Living Vision – the Practice of Journaling – Week 2 – 1/17/12

 

Tonight we continue our exploration of conversing with the Divine through journaling. This is a practice that has a long and rich history in many religions and spiritual heritages. For Christians, this practice of prayerful journaling and recording one’s spiritual interaction with God is most often traced back to Julian of Norwich, who recorded her visions and conversations in the 1300’s.

We noted last week that, like all the other disciplines we’ve explored, this particular practice engenders some reservations in those of us who enter it. And just for the sake of reminder, this listening and writing oriented discipline is in NO WAY dependent on your writing ability. You can misspell every word and make a million grammatical errors and still have a profound experience tonight. So let that go.

The other reservation we noted with this discipline is that we are such humble creatures that we can’t imagine that any words WE write can possibly come from God or God’s spirit. Julian of Norwich – maybe. Jesus, Paul – sure. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rick Warren- perhaps. But not us! Not Annie or Toby! Well, not so fast. To me, if God doesn’t speak to and through common folk like us, particularly when we’re engaged in listening for God’s voice, then what are we doing here? What’s the point of being spiritually devoted creatures. We need to let go of this notion that we aren’t good enough to hear from God or that God isn’t still in the business of speaking to and through ordinary, common folks.

And finally, for this practice and discipline to work, we have GOT to believe and trust that this force and spirit we call God loves us…adores us…wants nothing more than to be with us. If we’re still clinging to the Old Testament, adolescent understanding that God is pissed at us and just waiting to punish us, then we probably don’t even WANT to hear from Him tonight or any night, through this prayerful discipline or any other one. We’ve got to let God love us tonight…We’ve  got to trust those prophetic words – “I know the plans I have for you, saith the Lord, plans for good and not for harm.”

So in tonight’s practice we are going to converse with God, both talk and listen to God, through the discipline of prayerful journaling.  We’re going to do this by drawing a vertical line down the middle of each page. On the left side we will write our thoughts, our questions, anything we want to direct toward God. The right side of the page will be reserved for whatever results from our listening. After writing the thoughts and questions we have on the left, we look each one over and we wait upon the Lord. If and when we get any sense of direction, any little nudges or possible responses, we write them down on the right side. Don’t question or criticize what emerges in your right column. Just trust it and write it. We’ll worry about evaluating what winds up in our right columns later.

Now there will be an ebb and flow to this. It might not be that for each thing we write on the left we hear or receive something for the right. It may wind up that we have 8 or 10 things on the left when our 25 minutes ends and only 1 or 2 things on the right. There’s no right or wrong here, no number or balance to shoot for. Just write what comes to you to write and trust the process. We’ll debrief the experience and what we’ve written later, ok?