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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Whether you are a longtime journal keeper or someone who has never kept a journal at all, this book will help you go below the surface of your life with God. It is not about the art of writing, but about how journaling can form us spiritually. Every chapter combines descriptive text, illustrations from journals and the author's own experience with journaling practices integrated along the way to help you bring your own life and world into sharper focus. God wants to surprise you with the beauty of your own life, growing and alive, filled with movement, light and shadow. This is the book to do just that.
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JOURNALING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
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Encountering God Through Attentive Writing
Special thanks to Mandy Banksonfor her loving friendship and trustworthy reading.
Contents
Introduction
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My husband and I traveled to the tropical islands of Samoa for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Before we left, both of us thought we knew why we chose to travel so far away from our home in Chicago. For my husband, who loves planning trips, Samoa was uncharted territory for exploration and discovery. For me, visiting the Samoan islands was an opportunity to be in a relatively unspoiled tropical setting and walk along pristine beaches next to turquoise water. For both of us, it was a time to celebrate the life that we have together.
Walking along the white sandy beach on the island of Ofu in American Samoa, I did find myself gazing out at a clear turquoise sea. But if that was all I did, I would have missed the best of Samoa. Beautiful as the landscape was, an even greater beauty lay beyond the sand, underneath the ocean’s surface. When I share pictures of our visit to Samoa, I point to the shadowed area on the clear water and express my regret that we did not bring an underwater camera, because I spent most of our ten days on Ofu wearing a snorkeling mask and fins, looking at some of the most varied coral reef in the world and swimming with fish of indescribable variety and color.
These pages are also the beginning of a journey, one that you have chosen for reasons at least as varied as any other trip you have taken in your life. Some of you are longtime journal keepers who wonder what could be added to a practice already so firmly established in your lives. Others of you might have tried to keep a journal at times in the past but never really kept it up as a regular practice. Perhaps some of you have never kept a journal at all. It does not matter where you are in your journaling experience. What does matter is your desire and willingness and commitment to honor this spiritual practice by intentionally going below the surface. It is here that God wants to surprise you with the beauty of your own life, growing and alive, filled with movement, light and shadow. It is here that God wants to meet your own longing for a deeper life with the Spirit’s even greater longing to be with you, in all of who you were and are and will be. The journaling practices presented in this book are simply the mask, the snorkel and the fins that will allow you to make this journey. You will carry your own underwater camera—the journal itself—recording all that you see and hear, know and understand.
Every chapter of this book gives you opportunities along the way to use your journal reflections as a way of bringing your own life and world into sharper focus. Using your journal as a camera lens will allow you to zoom up close on a particular aspect of your own journey or take a step back and see the bigger picture of what might be going on within you and around you. These opportunities for seeing and remembering and recording are woven into the text of this book, just as they are woven into the text of your own life. If you do not actually stop to journal, you will only stay on the surface of my words and may not capture the greater beauty that is there right now in the context of your life. But if you stop as you read and take some time to follow the journaling suggestions along the way, you will meet your own exploring self beneath the text of this book as well as the God who longs to be with you on your journey.
Sometimes we might choose to explore with our journal as our only traveling companion. But there are other seasons in our life when we are helped in our own journey by having times and places to share the trip with others. A regularly meeting journaling group, even if it is only two or three people, can keep each person accountable and provide a group context for prayer and celebration. At the end of this book is an appendix with suggested guidelines to make the journaling group a safe place to write and reflect together. Especially in the beginning, it will be important to discuss the whole process of journaling, using questions such as, “How did that go for you?” or “What did you find helpful for staying with your journaling practice, and what made it difficult for you to keep writing?” As you become comfortable, try writing during the group’s meeting time as well. Being in the presence of others, reflecting and writing together on the same journaling suggestion, can push us to go to a deeper, truer place within ourselves and with God.
The more authentically we travel into our own lives and our own stories, the more we will lay claim to God’s image deep within us. This is both the beginning point and the destination. The more deeply we immerse ourselves in the story of God, the more our lives are filled with the love of Christ. This is my hope for all of you who read and write from these pages. And the more available we are to God, the more available we are to truly love ourselves, one another and the world. This is my prayer for all of you who make this journey, that through your reading and especially your journal writing you might “comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18-19).
So we begin with a blessing for the journey ahead and below and above and in us:
In the name of the God who creates us, may we deepen our awareness of God’s presence.
In the name of Jesus Christ, who goes before us, may we be led into pathways of truth.
In the name of the Holy Spirit, who is power and breath, may we sense the Spirit’s movement in our lives.
May your journal be your companion and friend, your guide and counselor, through “him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).
