Writing is a religious experience for me, if not a religion in itself. I write to process the world around me, I write to find meaning, I write to remind myself that there is “something bigger.” And being a part of a community of like-minded people, whether it’s in writing group or in grad school or at literary readings, is important to me. I read for all of the same reasons.

There’s an interesting article over at Magnet Magazine on the relationship between art and faith, specifically in music, as discussed by a Jewish woman and a former evangelical Christian. Excerpt:

I don’t know how it is for different religious practices, but in the one I grew up in, namely Evangelical Christianity, a big component of it is to try to convince other people that your belief system is the right one. And if a person holds that to be true on the one hand, and then tries to make art on the other hand—in artist practice there’s a lot more exploration and you’re not working from conclusions and you’re trying to engage in a discovery process about yourself and the world. And I think that for me, those two ideas tended to be at odds with one another. But then I started thinking differently about the religious side of it, thinking, “Why does it have to be this way? If this thing is true, shouldn’t you be able to explore that as well, and then you’d always end up with truth?” And so I think that it ended up feeling better to try to do the artistic process—that that was more honest and less loaded with a bunch of ascribed meanings or what have you.

Come to think of it, writers proselytize as well, don’t they? The job of the writer is to convince the reader that the world he or she has created is absolutely real, and that the message/belief system conveyed in the story is valid. I know several people who have explicitly said that they subscribe to a set of beliefs they found in a work of fiction. Maybe that’s taking it too far, maybe it’s not–but you could say the same of organized religion.

And then of course there are us literary types, both writers and non-writers, who proselytize literature to the masses. How many literacy organizations are out there, how many studies have there been proving that literature is absolutely essential to society? I think it’s completely true, literature is an essential part of culture and it should be appreciated by everyone, everywhere. But then again, I’m already a believer. There are many people who would disagree with me. And I’m just itching to change their minds.

[MAGNET via Vol. 1 Brooklyn]