How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

by Pat Schneider

When we humans dare to approach the deepest and most holy experiences of our lives, all language becomes metaphor.

There is not and never has been a belief system that holds exclusive truth. There is no book that contains all of the truth. But there is spirit, there are wise men and wise women, there is story, art, theater, music, and dance. There is metaphor, there is holiness, there is mystery.

If there is a Spirit, do the morning stars sing together inside us, too? And can we sing to the Spirit? Can we communicate with it? Does it communicate with us? Is it “manifest” only in universal “Laws,” or does it meet us personally? Can we pray? Are we heard? Does it answer? Do we hear?

To pray is to open oneself completely, intimately, into the Presence that is beyond our ability to name. And we have so few letters!

Although my understanding of spirituality has changed throughout my life, the central experience has not changed: There has been for me a deep and a continual sense of presence, and there have been experiences of meeting, or encounter, with that presence.

Prayer is, for me, an intentional openness to the presence of mystery in my life.

When we write deeply—that is, when we write what we know and do not know we know—we encounter mystery. Similarly, when we pray deeply, we encounter mystery. In writing, that encounter is sometimes described as a creative spark, the sudden emergence of an image, word, or idea that the writer recognizes as full of meaning. It doesn’t happen all the time.

In writing and in prayer we are essentially alone in the presence of mystery, regardless of whether we have companions around us. The inner journey is one we walk alone,

To open a door in one’s mind, whether in writing, in prayer, or in writing-as-prayer, is to invite an experience of “the deep.” It is rather like standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean at night, a cliff from which I can hear the pounding surf below me, and see in the distance a multitude of stars.