1
Starting Out
Discovering a Journaling Practice
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Fourth grade was the “California year” for each of my three children, who attended elementary school in northern California. This meant spending that particular year learning about all things California, especially California history. They studied the Ohlone Indians, the native tribe of the Bay Area; the Spanish priests who built missions along the Pacific coastline; and the miners who made their fortunes in the 1849 gold rush. As part of the year’s study, the children went on a field trip with their class to pan for gold in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. After a long bus ride, the fourth graders eagerly scrambled up the mountainside to the stream to begin their hunt for gold. Using a small sifter, each child dug into the stream, sifting through the river mud and rocks, searching for telltale flecks of gold. Sometimes the children would get discouraged; they would turn to their teacher and insist that there was no gold there after all. But inevitably one or two persistent students who kept digging and sifting patiently would find the flecks and even the tiny nuggets of gold that can still be found in the foothills of the Sierras. It didn’t take long before the rest of the children saw what their classmates found and went back to enthusiastically dipping their own sifters in the stream’s icy water.
Your journal is like the sifter my children used to pan for gold. If you are willing to dip your journal into the stream of your life, even though it may mean getting a bit wet and muddy, you will find the gold of your own life and God’s eternal presence. One of the wonders of journaling is that it interprets us to ourselves. Here we find our own lives and discover that even the struggles we face are shot through with the gold of God’s presence. But this blessing will not be ours unless we actually take up our journals and begin the process of sifting through our life experiences. It can be seductively interesting for us to read about journaling but not actually put our pen to paper or our hands to the keyboard. There is risk in the writing, but that is also where the reward is found. Buried in the stuff of our lives, underneath the running current of daily activities, lies the treasure, if only we are willing to risk looking and seeking.
When we go below the surface of our life’s stream, we know from our own experience that this sense of God is not just past history or a lovely metaphor; it is a reality to be felt and touched, tasted and heard, perhaps even smelled. All spiritual disciplines and practices, including journaling, are about learning to be aware and awake, open to God, ourselves and the world around us. Journaling is meant to give clarity to your day and rest to your night, reminding you even when you are not writing in your journal that God is there with you, in and through it all.
Our true goal is a deeper relationship with the God who longs to meet us at the heart of all that we were and are and hope to be. Attention to our own reality—our dreams and our wounds, our desires and our hopes, our friends and our enemies, our past, our present and our future—is not for its own sake, but to tune our hearts to hear God’s transforming Word for us. Our journal writing begins with our willingness to let God accompany us from the very beginning as we dip our journal-sifters into the running streams of our own lives.
[Beginning With God
Before we take up our journals and pay attention to our lives, we begin with our willingness to be known utterly and completely by God. Make this prayer from Psalm 139 your daily prayer as you prepare to take up your journal and begin sifting through your own life:
O God! Dig into my life1 and know me heart to heart.
Test, probe, purify me! And pierce through
my thoughts—
See whether I be on a road headed for grief,
And take me by the hand instead on the way of everlasting life. (Psalm 139:23-24)
Praying this prayer makes clear our intention to invite God into the heart of all our practice even before we open our journals.
When I begin a walking or running exercise routine, I may well turn to friends who are experienced in it to recommend a brand of walking or running shoe. But these friends never recommend that I run in their shoes. They know that the shoes I will wear need to be fitted to my own particular feet; they must be exactly my size. And even if I wear the same size shoe, I cannot exercise in someone else’s running shoes. Athletic shoes conform to the original wearer’s own feet, and secondhand use gives support in all the wrong places, resulting in painful blisters.
A spiritual practice such as journaling might be started in response to a recommendation by a friend or colleague. But unless we find a practice that fits our life and the way we are created, it may give us more pain than joy. It is essential to begin by finding a journaling practice that fits who we are and where we are right now. Our beginning point is always the place where we are standing (or much more likely, sitting) right now. Though we walk along the way together with our friends and our family, our neighbors and our faith communities, we do not all walk in the same way. Each of us has peculiarities and gifts that we bring to journal keeping, and these need to be respected and honored.
Take a few moments now to reflect on how the practice of journaling might fit in your day or week, in your family life and in your devotional practice. In order to honor this activity, consider carefully when would be the best time for you to write.
[ FINDING A TIME \
Look back over the past week, or even longer, and ask yourself these questions: Am I a morning person, or do I really understand and think better in the evenings? Is there a time in the middle of my day when the children are quiet or the office buzz is stilled, giving me a few moments for reflection? If it seems especially difficult to find an available time, invite God to help you see a place in your schedule that might be missing from your own vision.
When we journal as a spiritual practice we begin with an openness toward God’s movement in our life and a desire to follow Jesus Christ. Such an intention makes journal writing prayerful writing.
