Writing to Wake the Soul - Excerpt

7/28/2019 Writing to Wake the Soul - Excerpt

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Writing

to Wakethe Soul

Karen Hering

ATRIA BOOKSNew York London oronto Sydney New Delhi Hillsboro, Oregon


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3

Writing as a

Spiritual Practice

Te purpose o all prayer is to uplif the words,

to return them to their source above.L Y

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It is one thing to acknowledge that we all reach or words and thatmetaphors help us understand the big questions, but as we reachor metaphors with pen in hand, when does that writing become a

spiritual practice?

DEFINING SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

Spirit, like beauty, is best known in the eyeand the hearto

the beholder. One persons spiritual practice might be anothers

distractionor even affliction. o define what makes a practice a

spiritual one, we might do best to take note o its ruits. Anthonyde Mello tells the story o a spiritual master who defined spiritual-

ity as that which brings us to inner transormation. When a seeker

asked the master about ollowing the traditional methods handed


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Writing to Wake the Soul22

down by spiritual leaders, the master replied that the old meth-

ods are only as true to spirituality as their unction and results. A

blanket, said the master, is no longer a blanket i it does not keep

you warm.2Spiritual practices in the twenty-first century, whether

ancient or new, are those that still keep us warm and bring us to

inner transormation.

Spiritual practices are activities and postures that awaken us

to the ground o our being and to the pulse o lie within us and

around us. A spiritual practice will deepen our relationship withthe sacred source o lie, by whatever name we know itEnlighten-

ment, God, Allah, Spirit o Lie, or ruth itsel.3It will call us into a

higher-quality relationship with ourselves and others, alerting us to

the connectedness o lie and our role within that connectedness.

It might be as simple as ocusing. And as anyone who has tried to

ocus knows, it can be as elusive as that too.

For the ancient Jews, when the temple was destroyed, it was their

practices that helped them keep their aith and identity, whether

they were wandering in wilderness or suffering conquest by others.

For many o us today, the sacred structures, spaces, and traditions o

earlier generations have been destroyed or desecrated, or they might

have become inaccessible to us or any number o reasons. When

this happens, it is our own spiritual practices that can help us keepour aith and our identity intact and alive.

We might count a number o amiliar activities as spiritual prac-

tices. Prayer and silent meditation are common examples. Practices o

the body and movement, such as yoga, ai Chi, and walking medita-

tion, are others. Lectio divina(holy or meditative reading) and scriptio

divina(holy or meditative writing) are practices rooted in words. Each

o these is, on one level, a simple practice. And yet it might be said o

any o them that a lietime is not long enough or learning them.

Tey dont have to be difficult or demanding. We dont need to

give up our day jobs to do them, nor, I believe, do we need to do


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Writing As A Spiritual Practice 23

them every day. However, on some level, they do require a commit-

ment. Tey must be cultivated with some regularity and intention.

Tey are not accidental. Now and then, with some good ortune,

you can experience the kind o awakening Im talking about without

adhering to a spiritual practice, just as you can happen upon a patch

o wild blueberries and enjoy a trailside treat. But i you want to

harvest enough berries or jam (and year-round enjoyment), youll

either want to cultivate your own blueberry patch or youll need to

know how and where to find the most plentiul ones growing nearyour home. And youll want to bring a pail.

Because spiritual practices are essentially receptivemeant or

listening, waiting, opening, seeing, apprehendingthey require that

we be prepared to reap their ruits. Te main reason we call them

practicesis to acknowledge the necessity o this preparation. We are

practicing and thus becoming more adept at what it takes to receive

the abundance ripening all around us and within us.

Te requency and regularity o a spiritual practice can also

be sel-determined. When my son was young and learning to play

the harp in the Suzuki method o instruction, his teacher said he

didnt haveto practice daily, but he should practice every day that

he took time to eat. Spiritual practice is, Im grateul to say, per-

haps broader than that, but it is still based on hunger. Everyonescircadian rhythms are different, so why wouldnt our spiritual

rhythms be different too? One person might need to do something

daily to make it an active, salient, and nourishing part o his or her

lie. For the next person, it might be a weekly cycle. Whats impor-

tant is that it be requent enough to become effortless, habitual,

and reliable.

