some thoughts on writing

Last night at our gathering I talked about nurturing one's spiritual life (download file), about accessing the resources that God makes available to us for the purpose of growing more and more into the likeness of Christ.

I'm learning a lot about that right now. Writing has always been one avenue that helps me to become more human and more available to God. But it's taken me awhile to see it as a spiritual practice. Maybe it's because I haven't seen my spiritual life as a humanizing endeavor but a divinization ramp.

It 's human to take time to examine what's going on inside. It's also human to not like what we find and hide it away again in favor of some more "spiritual" and external endeavor. Why is it so often that we believe for something to be spiritually valid or meritorious, it has to be elevated and painful?

The picture above is Thomas Merton, a trappist monk and one of my heroes. This man was born to write. He was prolific in a way that is hard to grasp. For the last five or six years, his writing has been a constant companion to me and while I like his thought and prose, it is his journals that speak into my life. Merton, however, had a pretty tenuous relationship with his writing. He wanted solitude.

When Merton went into seclusion, leaving the world for the cloister of the monastery, I think he thought he was leaving himself behind. He didn't. He followed himself there. In his mind, he wanted nothing more to do with writing. Fortunately, monks practice obedience, one of their sacred vows. His superiors saw in him God's spark manifested through the written word. So every day, under obedience, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote. Then he would hand everything over, surrendering his thoughts and words, his doubt and his belief, his life, to people he trusted to speak to him as God would.

Merton admits, "I am finding myself forced to admit that my lamentations about my writing job have been foolish. At the moment, the writing is the one thing that gives me access to some real silence and solitude. Also I find that it helps me to pray, because when I pause at my work I find that the mirror inside me is surprisingly deep and clean and serene and God shines there and is immediately found, without hunting, as if he had come close to me while I was writing and I had not observed His coming. And this, I think, should be the cause of great joy, and to me it is." (The Sign of Jonas, p. 207)

This is encouraging to me.