I learned something about myself this week. Or at least I figured out how to express something that I may have known all along.
When it comes to writing the things that are important to me that I take particularly seriously, I can’t write just one thing.
I noticed that this week when I was working on a prayer for healing for Monday’s chapel service (look on the sidebar in “other writings” for the finished product). It turned out that I couldn’t write that without writing “Games People Play,” the post that precedes this one.
They don’t have anything to do with each other, but I think when I open my self up to the kind of creative thought that it took to write the prayer I also have to open myself up to the kind of personal reflection that lead to the blog post. The doors are connected somehow, and I think many times in the past I have tried to fight the connection and I have just gotten completely blocked. The more I fight writing the second thing the more the thoughts and ideas of it intrude into the first.
Another recent example is from the end off our fall semester. I had to write a research paper on Jeremiah for my Exilic Prophets course. It turned out that in order to do that, I also had to write a long personal letter explaining myself to the young woman who I now know to call my “limerent object.” Again, they didn’t have anything to do with each other, but they both had to come out, or neither one would. But that paper turned out to be one of the best I have written here, and I would bet my allowing myself to express the other thoughts at the same time had a lot to do with it.
I’ve been noticing that most of my sermons end up being at least partially about how I wrote them, and I wonder if that isn’t another aspect of this phenomenon. When I open myself up to the work of writing the sermon I also open myself up to reflecting on the process.
I wonder what it will mean to my writing as I start to look for this process to occur.
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