Quote Roundup #3: On writing as a spiritual practice

Writing as a creative act relies on faith, compassion, honesty, and humility.

It is a weekday evening, and I’m trying to work ahead on my Substack writing before Ben travels out of town again. I’m flipping through single-subject spiral notebooks that display chicken scratchings of thoughts, ideas, and insights I’d once read but had since forgotten about.

Now I’m riffling through four of them simultaneously, hoping to find a few words of wisdom that form a common thread. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but this time, it’s the flowery language that piques my interest. Something about the resplendent nature of beautiful words cuts through my bone-weary soul right now. I realize I need these nudges just as much as anyone.

This Quote Roundup is about wrestling with our shadow side. One of my favorite stories from the Old Testament is about Jacob grappling with the dark figure. Though we never learn its true identity, we do know this: Jacob refused to release the figure until it blessed him. And when it blessed him, he was left with a limp, presumably as a reminder of what he had overcome.

I don’t believe any of us can truly find fulfillment without the occasional scuffle with our own dark figures, many of which originate within us. The primitive drive to survive confronts the external adversaries that strive to wreck our lives, but there are also parts of ourselves that keep us armored so that we don’t have to explore our more vulnerable needs, longings, and frailties.

You don’t have to ascribe to a specific religion or theory or philosophy in order to be a person of faith. Faith is, quite simply, a belief that does not rely upon visible evidence. And this is what it means to have a spiritual vision of your life’s work. Writing in particular, or any creative act, is a perfect conduit for taking what is unseen, invisible, or intangible and turning it into what is very, very real.

A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry. Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision —a faith.¹

I’ve always believed in what I could not see or explain but still felt acutely and assuredly in my heart. Not long ago, I was speaking with the independent editor I hired to assist me with the narrative arc of my memoir, and I explained my difficulty in having deep relationships with people who are unable to see the nuances of circumstances. I grew up around those who filed everything as either a happy occasion (a wedding, for instance) or a sad one (a funeral), but could not accept that all instances carry the potential for both great joy and intense sorrow.

The editor to whom I was speaking said, “Yes, but you can sit with ambivalence, because you’re a writer.” That had never occurred to me, the idea that words are living, moving entities inside a person who sees the richness of everything around her, who allows herself to feel the full spectrum of emotions, and who can then distill these complexities into expressions through the art of language.

Where do we begin to do this as creative people? With vision. Vision involves empowerment through activating our imagination and incorporating our senses and experiences into something that becomes palpable, something with texture. I think curiosity comes into play here, too. The importance of remaining open and frequently asking ourselves, I wonder why, or Where’s the connection, or How can this come together with its opposite, and so forth, renews our vigor for the surprises of life.

Then, quite possibly, we find ourselves wanting to know what the next moment, or day, or decade may unveil. And then we shape what we learn as we travel through each moment, or day, or decade, and that is how our art becomes a thing that is alive and breathing, ever-evolving —a life force.

Those who can articulate the movements of their inner lives, who can give names to their varied experiences, need no longer be victims of themselves, but are able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.²

It’s easier to consider ourselves victims than victors. Victims aren’t expected to change or to do much of anything, really. Victims believe they are subject to whatever happens to them, that they are passive bystanders in their lives and, therefore, when they struggle, it’s because they just keep getting one bad break after another. Victors accept that some circumstances are beyond their control, but they never lose their sense of agency over how they wish to respond to what happens to them and what they want to make of the hardships they experience.

To continue with the construct of ambivalence, it is possible to be in a headspace where we feel more victorious than usual, or on the flipside, to tell ourselves that our glum mood is the result of an especially hard day. Sometimes we vacillate between both of these feelings in one day. The point is not to attempt to slay every dragon with ease. It’s to accept that sometimes the dragons will defeat us. But if we can learn to nurture the parts of ourselves that sometimes linger in despondency, then when we do conquer painful attributes of our lives, we will not forget that both the victor and victim are the same person.

Writing as a spiritual practice helps us integrate the idea that we can be both a hero and antihero concurrently. Through journaling especially, we can explore the ways we behave and believe that seem to contradict each other. Clarity often breaks through the catharsis of free association on the page.

I’m not suggesting that everyone is a writer, but what I am saying is that writing can benefit anyone who knows how to string words together. Not everyone is a skilled writer, but words have a way of awakening truths we’ve buried and bringing them to the surface. Words break the seal of silence and tell us we are worthy of owning our story, whatever it may be.

If you want to be an authentic writer, learn to tell the truth, to wrestle with it, to reflect on it, and then to write about it with great care. And with greater humility.³

Two years ago, I prayed, “Please help me to see the truth of my life.” It seems trite as I type this, but it was one of the most sincere prayers of my life, because I’d grown weary of not understanding a peculiar recurring nightmare that had plagued me since childhood.

In it, I was chased by a dark figure. Variations included me escaping the dark figure, the dark figure capturing me, me hiding (sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully) from the dark figure. What disturbed me is the terror I felt every time I awoke from the nightmare, and the fact that it had been tormenting me for decades.

Instead of suppressing it, as I had become accustomed to doing, I paused one morning after the dreadful figure caught and attempted to suffocate me, and I asked myself, What is going on here? What does it mean?

I thought that by approaching the nightmare from the perspective of how it could educate me about my own life, I could begin to tackle the unhealed wounds of my heart. By unveiling the truth, I might learn how to then tackle the dark figure itself. So, I prayed that I might know the truth about my past, realizing that repressed trauma was likely a culprit, or at least a factor, into this distressing dream.

Something shifted in me when I began to investigate the possibilities of what the dark figure might represent: a metaphor for my fears, for when life felt as if it were stifling me, but also —could it be a real person who had harmed me in my past? I didn’t rush to the conclusion that it was any one of these. I sat with my fear. I let it pass through me.

And then I wrote. I journaled furiously that entire year. Many times, it produced nothing more than a significant release of tension, but I was able to bring a few insights into my counseling sessions. Here’s what I learned: Our willingness to accept the truth, whatever it may be, is the first courageous step toward healing.

Elementary things are also essential things. Instead of abandoning them as banalities so as to chase after subtle novelties, we must always go back to them, to go into them more deeply.⁴

Complexity of thought and emotion can lead us astray from simple but profound realities. When Felicity was seven years old, she shared this with me: “Mom, when I saw the sun today, I remembered that even when there are clouds in the sky, the sun is still shining somewhere. And that means I can get through whatever bad day I’m having.”

I was having a bad day. I hadn’t told Felicity about it, though I wouldn’t be surprised if she sensed it. The difference is that I was analyzing my bad day, ruminating over specific wrongs and creating a brainstorm web in my thoughts about how I could amend the problems I was facing.

Felicity’s openness brought me back to that way of being I had long ago lost, which was to simply let my mind be cleared of its clutter and look at my surroundings. Her way was simple. Mine was complicated. And because my default way of handling sticky situations is to control or resolve, my vision had clouded. Hers was clear.

In order to write more clearly, I’ve learned it’s necessary to do some housecleaning in our minds and somehow, after we’ve swept our thoughts clean, allow the sun to break through.

1. Mary Oliver from her book, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, p. 122.

2. Henri Nouwen from his classic, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, p. 42.

3. Vinita Hampton Wright from her book, The Art of Spiritual Writing, p. 49

4. Henri de Lubac from his classic work, Paradoxes of Faith, p. 132.