How ofen will you need to do it in order to miss it i you stop?

How long can you go without it beore you hunger or what it brings

you? I you dont find yoursel hungering or it when you give it up,

you might ask yoursel i you have ever ully tasted its ruits.


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Some use the term spiritual discipline. Others, including many

dedicated to one spiritual practice or another, eschew the word

discipline or its connotations o correction and punishment. But

the Latin root o the word discipline, meaning instruction o dis-

ciples, strikes me as fitting. In a spiritual practice or discipline, we

are all students learning lessons in paying attention and spiritual

living. Not only that, but we are also lielonglearners, never finished

but always practicing, not with a goal o perection (as in practice

makes perect), but with the hope that over time, our spiritualgrowth and the activities that cultivate it will come more easily.

THE SPIRITUAL PRACTICE OF

SEEING METAPHORS

In the spiritual practice o writing, especially the kind described here

as contemplative correspondence, we become more adept at meta-

phorical thinking. As it becomes easier to think metaphorically, we

begin to see more metaphors around us; and the more metaphors

we see, the more bridges we have access to, inviting our connection

to other people, to other perspectives, and to other possible outcomes.

Yannis Ritsos, a twentieth-century Greek poet active in the Nazi

Resistance, beautiully describes the power o seeing through wordsand metaphors in his poem, Te Meaning o Simplicity. He writes,

Every word is a doorway / to a meeting, one ofen cancelled4. Te

test o the words truth, according to Ritsos, is whether it reuses

our attempts to cancel the meeting and calls us into a meaningul

encounter anyway.

Practicing contemplative correspondence makes it easier to spot

the countless metaphors o daily living as doorways to the larger

meanings ofen hidden behind, beneath, or beyond them. First we

regard the world at hand, tangible and tantalizing, ragrant and rac-

tal, describing its edges, its discord, and its harmonies. Ten, as we


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do, even i we dont find the larger meanings, i we reocus our eyes

on the possibility o larger meaning, well be looking through the par-

ticularities o our own lives, knowing there is more.

French anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss noted that the

human brain develops its capacity according to the demands o our

physical and cultural survival as well as our interests. He marveled

over evidence o ancient cultures where people could see the planet

Venus by day. Afer consulting with astronomers and European

navigational history, he ound additional reerences to sailors whocould see Venus in broad daylight and concluded that it was made

possible by two thingsthe need to navigate vast waters by day, and

a knowledge o the stars and planetary patterns that helped the early

sailors know where to look. Speaking in the 1970s, Lvi-Strauss said,

oday we use less and we use more o our mental capacity than we

did in the past,5suggesting that the demands o the twentieth cen-

tury caused many people to develop their capacity or scientific and

abstract thinking while losing some capacity or sensory perception.

[A]s scientific thinkers, he noted, we use a very limited amount o

our mental power.6

Is it possible to recover mental capacity that weve lef behind

thinking it is no longer needed? Tis is the question that I would

pose to Lvi-Strauss i he showed up on my doorstep today, becauseit seems to me that in the twenty-first century, we could use a bit

more capacity or mythic memory and metaphorical thinking than

most o us currently have.

Curious about Lvi-Strausss example o seeing Venus, I tested

this out as best I could. One night, awakening about 4:30 and

unable to return to sleep, I stepped outside to find the moonless

sky filled with stars. In the east, Venus was just rising over the

horizon, brightest o all. Sunrise was two hours away, so I bundled

up in some warm clothes and sat on my deck in the autumn dark-

ness, intently watching Venus as the sky gradually lightened. One


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by one the constellations were extinguished by the approaching

dawn. Te sky turned vaguely blue and the grass and trees emerged

around me, first as orms and then with colors. I kept my eyes on

the sky, though, staring intently at Venus as the tails o light that

had made it appear as a star slowly retreated. Just beore I lost sight

o it altogether, it resembled the tiniest orb o a moon barely dis-

cernible against the brightening sky. Ten, with my next blink, it

was gone. Shifing my eyes to the horizon, I saw that the sun was

already well above it. It was an hour past sunrise, and I had seenVenus by day!