There is not just one “right” time for prayer, and the time of our daily or weekly prayer might change in different seasons of our lives. As a mother of three small children, I found that setting aside an extended time once a week was more possible than trying to carve out even a few moments from my busy days. In monastic settings, morning and evening, noonday and nighttime were all times that Christians would meet for prayer. If this is an unfamiliar practice, begin with short times of five or ten minutes each. It is better to make even a small start than not to journal at all because the ideal time is not available to you.
Just as there is no right amount of time to devote to journal keeping, there is also no right place. A coffeehouse can be just as appropriate as a prayer room in a church or retreat house. But all spiritual practices benefit from returning again and again to the comfort of a familiar place and time. We honor our journal keeping by writing in a place that attracts us and that is also somewhere we can feel at home in ourselves.
[ FINDING A PLACE \
Is it easy for you to listen when you are in a coffeehouse surrounded by other people, or do you need to be alone in a quiet room? Is there a room or nook in your home for journaling, or will you need to claim a space at your workplace? Will you sit at the kitchen table near a window in the morning light or in a comfortable chair at the end of the day when the children are in bed? Perhaps you will want to take a few quiet moments at your office desk and put the incoming calls on hold.
Sometimes just a few small changes can reveal a space available for reflection. A friend complained that she could not find a space in her home for prayer. Everything around her seemed only to remind her of what she still needed to accomplish before the day’s end. But as she sat in her living room, she saw the large tree in her backyard. By turning the living-room chair just ninety degrees, she was able to make this beautiful tree an anchor for her prayer time and journal keeping, and so she found rest for her soul. Some of us find a place at home or at work, but others will need to look around for a third place. A coffeehouse was my personal sanctuary for the season of my life when my home was filled with the happy but distractingly noisy demands of children. You might consider using a corner in the library, an Internet café or the empty room after your yoga class has ended.
For some of you, ensuring the privacy of your journal in your home will be very important. Having privacy gives you permission to write whatever comes to you; it allows you to make the journal wholly yours. Along the way you may choose to share something from your journal as a way of sharing yourself with a loved one. But some of us feel the approval or disapproval of those around us more intensely than the hopes and dreams of our own hearts. Worse yet, some of us have been violated by others who did not respect or love those hopes and dreams. We will never truly begin until we begin with the permission to say what must be said, to feel what must be felt and to be as honest as we are able to be for the sake of our own souls.
Choose a place to keep your journal that will ensure, as much as you are able, that its privacy will be respected. Even when writing with others, only you have the right to share from your own journal. If you are using the computer, think of a way of informing others that your journal is not to be read. Even within my own “Helen” file folder on the family computer, I have another file that is personal and private.
[ CHOOSING A JOURNAL \
The stores are full of blank journals with many different kinds of bindings and covers. Will you begin with a new journal or pick up where you left off last year or yesterday? One workshop teacher suggested that it is best to use loose-leaf paper and a three-ring binder with dividers. That way you can have different sections for different types of journaling. Another author always has at least two journals—a larger one at home and a smaller notebook to carry with her. My daughter keeps three journals: a tiny journal that fits inside her purse and often has lists of reminders, a larger journal for reflections, and a travel journal that can easily be packed for trips away from home.
I especially like to write in the bound composition book with the mottled black-and-white cover. The lines are wide enough to accommodate my script when I write fast, and the books are cheap enough that I don’t need to worry about writing too much. These books also lie flat for writing, an important criterion for me. Some of you who might want to draw or sketch in your journal should consider choosing an unlined book. Anyone who hopes to write outside the lines—literally or figuratively—might also choose an unlined journal or an artist’s sketchpad.
Choosing a journal can be an important beginning to finding a journaling practice that belongs to you and fits the particular way God made you. It is also the beginning of honoring a spiritual practice and ultimately honoring your relationship with God and with yourself. Some of you will choose not to write in a book at all but will use your computer to both write and store your journal. Try making even the computer file a set-apart place by giving your e-journal its own file location, title and special font.
Take some care to select a journal that expresses who you are as well as a pen that will always be there when you want to write. If you are journaling on your computer, take some time there as well to set up your journaling practice. Making your time and place less haphazard clarifies your intention to follow through on your desire to keep a journal. Being intentional also helps you pay attention during the actual journal-writing time.
[ WRITING IN YOUR JOURNAL \
Whatever choice of pen or paper you make, do not let your tools be so precious that you cannot use them with abandon. One of the most important rules of journaling is that you need to be free to write the worst junk in the entire world. Most of us need to write ourselves into a place of understanding. If we feel the need to be meaningful right at the start, it can give us a severe case of writer’s block. For those of you who feel you can’t write because of the memory of a teacher’s red marks on a paper where you shared what was true and real for you at a moment in your childhood, this is especially important.
