Why Write?

"This is praying time, and the act of listening in prayer is the same act as listening in writing.”

~Madeleine L’Engle"

So. It has been my intention to write something at least every week--write about things happening, write about a theme, a question. I haven't given much overview of what's happened so far--but is that really the point? I imagine I'll get to it at some point.

Many people when they start this kind of journey say "I'll start a blog...I'll keep people up to date or vent." The written word is a powerful and wonderful tool. My abilities with it are one of the few things that I am very proud of myself for. I write for more than just letting people know what's going on. I've been meaning to journal as well-- I haven't been doing that as much as I'd like. Things have been so up-in-the-air nonstop crazy I haven't been able to sit down and digest or reflect. I don't want to write just to write about what I did or give an outline of what I'm doing. Perhaps that will happen, but I write because I must.

Writing is personal, it is an extension of one's true self, their inner-being. When we write, our guard comes down--the act of solidifying our experience into a visible representation makes us vulnerable, allows the words to be shared--either with others or simply with the page. Either way, writing allows us to express where spoken words might fail.

Last year at Cabrini we started a Prayer 101 program--one of the things I discovered in that experience was that anything can be prayer with the right intention. Our actions can be prayer, our day-to-day experience can be prayer (the Jesuits and St. Ignatius are big fans of this, I've learned--"God in all things.") I did a session on journaling and did some research on what people had to say about journaling as prayer, and it made me realize even more deeply why writing is so important to me. Even if I am not writing out prayers or reflecting on scripture, my writing can be a prayer if I am making myself open to God. My fiction can be a prayer, this blog entry can be a prayer.

And so, in this new year and this new and frankly quite scary journey I will need to write--to share, to make myself vulnerable to God and to others, because that is the only way I will be able to find the strength to prevail. We have to allow ourselves to be weak in order to overcome. I open myself up in this act of writing in order to persevere.

In my preparation for that journaling prayer session at Cabrini I found this quote that puts it into words better than I ever could:

I write with brutal, tear-stained honesty the agony of right now because when the path is easy, it is also easy to forget the pain so deep that one cannot breathe...

I journal because one day someone will follow behind me, and when they are in the place of such pain their very being is filled with it, I don't want to forget where they are or how they feel. I don't want to forget the desperate need of a kind word, a soft shoulder, and a loving touch.

I never want to add wounds because I have forgotten the pain of my own.

I journal so I can understand where people are by where I've been and recall the hand of God in my heartache so I can be His hands in theirs.

-Jerri Phillips