Similarly, in contemplative correspondence, I have ound that by

ocusing our attention to the suraces o our daily lives as metaphors

or something more, we train our inner eye to see what might oth-

erwise remain unnoticedwhat Tomas Merton called the hidden

wholeness. John Calvin once said, Wherever you cast your eyes,

there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least

some sparks o [Gods] glory.7 Learning to see this wholeness or

these sparks o divinityand to name them or what they areis

what a spiritual practice trains us to do. Spiritual practices increase

our capacity or ocusing, or paying attention, or noticing patterns.

Tey train our vision so that we can see what has always been there

whether in the daytime sky or in the ground beneath our eetbutmay have escaped our preoccupied minds and habits o distraction.

A spiritual practice also requires our internal consent, a willing-

ness to sit still long enough to receiveand be changed bywhat

comes, which is what happens in creative work as well, as the

poet William Stafford described in these lines rom When I Met

My Muse:

. . . Her voice belled orth, and the

sunlight bent. I elt the ceiling arch, and

knew that nails up there took a new grip


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on whatever they touched. I am your own

way o looking at things, she said. When

you allow me to live with you, every

glance at the world around you will be

a sort o salvation. And I took her hand.8

Like most orms o spiritual practice, the invitation into creative

work and living requires an openness to changea surrender so

complete it opens a wide new view to us. But significantly, it is asurrender to our ownway o seeing, as it is in spiritual practice. Te

muse, too, has a placeand a salvific role to playin our lives and

spiritual practices. Welcoming the muse is about seeing possibili-

ties already here in this world that have gone unnoticed. As writer

asha bandele said, Te world is so magnificent, the way it keeps

rebirthing itsel to you, i youre amenable.9 When imagination is

called upon and strengthened through the practice o a spiritual

disciplinean intentional ocus on truth and reality larger than one-

selit is less a matter o make-believe than it is one o seeing what

already exists in the possibilities lying in wait beneath the surace o

things. It is not unlike seeing Venus by day.

WRITING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

Writing can serve as a spiritual practice in many different orms,

some o which you have likely experienced. Perhaps youve had a

correspondence with a riend or loved one that verged on prayerul

reflection, or your journal writing might serve that purpose. Maybe

you write a haiku every morning, or a blog entry, as a way o paying

attention. An early mentor o mine in the ministry ofen said her

primary spiritual practice was writing weekly sermons, and I know

many others who name the writing o their poetry, fiction, or essays

as spiritual disciplines.


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For much o my own lie, journal writing has been an important

act o soul centering. Initially unaware o my journals spiritual pur-

pose, I later fiercely claimed this writing as a spiritual practice when

I realized my journal pages had become a kind o chapel or me, an

intimate place that I requented to whisper my gratitude, praise, and

laments, and even, at times, a petition or two. I know many people

who regard their journal writing similarly, and perhaps an equal

number who consider it a spiritual practice to write daily morning

pages, a discipline o clearing the mind at the start o each day withthree long-hand pages o stream-o-consciousness writing advo-

cated by Julia Cameron in her book Te Artists Way.10

Fundamentally, writing as a spiritual practice in most o its

orms looks a lot like journal or letter writing. It involves sitting

down with an open page, without outline, plan, or six points lead-

ing toward a predetermined conclusion. Writing as a spiritual

practice is an invitation to wander and discover; it is an opportunity

to take a stepor many stepsinto the unknown. When you write

as a spiritual practice, you are not ollowing a charted trail; you

are setting out to do a little bushwhacking on the open page, and

where youll end up is ofen as unknown as the route you will take

to get there.

What makes some writing a spiritual practice and not others isless a matter o orm than one o orientation and intention. Writing

becomes a spiritual practice when it serves as a personal corre-

spondence with the still, small voice within,11a way o listening to

ones inner voice and truth, and to the sacred source o that truth.

