At the start of every class she teaches, SPU adjunct professor Jessie Van Eerden begins with an "invocation": poems and short stories to get her students into the creative mindset for the class.

It was therefore only fitting that she began her lecture at the Milton Forum last Thursday with a poem, "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver: "You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Van Eerden, SPU's current "Milton Fellow" through the Milton Center, read the poem as the introduction to her lecture on the topic of "Contemplation and Action" and how the vocation of writing can be utilized in the Christian world.

The Milton Center is a program at SPU that fosters creative writing in Christians and "builds a community of writers, readers, publishers, and editors to initiate and sustain dialogue in and about literature that transforms and redeems the time." Van Eerden used the opportunity to ask attendees a key question: How can one pursue a career in writing when our efforts could be used to produce tangible outcomes elsewhere in the world?

This conflict between contemplation and action is to be welcomed, not discouraged, Van Eerden said. "There will always be a scrutinizer for your actions," she said, explaining that the decision of your vocation will never please everyone.

The conflict is the basis of a vocation, she said, and "contradictions should be invited, not feared." When determining what to do as your vocation, she said, you need to figure out what makes you content and not succumb to guilt or frenzy. "Frenzy and guilt negate any good work we do," she said.

Using a personal account for illustration on the topic, Van Eerden explained a dilemma in her life after getting her bachelor's degree. Before returning to school and getting her master's in nonfiction at the University of Iowa, she spent two years volunteering at an adult literacy clinic, the Academy of Hope, in Washington, D.C. During that time, she questioned whether she should have been spending her time writing or continuing her work with illiterate adults.

Van Eerden's own writing has since led her to be the Milton Center's postgraduate fellowship writer, a position that allows her to teach classes at SPU as she writes her first novel.

She said that your vocation is where your gladness and deep hunger meet and that searching for this combination of two selves is a good place to start.

Although writing is not the same as physically building a house in a distant country, she said, it can aid the value of Christian writing in a secular world. Writing can engage the world just as much as another profession.

"A serious fiction writer writes about the whole world, no matter how small [their story is]," she said.

Van Eerden compared Christian writing to the Inuit word "isumataq," which she described as "a person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom creates itself."

She explained that this wisdom is found in the discovery of fiction. Discovery is crucial to fiction, and the wisdom found is specific to each person, she said.

At the event, Van Eerden also read a quote from dancer Martha Graham: "There is only one you in all of time, and this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and it will be lost."