The Sword Divides, the Pen Binds

Write Answers Only - Part 6

This is part 6 of a limited series I’m running called “Write Answers Only” in which I reflect on hinge moments in my vocation as a writer—and offer them to you for your own vocational journey.

They say the pen is greater than the sword.

But no small amount of ink has been spilt in these past many weeks and still hard working folks are summarily sacked from their jobs and their income and their careers; communities across our world are cut off from life-saving aid and medicine and left out in the cold corners of our struggling global society; immigrants and refugees and asylum seekers are torn from communities and cast back into places of violence; fear and hatred and bullying and chaos seep further and further into our daily lives, our minds, our hearts, our souls.

The sword—a weapon able to deal in precise strikes and blunt force alike—appears to be winning. Because though the pain inflicted feels arbitrary, cruel and unusual, the lasting damage won’t be caused from the blunt end of the sword.

Rather, the simple, clean strikes that sever our communities, our sense of solidarity, our empathy and our compassion—those virtues that draw us to one another, that lead us to curiosity and wonder and awe rather than hate and cynicism—leave us distrustful of our neighbors and our family members and perhaps even ourselves.

No small amount of ink has been spilt from our heroic pen, and yet we seem to live in different realities, our hopes and dreams, worries and challenges, so divergent from one another that the sword need barely raise its glistening head to cut through a people so divided.

But the sword can not bind up wounds.

And we are wounded. We are struggling. And I believe at our core we want to do good, we want to be good, we want to leave goodness in our wake.

And I wonder: The pen may not be able to prevent that swinging blade from falling upon us. But it can help to heal. The pen can offer a word of consolation, a word of courage, a word that reminds us that we are all members of the same human family, that God desires only the good for us—and that same God desires our active collaboration in the ushering in of that good. The pen can journey out into that wayward battlefield and stitch together the torn seams of our failing flesh.

And the pen can begin to chart something new, something good, something beautiful.

The sword severs. The pen dreams. The sword divides. The pen weaves together. The sword necessarily makes things smaller, cuts them down to size, splits and bleeds and tears.

But the pen can gather all these disparate pieces into a great tapestry, a great story, a narrative that makes room for all.

And the pen can be passed to another, so that each and every one can write down their own uniquely sacred self in a story of God’s own making.

Don’t forget to preorder my upcoming book, “Finding Peace Here and Now: How Ignatian Spirituality Leads Us to Healing and Wholeness!”