Some might call this a correspondence with God, others with the

soul. Still others describe it as a letter to and rom onesel, a chance

to open time and space or listening to the shy, inner voice that is

quickly silenced by a busy pace or a noisy world. It is tuning in to the

whisper that sometimes prods us awake in the middle o the night,

because the night might be the only time quiet enough or it to be


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heard. Writing as a spiritual practice awakens our ear to the inner

sel and, in doing so, to the holy.

Tinking o this as a letter to and rom ourselves might make it

seem easy, but in act, it describes an exchange that many o us have

long avoided, whether because o the time, patience, and silence it

requires, or because we might be reluctant to hear what our inner

voice might have to say. Each time we turn to our email inbox or our

smartphones or the next newseed or text message, we are tuning

out and turning away rom our inner voice and the conversations wemight have with it. One hundred and fify years ago, Henry David

Toreau noted the costs o shutting down this inner correspondence:

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversa-

tion degenerates into mere gossip. [. . .] In proportion as our

inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the

post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who

walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his

extensive correspondence has not heard from himself this

long while.12

When was the last time you heard rom yoursel? When was the

last time you wrote to yoursel? Writing as a spiritual practice invitesyou into such a correspondence, with regularity and with intention.

Correspondence, o course, carries other meanings too, nota-

bly the connection between one thing and another. Te practice o

writing described in this book intentionally directs our attention to

how things are hitched, one to another. It can be as basic as Charlies

three-word composition o awe and wonder at the close o a good

daySun, Moon, Lau-rie!a constellation o names that oriented

him to the universe and to relationship. When writing serves as a

spiritual practice, it connects the dots o our experience and opens

our eyes to the connections already there, holding the world together.


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Nature, o course, is replete with evidence o these connections, but

they are increasingly out o sight to many o us as wilderness expe-

riences become ew and ar apart. Emerson described it this way:

Nature offers all her creatures . . . as a picture-language . . . Here

we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical speculation but in a holy

place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand beore the

secret o the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and

Unity into Variety.13

Words matter not because o what they are or what they say, butbecause o what they point toward: the sacred ground o unanswer-

able questions and unspeakable mysteries. My riend Bart Schneider,

a lielong writer and editor, says he first glimpsed the power o

writing at the age o fifeen, when a poet visited his high school. He

recalls the poet saying, Science tells us what things are. Poetry tells

us what things are like. It was a simple distinction that ignited his

curiosity and launched him into a lielong vocation o poetry and

other orms o writing, telling what things are like, which, he notes,

allows or many more imaginative opportunities than telling simply

what things are.

elling what things are like is a matter o seeking, discovering,

and sometimes creating connections between this and that, between

you and me. It is the muscle o metaphor Adrienne Rich was talkingabout. It doesnt ignore how things are different. It acknowledges

there are (at least) two sides to every coin. Te spiritual practice o

writing, like other orms o prayer and meditation, simply helps us

pay attention to both sides o lies currency. It wakes us up to the

particulars o our own experience while always asking, What is this

like? How am Iand how is my experienceconnected to others

and to lie as a whole? And what does that connection mean?

It can be easy to orget in the present climate o religious divi-

siveness, but making connections is the root meaning o religion, a

word tracing back to Latin origins meaning to bind. Writing that


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intentionally looks or sacred connections participates in the dia-

logue at the core o human existence, the dialogue between what is

fleeting and the eternal. It lifs up the way each one o us is a beauti-

ul and unique conversationan exchange at turns poignant and

simple, sorrowul and joyous, tremulous and boldbetween our

physical, mortal bodies and the more lasting breath o lie moving

through us.14

In contemplative correspondence, we record that exchange

between our particular experience and the larger meaning runningthrough our lives. We write about the world we see, hear, taste, smell,

and eel. Ten, as the ancient Chinese poets described the writers

task, we lif our eyes.

[G]ood work / joins earth to heaven, wrote Lu Chi almost

two millennia ago,15having earlier advised, Know when to lif your

eyes / and when to scrutinize.16As we put our own experience into

words, noticing its unique textures and scent, its sound, colors, and

flavor, by lifing our eyes we begin to discover what transcends these

particulars. And in that discovery, our words will point toward a

larger experience o lie where greater meaningand connection to

othersdwells.

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Writing to Wake the Soul - Excerpt