By RAY WADDLE

I teach a “writing about faith” seminar from time to time, a course that pushes students to write about their deepest beliefs or about the big-picture spiritual trends that help define these jittery, adventurous times.

Early on, I look around the room and tell them: “Life is a plot … but what’s the story?”

This notion of “plot” intrigues some students and confuses others. Is there really a storyline to this life? Is your life being “written” even now? Or is plot merely that piece of land awaiting us in the cemetery? What’s the story?

Since it’s usually a seminary setting, discussion quickly turns to those solemn hobgoblins of theology –predestination versus free will.

One student will say: If life is defined by free will, then there is no plot. It’s random chaos. Then another student pipes up: But if predestination is real, then it’s all been fixed by God anyway, whether we ever figure out the plot or not -- so why bother?

This kind of talk deflates and subdues the room. Fear not, I interject: there’s another way forward. I bring out my favorite quote from Jewish writer I.B Singer: “God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.”

I love that idea. It throws us back into the big drama: Instead of helplessly submitting to a severely logical, ironclad model of life (both predestination and free will are nothing if not logical), we find ourselves in the middle of a teeming adventure. We are both the readers of the sacred text and the heroes (the actors, characters, protagonists) in the sacred story. God’s got no one else to work with but us. And that gives us work to do.

It requires paying attention at every turn. It means noticing the journey of your own unstoppable emotions. It means asking why current religious trends – megachurches, WWJD tattoos, pluralism – are happening today and not a generation ago. It means looking into the eyes of the next person you see and realizing you are encountering the image of God.

These are the writer’s tools – alertness, wonder, empathy, the value of listening, listening to what life is trying to tell us. These also happen to be tools for daily existence, for being human. I toss the students another quote, this time from Presbyterian writer Frederick Buechner:

“Listen to your life. There really is a God, and God speaks powerfully to you through the events of your life. “

Tears, for instance. If your eyes well up suddenly – at the sound of a voice, or during church, or because of a difficult memory, or when the radio plays that certain song, you ought to pay the closest attention, Buechner says. Unexpected tears are a sure sign that your soul is trying to tell you something, and God is stirring you to plot the next move, the next breakthrough to self-knowledge.

This implies that your unique wounds offer clues to the story. They thicken the plot. (No, I am not going to sit here and glorify suffering. Nobody wants it, nobody sees it coming. The pain of this life deserves our lustiest curses and anger. But it’s not going away. The only way out of it is through it.) Author Julia Cameron says writing works like medicine when you write without evasion about your particular suffering: “Metabolize injury into art,” she says. “When you write about hurt, you are no longer a victim or an enemy but a writer.”

Seeing life as an outrageous adventure – whether as romance, fairy tale, mystery, thriller, comedy, tragedy, or epic poem – certainly broadens the writer’s “material.” Suddenly each day raises a fresh curtain on the mystery of who we are – a mystery not to solve but to savor, despite the ridiculous fact that you have a thousand other things to get done by this afternoon.

All this takes trust … trust that the universe can be trusted, trust that it is unfolding in ways that add up, not wear down … trust that the effort of sifting through the strange daily parade of exuberance, discouragement and breakthrough is never wasted. Everything matters.

The crazy paradoxes matter too – the tumble between flesh and spirit, emotion and reason, gab and silence, sex and death. They demand not denial but embrace, preferably with a sense of humor. (Beware of two enemies of writing: self-doubt and false piety.)

When Jesus said, I stand at the door and knock, I take that to mean it’s time to pay attention to sounds, impulses, arrivals, unexpected messengers or guests. Long story short: everybody’s a storyteller (maybe even a writer), because it’s everyone’s privilege to greet the next moment with care and attention, like the next page in a story that is busting out to be told, and lived.