Book Review: Paul Martin’s “Original Faith”

I recently had the exciting opportunity to read and review the book “Original Faith: What Your Life is Trying to Tell You” by Paul Martin as part of his book tour with Women on Writing. This book is a spiritual self help book which manages to guide the reader through his or her own murky waters by sharing spiritual insights and asking probing questions. I was particularly interested in the process of writing that Paul went through as he wrote this book. He has experienced health problems in the past and I was curious as to how this impacted his views as well as his writing experience. Answers to those questions are found in the following short interview with Paul Martin:

1. What did you consider to be the most challenging part of writing “Original Faith”?

Overall, my writing process had a sense of ease and joy. The most challenging period may have been about a year’s worth of work, in about my third year of writing, when I took a major wrong turn. Writing was becoming more and more tiresome until I realized that if I myself was bored with what I was writing… well then, who wouldn’t be bored reading it! I saw that I’d been writing from my head as uninformed by my heart and my actual lived experience – not writing creatively at all.

1. You incorporate wonderful poems at the start of each chapter. How do you feel this adds to the book (or what do you hope readers will take away from these)? And at what point in the writing stage did you add these in?

The poems’ themes anticipate each chapter’s contents, adding variety to the reading experience and helping to engage readers at the level of immediate feeling. I worked them in at the end, which was fun to do. Since these poems and many others were written concurrently with the prose, they reflect similar experiences, imagery and thoughts, which made it easy to find poems to integrate with my text.

1. You describe writing down your experiences and revelations over time as they occurred. Would you say that writing aided you in understanding your experiences or were you simply trying to recapture them for memory?

For me, the act of writing very much helped me to understand my experiences. Jogging, my work with children, meditation – and sitting at my writing table – these were the major and ongoing sources of experience and insight that generated material for Original Faith. Much book content wouldn’t have become as clear as it did and some of it wouldn’t have been created at all if not for the regular activity of sitting down to write.

Often I’d be at my desk working on one concept when I’d find myself unexpectedly struck by an insight or by especially vivid language that related to another. This aspect of the writing process was a big factor in how the manuscript came together – and what a mess my desktop was…

1. Some spiritual writers believe that it is impossible to truly articulate their beliefs although they do the best that they can in their writing. Is this something that you have struggled with at all?

Original Faith is a guide to entering into a process by which our identity changes in ways that lead us to contribute more emphatically and consistently to the well being of others, in turn bringing us greater personal fulfillment. Initially, identity moves away from being ego-based toward becoming increasingly love-based. I found that I could express this aspect of personal transformation in considerable detail and in a pretty straightforward manner.

The second identity shift that I discuss involves the transcendence of identification with one’s own love. Here I found myself having to rely a lot more on analogy and metaphor. Often the best that I could do was to use language as a kind of pointer for providing a sense of direction.

1. What is the one key thing that you would like a reader to take away from “Original Faith”?

That faith is a fact. Whether or not we connect faith with a religious belief system, each of us is profoundly at peace with what we’re doing here, with living and dying into the biggest picture, the greatest context. To know all-hope and all-trust in (to paraphrase St. Paul) “the One in whom we live and move and have our being,” is to become aware of an unconditional fact concerning who we are – a dimension of our own being that we can know with certainty. This is so whether we conceive of the One as a Creator existing in distinction from creation or as all-being, nature or reality itself.

Paul Maurice Martin is author of Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You and blogs at www.originalfaith.com. He holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and an M.Ed. in Counseling from the University of New Hampshire.