How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

by Pat Schneider

To write grief onto a page of lined paper until tears blur the ink is often the surest access to giving or receiving forgiveness.

To be in an attitude of praise or thanksgiving, to rage against God, or to open one’s inner self and listen, is prayer.

Writing is for me the surest way to find out where I am and to open the gate to where I might go next.

When we write deeply—that is, when we write what we know and do not know we know—we encounter mystery.

The inner journey is one we walk alone, as the old gospel song says: You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley. You’ve got to walk it by yourself. Ain’t nobody else can walk it for you, you’ve got to walk it by yourself.

If I am made in the image of the creator, then I am myself a creator, and my acts of creating participate in mystery.

Writing, when it is soul work, is creative, and if what I believe is true—that we are “made in the image of God”—then we, too, as creators, may brood upon the waters of our own “deep.”

Z

Mark Nepo that opens this chapter: … Now I understand: to blossom is to pray, to wilt and shed is to pray, to turn to mulch is to pray, to stretch in the dark is to pray, to break the surface after great months of ice is to pray, and to squeeze love

To pray

I myself, when I turn my attention and “unfold again”—am the prayer.7

Unfold

Silence is all we dread. / There’s Ransom in a Voice

Silence

The more we open ourselves to love, the larger our capacity for love becomes.

Capacity

We unfold into love.

Unfold

Writing them—slowing down and allowing the images to write themselves, without trying to analyze them—can bring about an amazing experience of personal revelation.

Slow

That work of going into silent, closed places of memory and writing through it again is sacred work, redemptive work. Under pain, if we go deeply enough, there is joy. Under confusion there is clarity. Under

Go deeper

The good news is, under pain, there is joy. Under grief there is love.

!

Poet Louise Glück wrote in “The Wild Iris” that “whatever/ returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice.” I believe that with all my heart.

Returns

Let there be no shame. And it is so.

Wow powerul poem

I have made a hallway for myself, and I am walking down it. I walk in sunlight and nutmeg. I walk in the still magic of imagined space,

Reimagine a painful memory

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE JOURNEY The self you leave behind is only a skin you have outgrown. Don’t grieve for it. Look to the wet, raw, unfinished self, the one you are becoming. The world, too, sheds its skin:

Maybe she is right. Maybe the old self has to die for the new self to be born. Or maybe, for me, the old self doesn’t have to die. Maybe who I have been is not erasable on the tablet of who I am, or in the book of who I will become. Maybe writing, like painting, can be pentimento—one layer over another, the early layers now and then showing through.

yes

Writing is often a struggle between the personal and the universal, and the way writers deal with that struggle varies.

The issue for me, both as a writer and as a spiritual seeker, is courage—the courage to be there myself, and the courage to allow the reader to be there—to see, to touch, to taste, to smell,

human suffering is the price we pay for freedom—our own, and the freedom of others. We are free to make mistakes, free to be cruel or kind, free to hurt or help one another. We are free in a dangerous world;

Soul garment. Spirit garment.

Y

“It is what we love the most / can make us most afraid

Y

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

Dang