Yancey on Writing
“I felt drawn to writing because for me it had captured chinks of light that became a window to another world. I remember the impact of a mild book like To Kill a Mockingbird, which called into question the apartheid assumptions of my friends and neighbors. As I went on to read Black Like Me, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King’s “Letters from Birmingham City Jail,” my world shattered. I felt the power that allows one human mind to penetrate another with no intermediary but a piece of flattened wood pulp. I saw that writing could seep into crevices, bringing spiritual oxygen to people trapped in air-tight boxes.
I especially came to value the freedom-enhancing quality of the written word. Speakers in the churches I frequented could raise their voices! and play on emotions like musical instruments. But alone in my room, controlling every turn of the page, I met other representatives of faith – C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, John Donne – whose calmer voices traversed time to convince me that somewhere Christians lived who knew grace as well as law, love as well as judgment, reason as well as passion. I became a writer because of my own encounter with the power of words, and I gained hope that spoiled words, their original meaning wrung out, could be reclaimed.”
from Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church by Phillip Yancey
