Saffron Cross Revisions

Saffron Cross

November is here. I am now relegated to my writing cave with strict orders from my husband and editor not to emerge until the Saffron Cross revisions are complete. I’m a hermit, chipping away at the sentence level and feeding off the words of writing saints whose tightly crafted prose notices life and propels me into wanting to do the same. Only I have a beginner’s clumsiness.

My constant prayer for Saffron Cross is that it will speak to someone–anyone–even the old, sour cat lady who thinks interfaith marriages are shams.  Because, at its cheesiest, Saffron Cross is God’s story: the miracle of two people from very different religious traditions falling in love and struggling to know God together. My prayer is that connection to burst from its pages. My hope is that the vulnerability that accompanies spirituality will be evident, and that someone, somewhere, will have a glimmer of recognition for their own journey.

But, this is the writer’s plight: wanting to communicate so explicitly, so freshly–but waking up with the distinct inability to do so. I imagine it’s how babies feel when they’ve just learned to formulate sounds, but can’t yet effectively tell their parents about all the new faces and colors they see, or that they want mushed apricots instead of pureed apples.

And so, as Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, “I’m a mule … [I] sweat and labor and barrel through it awkwardly.”

These days, my writing is more mulish than ever. I slug through each Saffron Cross chapter laboriously in my bat cave. But there is learning and joy in the process, because, occasionally, I meet that  enigmatic “thing” in my own writing that I find so appealing in others’: connection.

 Olé.

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