Allowing yourself to write without regard to sentence structure, spelling mistakes, paragraphs, finding the right word or even making sense gives you the permission and the freedom to come home to yourself and God in your writing. Give yourself lots of space to say or draw or imagine whatever asks to be heard, and keep your own red pen locked in a drawer or hidden somewhere. Better still, throw it in the garbage.
Writing your first thoughts without any internal or external revisions, or just trying to write without stopping for ten to twenty minutes, will help to free up the flow between your head and your pen on the paper or your fingers on the keyboard. Like the stretching exercises that one might do before running or swimming, “flow writing” is a good way to warm up before beginning a journaling exercise.
[ WRITING YOUR FIRST THOUGHTS \
Begin with a time of silence or music or even physical exercise such as walking. Then simply put your pen in your hand and begin writing. It doesn’t have to make sense, and you don’t have to write in sentences or even sensibly. You can make lists or complain about journaling, but you must keep writing for ten minutes without stopping, even if it means repeating the same word over and over. If you feel stuck, try writing with your nondominant hand and see what happens. Or begin with the words “I remember,” and write for five minutes. Then turn to a new page and begin with the words “I don’t remember”; again write for five minutes. Here are the rules: Keep your hand moving, and don’t cross out mistakes or worry about punctuation or grammar. Lose control and don’t think or be logical. If something comes out that seems scary or exposed, dive right in because it probably has a lot of energy.
Always put the date at the top of each journal entry. This may seem unnecessary at first, but it will prove important if you want to go back and remember not only the entry itself but its surrounding events. Sometimes the time of day and the place also matter for a journal entry, so don’t hesitate to record those. What we write in a hospital waiting room late at night differs from what we write in a coffee shop after a long, satisfying walk. The intention of a journal is to record and save the moment. It also offers the possibility of returning and reconnecting at a future time.
When we journal, we find that there is something about putting pen to paper (or fingers to the keyboard) and simply writing that seems to clear away the debris so that we can more clearly discern our lives and the world around us. But journaling as a spiritual practice means that we begin with the longing to come closer to God through our journaling. Like all spiritual practices, it begins with the trust that God is active at the heart of our lives and the life of the world. It begins with our openness to trusting in the transforming power of Christ’s Spirit to lead us closer to our true selves and to God. As we regularly and intentionally pray in this way, we discover that “God is already present2 in the hidden depths of the present moment; it is just because we were skimming along across the surface of what is happening that we were unable to know and rest in that presence.”
2
Beginning . . . Again
Staying in My True Calling
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Trosly, France1; Tuesday, August 13, 1985
This is the first day of my new life! Though it sounds melodramatic, I cannot avoid feeling that something significant is starting today. My decision to leave Harvard Divinity School and move to France to live for at least a year with Jean Vanier and his L’Arche community in Trosly took many tears and sleepless nights. It came after a period of many hesitations and inner debates. But as I drove away . . . I felt as if I were moving toward a new freedom.
The Road to Daybreak is a candid and intimate reflection on Henri Nouwen’s life in the L’Arche community in France and at Daybreak in Canada. It is one of several journals Henri Nouwen wrote at key turning points in his life. Shining through all of Nouwen’s journals is his willingness to risk new experiences in his search for an intimate relationship with God. Reading these journals, one doesn’t doubt his strong sense of belonging to God, but he is transparent about his own faith struggles as well.
Friday, December 132
Yesterday was not only the day on which Peter left, but also the day on which I received a long letter from Daybreak in Canada inviting me to join their community. . . . I know Joe’s invitation is not a job offer but a genuine call to come and live with the poor. They have no money to offer, no attractive living quarters, no prestige. This is a completely new thing. It is a concrete call to follow Christ, to leave the world of success, accomplishments, and honor, and to trust Jesus and him alone. . . . If ever I wanted a concrete sign of Jesus’ will for me, this is it. I feel many hesitations. Living with handicapped people in a new country is not immediately attractive.
The questions raised in Nouwen’s journals are more than self- examination; they are the seeds that plant renewal and transformation in his life. Nouwen has the space to move from utter certainty to naming all the hesitations and questions in his soul within a sentence or two, and only then does he find the place where he is called to “trust Jesus and him alone”—only to admit again to doubts about this particular call.
Like Nouwen, I am often sure of something yet unsure at the same time. I want and I do not want; I am attracted and repelled. I may long to move in a certain direction, but my resistance to going in that direction feels equally strong. I want to get it right and have my uncertainties sorted out and the truth understood. But if I would not write in my journal until I understood everything clearly, I might never begin at all. It is the writing itself that leads me into understanding.
