Hi! My name’s Carbite. I’m a friend of Ink's in faith, life, and literature. You’ll be seeing me around the Inkwell, especially as future projects lift off. In my inaugural blog post I’d simply like to introduce myself and my approach to the Catholic faith, namely Surrender. This will frame my future writing in both style and intent.
Before that dive, about me: I grew up in Ohio, spending tons of time outdoors or in books. My hobbies revolve around those two themes: backpacking, running, fishing, canoeing, reading, writing, and an exception: singing. I love surrealism and abstract contemplation, though that means, as you're about to see, that I struggle describing broad topics since they exist in my mind as abstractions. Okay, time to take that dive.
A cradle Catholic, I never strayed far from the faith. My loving parents raised me lovingly enough that when in my junior year of high school I developed a severe depression and I faced the void, I saw God. I couldn’t tell why my life seemed to be crumbling, but something I’d been taught itched: God should be first in your life. I decided to let everything crumble and rebuild with the Lord as my foundation. I’d focus first on my faith; if only that went well I’d call it a win. I had no idea at the time what magnitude of surrender that really was. Things didn't crumble; they slowly started getting better, a trend that has continued like the oak: slow, steady, and strong, ever since.
I’ve made several long attempts at summarizing the incredible ways my faith has grown since then, every time foiled by the vain nature of accurately describing God's Kingdom. The best I can do is highlight the two most prominent facets—Truth and humility—and cite my influences.
Truth to me does not mean scholasticism, it means unbound revelry in Veritas. It means submitting my knowledge to the teaching of the Church and my understanding to God, as St. Ignatius of Loyola's "Suscipe" calls for: “Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory [and] my whole understanding.” I don't worry about knowing everything, only understanding my mind, heart, and spirit. As soon as I understand the questions pressing there and make them known before the Blessed Sacrament, the answer comes.
Humility is the prime virtue, to which obedience is the action, to which surrender is the movement of the heart. After reading The Story of a Soul, I wanted to be like St. Therese of Lisieux, as little as possible. Except I can’t, in two ways: I don’t share her salvation from mortal sin, and God doesn’t call me to be that little. To be bigger requires even greater humility.
My last influence is G.K. Chesterton, in both faith and literature. I take to heart what he says in Orthodoxy: “The ordinary man has always been a mystic.” Heralded as the Apostle of Common Sense, he helped me grasp that not everything has to, or even should, be understood. And his simple, direct writing style cleared my mind like soap parting oil. I realized the simple but profound truth that you can just say what you mean.
I apologize for my brevity that brazenly refuses to explain anything it mentions. As I mentioned before, any attempt at subtlety only led to confusion, like entering a dense, hilly forest without a compass. But I hope this serves well as an introduction, especially once my fiction writing starts cropping up. My identity as a writer should emerge naturally. Feel free to ask me then why I write the way I do, or anything else.
- Carbite
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