“To not have to entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment,” wrote the late poet Charles Bukowski to his friend and publisher John Martin1.
Loathe him or love him, Bukowski was a talent. Yet his rise to notoriety and mass appeal came late in his life.
At the dawn of his 50th birthday, one of Bukowski’s short essays caught the attention of Martin. It was 1965, and after decades of working less-than-sexy jobs like making dog biscuits in a factory, framing pictures, and finally, for 10 years, at a post office—Martin offered Bukowski $100 a day to quit his job at the post and write full time (remember this was ‘65 so $100 was heaps!).
The rest as they say is history, by the end of his life in 1994 Bukoski was not only a wealthy man but renowned by actors, poets, and writers worldwide.
But it wasn’t money that made him tick, it was an insatiable appetite to write.
“Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it,” as he put it in his famous poem “So You Want to be a Writer2?”
Bukowski thoroughly believed that writing was his life’s work. In other words, he lived to write and wrote to live. He saw his years in obscurity not as obstacles to overcome but as the source and materials for his poems and prose.
He was placed on this earth to write and he did. Have you ever considered why you were placed here? In this time and place?
Getting Busy Living
I have a friend who senses a deep call and desire to pastor and preach the beauty and mystery of Christ in his local context. Is this hubris? I think not!
We shared a text exchange recently in which I perhaps pretentiously told him to let this desire enfold him (drawing on the Bukowski poem) to allow it to consume him to drive him to grow in depth and craft. I see this as the unfolding of our salvation.
Which I think we sell short, the mystery of salvation that is, as a once-and-done deal then meander aimlessly through life. But what if we took Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:10 seriously?
That for those that have now been drafted into Christ become alive to the previously dormant callings, desires, and creative pursuits - that the itch to write, to sing, to fight for justice, are not worldly ambitions but extensions of our true humanity that can only be uncovered in partnership with Christ?
As the Message puts it:
…we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing3.
So when Jesus bids one to follow him he bids us to die to false notions of ourselves and to live toward the truest expression possible. To love justice and pursue mercy in our unique ways and spaces - through words, paintings, sermons or spreadsheets!
To know Christ is to walk in toward the works he’s set before us, not to slink into our place of work like zombies but to dream big, to love hard, and to believe that we truly are His works of art.
Bukowski was a broken artist, he drank too much and wrote scathingly about women and the human condition, but he understood his place in this universe as a writer. Come hell or high water, from 9 pm to 2 am he would write.
I once told my mom being a Christian is boring and hard, she said something along the lines of “No mijo your view of God is boring and hard!” I think she was right.
I wonder what the world would look like if those of us who are followers of Jesus took Paul’s exhortation to heart. How might this view of God’s grace for and through us spark energy into the seeming humdrum of our lives? Who knows but it’s something I’ve been pondering lately.
Until further, here is a wonderful rendition of “So You Want to be a Writer?”
Charles Bukowski, Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978 – 1994, Vol 3, (Ecco: New York, 2002).
Charles Bukowski, “So you want to be a Writer?,” in Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems, (Ecco: New York, 2008).
Ephesians 2:9-10 The MSG.