Writing Practice, Spiritual Practice: An Excerpt
From Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir
Write a metaphor that describes your spiritual journey. Perhaps it is like peeling the layers of an onion, walking a labyrinth, or wearing out a pair of shoes. Linger with your metaphor, allowing it to teach you about your spiritual journey.
During my silent, intimate, early hours at the computer—even during small temper tantrums at whole paragraphs gone awry—I know, more clearly than at other moments, a divine presence at work. I recognize it when my hunches for syllables and sounds lead me to words I’m surprised are in my vocabulary. I recognize it at the end of a torturous draft when, after letting it sit for a week, I read through and am shocked by its vitality. I recognize mystery at work when the broken fragments of images and ideas are suddenly smoothed over by transitions, and a piece becomes healthy and plump. When I follow my literary hunches through a written story, I add another chapter to my own lived story. New age writers might say that I’m channeling divine energy on to the page, but in my experience the opposite happens: The writing channels energy into my life so that, at the end of a piece, I’m more awake to the world and more responsive to myself than ever before. It’s an awful lot like getting pregnant. On one level we know how a child is conceived, but on another, that spark of life baffles and humbles us. Bringing something from ourselves into being changes us. This new life gives us new life.
When I set out to write my first memoir, I was under the grand illusion that I was writing a book. At least that’s what I told myself in order to haul my body out of bed at five-thirty every morning to write before going to teach seventh grade. At the end of six years of work, I had two hundred polished pages to show for it. Halfway through, however, I realized that the book itself was really writing me—that the careful telling of my past, my reflections on sexual identity, and my search for God had softened, shifted, and honed who I was. I wrote about discovering the spirit in my sexuality but found the discovery incomplete until it had been articulated. Every revision brought fresh insight into how holiness inhabits my bodily experiences. By becoming a creator, I found myself being created. We pour energy into our writing, but then there’s a feedback loop where we least expect it, and so creative energy flows from our stories back into our personhood. Call it what you will—mystery, God, the muse. It’s this stunning dynamic that draws me again and again to the page.
The best evidence I can offer that writing is a spiritual practice is, perversely, what happens when I don’t write. Beware! I become a terror. I snap at my friends, refuse to scratch the cat’s tummy, and feel bitter toward every book that lines my shelves. I feel trapped inside my skin, as though writing opens pores and releases pent-up waste. The longer I don’t write, the less I know what I think or how I feel or what I believe. My breathing turns shallow. My shoulders hunch.
I avoid this horrible state at all costs.
Any spiritual practice that holds potential for an individual has a certain tug. On the surface sitting in silence seems pointless, boring, even insane, but meditators nonetheless feel yanked by silence or tantalized by its elusive, secret treat. I recognize this tug in every student who wants to write. Despite all the nay-saying voices, we must yield to this tug. It is wiser than we are.
Peel the veneer from the craft of writing and you find underneath a structure for spiritual growth. It’s all there: The learned habit of openness. The discipline of listening deeply. Letting go of ego in deference to some larger, barely discernible intent. Honoring details as an access to the universal. Facing weakness and brokenness so healing can happen. Shedding illusions and naming what is. Unitive, peak moments; lost-in-the-wilderness moments. Millions of moments lived in ordinary time. Call and response, the quality of prayer. The faith required to begin, to continue, to finish, to share.
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Last updated on Wednesday, June 2, 2010.
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