Last
night, as I laid the hearth for my family’s celebration of Imbolc, I
found myself reaching for my camera, to take a quick shot of the altar…
and then I hesitated. I’d laid that altar for Brigid; what did it say
about me that my instinct had been to photograph it for a blog? Not This Year’s Altar, Cat Chapin-Bishop, 2013.I
realized it didn’t feel right to snap a picture of the hearth–that, in a
way, it was no different than drinking the offering we’d left there.
The altar was not for me, and it wasn’t even for my community, but for
my gods. It felt like photographing the altar would have been a kind of
theft.
In the end, I left the picture untaken.
One of the
dangers of writing about my spiritual life is that I risk getting
my priorities scrambled. It’s the “here I am wasn’t I” of meditation
raised to a near-infinite degree; by recording my spiritual life, I risk
making the recording, and not the life, the center of my acts. And it
is true that in the middle of meditation, in the middle of worship, in
the middle of a walk in the woods or a ritual or a Tarot reading, part
of me is always asking, “How can I write about this?” And part of me is
taking notes… not participating in the moment at all.
That’s a loss.
It’s
not just spiritual writing that can lead to this, of course. When my
husband and I were courting, we lived about a hundred miles apart… and
this was in the bad old days before the Internet, when words took days
to travel from one city to another. Perhaps because of that, we managed
to pen over five hundred letters to one another. We also each kept a
journal, and like Dr. Who and River Song, when we met, we traded
journals.
For over a year, virtually every word I wrote I wrote
with Peter hovering invisibly over my shoulder. Eventually, I felt it
changing how I lived in the world. Everything around me became grist
for another letter, another journal entry. Was I looking up at the
stars to see them, or to see them so that I could write to Peter about
them? And of course, every experience had to be remolded slightly,
repackaged, in order to fit into a container of words to share.
I’ve long said there’s no such thing as non-fiction. Blue Tide. Bruce Anderson, 2007.The
very act of writing changes experiences; turn them into stories, and
you make a hundred tiny decisions about which parts of the story to
bring forward and which to let fall away. Try to describe the ineffable
quality of a spiritual experience, whether it’s watching a sunrise
or the bioluminescence of the ocean at night, and you wind up creating
an altered version of the experience… One that has been simplified,
flattened for transit from brain to brain.
Don’t think that’s
so? Think about recording your dreams. Before you write them down,
they have layers of resonance and significance that defy explanation.
After you write them down, though, there’s a false certainty in all the
details. In your dream, it might have been a book, or a scroll,
or–just possibly–a take-out menu that you were handed (by a god? your
best friend? or your great-grandmother?). But once you’ve written it
down, the words on the page will record a version of your memories that
seems so absolute that it may replace the fading memory of the dream
itself.To write about Spirit is to risk distorting or
distracting from the experience itself, whether of ritual, dream, or
gnosis. Words are two dimensional, even when they create the illusion
of more, and we always change the map of the world when we render it
flat.
Given all that, the risk of distorting or distracting from the realities of my spiritual life, why do I write about it?
I’ve
had a lot of different reasons to blog, over the years. I’ve
half-joked with members of my Quaker meeting that they should all be
grateful that I blog, because it is an outlet for the messages that
don’t quite rise to the level of vocal ministry, but which I’d probably
blurt out in meeting for worship if I didn’t have a blog. That’s true
enough, I suppose… but it doesn’t answer the question of why I feel
that pressure to speak in the first place.
I suppose the truth is, with writing and with spoken ministry, I just really love the feeling
of Spirit flowing through me in words. There is a sensuousness in
being a conduit for even glimmers of what’s sacred, and I deeply love
the feeling when I have done it well–when I’ve found words for a
numinous experience that doesn’t fit into words precisely, and when I’ve
done it well enough that another person has felt what I did.
I
don’t mean to oversell what I do here. Of course, a lot of the time,
I’m not so much conveying a spark of Spirit as I am groping for some
matches in the dark. And even on those days when I am responding to
something bigger than myself, as Quakers say, “the water always tastes
of the pipes.” My personality, warts and all, seeps into whatever I
write, Spirit-led or no. I can’t help but muddy the water I’m trying to
share. Cold Winter Sunrise. BLM, 2014.Still, that instinct, the instinct to write,
is deeply-rooted in me, after all these years. I have been blogging
since 2006, and journaling about my spiritual journey for twenty years
before that. So when I see the firelight reflected on the altar
chalice… when I watch one neon streak in a sunrise otherwise lost
in gray… even though I know I will fail, my impulse is to at least try to catch that flash of wonder.
For better or for worse, I am always trying to bottle the lightning, and to share it with the world.
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