, but in actuality, to write is to feel a daily kind of crucifixion. It is to painstakingly and repeatedly untangle a precious artery or a vital organ to hang it up on splintery wood, raw and dripping.
These innermost parts, of which I have but one, are left dangling on public display, open to the painful scrutiny of strangers and friends. Many days I am like the man lying on the side of the road, naked and bleeding, as passersby sniff and walk by unperturbed. Sometimes I am howling among the tombs as everyone averts their eyes. Sometimes I am cast out into the desert and waiting to die, hoping to hear a tender voice saying, “I see you.”
The desires that the cardinal prays against and the desires that he prays for are amplified in the heart of the writer. So when I turn again to the cardinal’s litany from this place of wretched humility, I hear God’s call clearly. In his call to me, grace comes all the more. It is then I remember again that Jesus of Nazareth has made me his own. It is he who miraculously makes in my dying a new and truer kind of living. It is he who binds my wounds and casts out my demons, he who I name The God Who Sees.
Doorways into the Soul
In his book Can You Drink the Cup?, Henri Nouwen reflects that “the greatest healing often takes place when we no longer feel isolated by our shame and guilt and discover that others often feel what we feel and think what we think and have the fears, apprehensions, and preoccupations we have” (59).
As a writer this means that the innermost parts which we drew out with trembling hands turn out to be the doorways into the souls of fellow humans. It turns out that all of us are walking beside our own monsters, and these monsters have the same names.
There’s healing in naming not just what is perfect and beautiful but in naming what is broken. This healing is not just our own, but also the world’s of which we are a part. The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote of an encounter she had in “the terrible years of the Yezhov terror,” during which she waited outside a Leningrad prison for seventeen months.
One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before.
Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there), “Can you describe this?”
And I said, “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
The call of the writer is, as Akhmatova so beautifully writes, a call to describe. We as humankind long to see ourselves and our deepest sufferings named and mirrored in the words of others. The seed of eternity in our hearts stirs in the waters of story.
The writer who is a Christian is thus ultimately concerned not with numbers, followers, and book deals, but is rooted in the daily faithfulness of drawing from secret wells, making sentences to be clothed in prayer and cast into the wind. We offer up these dry sticks with visions of fire, hoping that the bones of our words would rattle to life. As Flannery O’Connor so often wrote in her letters, we do what we can, and write what we know. We do this and we leave the rest up to the Father who loves us.
Can a Christian writer pray the cardinal’s litany of humility? I would reply yes, and desperately. We as writers—like our cousins the preachers and teachers—pray for Jesus to deliver us from the snares of desiring to be approved, honored, and extolled, and from the fear of being humiliated, ridiculed, and suspected (how well we know the contours of these words!). We pray that we can take criticism graciously and see each failure as an opportunity to grow in grace toward ourselves and others. Rather than engage in petty rivalries, we pray that we can raise up fellow writers and mutually support one another, not just in shallow shows of affection but with courage and depth and perseverance. We pray that we can outdo each other in love, considering others better than ourselves.
We pray most of all that in sharing our vulnerabilities and our stories, our readers will feel more loved, more esteemed, more seen. We pray for the seed of eternity in the hearts of our readers to be warmed by gospel light and nourished by the waters of our God-ordained stories.
We pray for the holiness of our readers, for the fruit that our writing might bear in their lives. We pray that our words will give voice to the “fears, apprehensions, and preoccupations” common to us all, to see and name the monsters that walk beside us. And we pray that in their healing and in their growth, of which our words play a tiny part, our readers will so grow in fruitfulness that they will surpass us in renown and praise.
So Jesus, source of all beauty and healer of all pain, meek and humble of heart, hear us. From the desire of being esteemed, deliver us. From the fear of being forgotten and wronged, deliver us. That others may be loved more than us, Jesus, grant us the grace to desire it. That others may be praised as we go unnoticed, Jesus, grant us the grace.
Sara Kyoungah White serves as senior editor and content strategist on staff with the Lausanne Movement. Her essays, articles, and poems have appeared in publications like Christianity Today, Ekstasis, and The Banner. Find her on Instagram @sarakyoungah.