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Contents © 2005
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
December 2005

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THEY REJECTED MY BOOK

My publishers rejected my latest manuscript. I don't want to get into details about their reasons for rejecting it -- they had several. What's important is that they didn't think I should seek publication elsewhere. They thought the book, if published, would be damaging to my reputation, my career, and possibly, my family. Maybe they were right. The book includes a big dollop of sin -- my sin -- and as I'm always telling my son, sin reverberates.

For example: I sin. My wife is unhappy with me for sinning. I'm unhappy that she's unhappy -- this is patently ridiculous on my part, but who wants sin to have consequences? So we're both raw and ragged. Insert basic childhood misbehavior into that dynamic, and you often get someone exploding into shouts -- usually me. Then my wife is mad at the children for their misbehavior that caused the shouting, mad at me for shouting, and doubly mad at me for setting up the dynamic that led to the shouting. And finally, icing on the poisoned cake, I hear my eldest son, days later, exploding at his little brother in a damnably familiar fashion. Oh, yes, sin reverberates. So maybe they were right.

My father counseled me not to ignore my editors. "My disposition, over the years, as you know, has been to take editors' feedback very seriously," he wrote. "Editors are smart people. Their job is to make writing better and to anticipate problems readers will have with a manuscript."

He reminded me that I had a working, fruitful relationship with these people, and that this was, as everything was, from God.

But what did it signify? Should I accept or persevere? Renounce myself, put the manuscript away in a drawer? It's not hard to imagine God asking for that kind of self-denial -- even if for no other cause than my self-abasement. And here were smart people suggesting that there was good reason for that course of action.

They were very disappointed. I hate to disappoint people. For hours after my two phone calls with them, my stomach trembled, my chest tightened to the point of vibrating with the tension. Not because I had failed, but because they were so unhappy with my attempt. "Get to Adoration," said my wife. I drove to Saint Therese, parked, walked past the grotto and down the alley to the little room in back where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed 24 hours a day. I had been there a few days previous, praying that my publisher would accept my book. Now I knelt and repeated, "Speak Lord, your servant is listening."

I don't often get answers to prayer -- at least, not in the sense of "I speak-God responds" conversation. And it wasn't until later, at home, that I found myself thinking about Saint Francis, stripping off his clothes and handing them back to his father. Taking up a life that seemed, in his father's eyes, to be purest folly. Francis would become a laughingstock before he became a saint.

I'm not Francis, of course, and those editors aren't my father. Further, to be a fool for Christ is not the same as confessing your sins in print. (Though it is not entirely different, either. I had a reason for it, and the reason was to name the sin and drag it into the light. I was making myself vulnerable to scorn for several reasons; for one thing, I wanted my public confession to be a service to others.) But where did that thought of Francis come from? Was it ego, popping in under cover of my explicit request to hear not myself but God? Or was God, telling me to abandon myself to Him?

We pray to know God's will. We look for signs. Sunday's Gospel was about the men entrusted with the master's talents. Father warned against coming to the end of life with regret -- not for what we had done, but for what we had not done. A couple of days later, I stumbled across this from Saint Francis de Sales on a weblog: "Do not scrutinize so closely whether you are doing much or little, ill or well, so long as what you do is not sinful and that you are heartily seeking to do everything for God."

I am realizing that I have not had to make very many difficult decisions since I decided to propose to my wife. I have sailed along, accepting. I have chosen some difficult things, but the choice itself was usually clear. Not this time. I'll keep praying, keep looking for God to show His hand.

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