About 12 years ago, someone suggested that I keep a journal. Since then, and in widely different contexts, several others have made the same recommendation. At first, I didn’t know where to begin. A blank page can be daunting. Should I fill it—like a daytimer—with the trivial details of my day-to-day living? Or should I gush with the intimate cares of my heart? Or should I give abstract consideration to political and philosophical matters? Journaling is not a guy thing. When my daughter was first learning to read, several different people bought her diaries—the kind with a lock and key—but no one thought to give one to my son. Generally, it doesn’t occur to us to cultivate in boys the art of setting things down in writing.
When it was first suggested that I might benefit from journaling, I didn’t know why this might be so, nor did I know how to proceed. I made entries sporadically—my half-hearted attempts at reflection. Later, I used a template from Mind Over Mood. This is a pragmatic tool that helps you see patterns, pick out relationships between your daily activities and the way you feel. You map out every waking hour, inserting in tiny boxes a two-word description of what you were doing each hour and then assigning a mood rating, from 0 to 10. I did this for several months and discovered that I had horrible sleep patterns, often staying up until 3 and 4 in the morning, then wondering why I felt awful the next day. Over a couple of months, I was able to bring my sleep habits back in sync with the rest of the world, simply by tracking them on a chart. Now, three years later, I continue to maintain a well-structured habit of waking and sleeping without much effort at all—and my mood is correspondingly better. This kind of chart often provides a person with the first insight about moods and their relationship to the activities of everyday living. Often, it comes as a complete surprise to a person that he feels low when dealing with a particular person, for example, a spouse or a parent, or that he is angry whenever he has to do a particular task, like making a long commute to work or cleaning up after the kids. With insight in hand, a person can then roll up their sleeves and get down to the business of changing their lives—either by doing new things, or by examining their habitual responses—or both.
Andrew R. Irvine offers another resource in his book, Between Two Worlds: Understanding and Managing Clergy Stress. Although context specific, let’s face it: stress is stress, and humans have a limited repertoire of responses to stress. Irvine offers a useful template for daily and weekly reflection. I have adapted it for more general use. Download it as a word document, along with a few of Irvine’s comments to get you started. The big challenge of this model is that it requires self-discipline. You have to set aside a half-hour each evening to sit and reflect on the day. I have found that, when things get hectic, it isn’t easy to find the time for this exercise. You have to follow it … well … religiously. And there is no immediate payoff for this kind of exercise; it is only after months and years, as you sit down and leaf through old entries, that you discover that your thinking and your habits have slowly changed. Only with the passage of time do you recognize that, yes, indeed, you have grown.
By far the best resource for journaling—at least within the context of spiritual reflection—is Sarah Stockton’s A Pen and A Path. It is a collection of 36 directed reflections that force you to dig deep, forcing you to turn your attention to issues of faith, family, childhood, work, aging, sexuality. Be warned: each of these exercises takes time; make sure you set aside an hour or so when you can work without interruption. Stockton begins each reflection with an exercise called “Pen in Hand” which neatly answers the problem of what to do when confronted with a blank page. “Pen in Hand” is a series of questions to loosen up the imagination—free-association—scribble whatever words come to mind. Then, when you have finished this preliminary exercise, these loosely strung words become the raw materials for more focused writing.
Finally, of course, is blogging. Traditionally, only a handful of private journals have ever come to public attention—Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, and a few others. But, almost by definition, blogging must be public. There are all sorts of tools available, such as blogger and typepad, or like me, you can make it up as you go along. Nevertheless, it seems to me that those who blog in the hopes of attracting a large audience to generate advertising revenue, or who hold themselves out as independent newsgatherers, and those who are unabashed exhibitionists, ignore the opportunity for interior growth which journaling facilitates. Paradoxically, those who blog to journal are engaged in an activity of private spiritual development while inviting others to watch. And their readers become a lot like tourists in Tibet—gazing through the windows of the monasteries, trying to take a peek at the monks as they meditate. For my own part, I have tried to answer this paradox by offering more than interior musings. In reviewing the progression of my “style”—if style is what it is—over the past couple of years, I note a shift from personal reflections toward entries which might be of use to readers as points of departure for their own reflections—a movement from solitude to conversation, from thinking to doing.
I am mindful of an observation by Henri Nouwen in his book, The Wounded Healer: there are two ways of being spiritual in the world—the mystical way, and the revolutionary way. And yet each inevitably leads to the other. Those who begin with reflection and contemplation reach a place where they can no longer keep still about their observations, and this leads them to activism. Conversely, those who begin with activism reach a place where they cannot help but discover that the things which motivate their extroverted approach to the world are things which lie deep within their being. Perhaps blogging carries with it the potential to capture the intersection of these two modes of spirituality.