Journal as religious experience

From Bismarck Tribune:

"From Emperor Marcus Aurelius to the Apostle Paul to Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, journal-keeping is an age-old way of paying attention to our spiritual lives, said Carl Koch, program director of the Franciscan Spirituality Center in LaCrosse, Wis., who will lead a journaling retreat Oct. 21-23 at Sacred Heart Monastery in Richardton.

There's a kind of dance, he said, between our beliefs and our day-to-day lives. Journaling is one way to work through the conflicts between what we believe and what we do.

It's also a way of discovering things about ourselves, he said.

One of Koch's favorite quotes is from poet Robert Frost: "I write to find out what I didn't know Iknew."

Especially in spontaneous journal writing, Koch said, "we inevitably find we always write over the edge of our consciousness. We generally find out things we didn't know were going to pop out."

In a sense, journal keepers writing in a religious context are writing their own Bible, their own "salvation history, telling the story of our encounters with the divine, the development of our relationship with the holy,"he said.

A really profitable journal needs to have honesty, spontaneity, freedom: That can make people hesitant about doing so.

"The irony is the only way to free ourselves from those fears is to do it," he said.

The profit of journaling is not necessarily the content, but the fact that we are expressing what comes from our soul, giving ourselves a chance to look, reflect and be aware, he said."

I like the ring of that, especially the "honesty, spontaneity, freedom" part. "Expressing what comes from our soul" and "chance to look, reflect, and be aware."

I rarely write to authors on the net, but I just dropped Ms. Herzog a note to thank her for the well written article. It was definately worth reading and I am sure it will prompt thinking from me for days to come.