Journaling as spiritual discipline and the false writer's god.

I found this blig entry very thought-provoking, and wanted to share it. I used to always keep a journal, up through my twenties. I don't keep a journal at all now, and I sometimes wonder why and if this contributes to my sense of days slipping past me at the speed of light. It's very strange to me that something that I used as a tool for reflection pretty constantly throughout my life has had little place in my life for the past five years or so.

But reading this blig post helped me understand why, suddenly. It's because back when I was in my early twenties, I read a book called Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg. I really loved this book, and I still think it's a valuable resource for writers. But here's the problem: over the years, writing took on the role of a religion in my life. This was encouraged by a number of books I read on the subject of writing. I turned it into a false god, I now realize, one that needed to be served every day until I felt terribly guilty. Things got really bad around the time that my first child was born; I was trying to do what Julia Cameron calls "morning pages"--three pages of longhand writing a day--which she and other writers I know swear by as an essential tool to becoming a "real" writer. But it wasn't working out. A lot of the time, I felt angry and frustrated, by my constant navel gazing, partly, and by the idea that I had to do these daily exercises in noodling around in my own psyche.

Looking back, I noticed that the journaling started falling off as I started taking my religious tradition more seriously. I think I felt a need to break with the false god, to get to the real God.

But I do kind of miss writing, like I used to before it become a hideous exercise in self-absorption. Anyway, here's the link:

http://www.aholyexperience.com/2009/05/journaling-as-spiritual-discipline.html

I wonder if anyone else uses journaling in this way. Alternatively, are there are "replacement" religious practices you've had to get rid of to approach the true ones?

I've never kept a journal, and with the possible exception of our old friend BH (who seems like he might have kept one), I don't know if I know any men who have kept a journal.

On the other hand, for a few years I archived some of the posts I'd made on syracuse dot com, not in that vindictive way where you capture some of the stupid or mean things others say so you can whip them back out at opportune moments to embarrass them, but where someone would say, for example, "I don't understand why Catholics don't just admit that annulment is the same thing as divorce," and I would write a longish post explaining how and why we believe they're not the same thing. There were a few years over there where we kinda did have substantive exchanges, however pointless in changing anyone's minds. But I ended up with, I kid you not, several hundred thousand words of Joe-authored catechesis/explanation of the faith. But maybe two years ago I stopped saving any of those posts, and probably stopped making them at some level. I think I had fancied them as the basis of some project that I could edit on overcoming the objections one might have to orthodoxy, where I outlined or explained the ways that the orthodox beliefs of Christians are sensible and nothing to be embarrassed by. My sense was that there was a real hunger for orthodoxy, but also a real fear of embracing it for looking stupid in our O so smart secular world, and I envisioned a smart little book that took on all the objections I'd heard over the years and showed how those objections could be pretty easily put away.

I guess I came to see that as a kind of vanity project--like somehow I was going to make orthodoxy okay again--and after the tenor of the forum became so nasty, the substantive posts kinda dried to a trickle.

I offer this as a kind of analog to your experience, though hardly a perfect one. I think my writing was always directed outward, for others to read, but it was also a kind of idol (to borrow Bacon's term). On the other hand, I obviously haven't stopped, though I have tried to move into a more substantive vein again.

keep a journal in the format mentioned. I did keep a Dream Log for a time when I began my studies.

Journals are good to keep a memory locked in documented form for future reference and comparison.
How it assists in a persons advancement varies by individual.

for your responses. I'd never really thought about gender here, but you raise good points--and BH's writing,as far as I know, was always outward directed too, and he did quite a lot of it. But it's been, and continues to be from what I hear, directed towards exploring different genres--fiction, then poetry, etc..

I'm glad that you saved those posts, Joe, and I want to say that the things you wrote helped me a great deal. I can directly trace my movement from fuzzy thinking about my faith to (greater) clarity to many things that you've written over the last few years on syracuse. So collecting them for others is, perhaps, something you should think about--it's not a vanity project, perhaps, so much as a reflection of how one person came to orthodoxy and has framed answers to common questions. (Not to try to tempt you back to an idol, LOL). I can tell you that there were moments early on after I joined the forum where someone would pose a challenge to you, and I would think, "That sounds reasonable. I don't really have an answer," but you always would. I was much more wishy-washy in certain aspects of the faith, having always been more drawn to the mystical side of things and kind of ignoring some of the harder questions. So my point is that you did change my mind about certain things, or at least got me off the fence, even if some hard-core atheists aren't ever going to consider another opinion.

And BelieveHUman, I agree with the reference aspect of journals--I love to look over my old journals to see who I was at a given point. I think I just need to get back to what it was like when I was a kid--writing things down fairly regularly, no set format--not the militant "religious practice" of writing three pages or else, etc..

There was a time a few years ago when it seemed like the old forum actually had some content. Here's to hoping this place picks up the slack.