The Practice

When we write, our hand can’t keep up with the brain, so each sort of does its own thing, and God slips in. We do not think, we just write. Suddenly, we read the words we’ve penned, and realize that we have expressed an idea or insight that is new to us. It didn’t come from ourselves, and we know we’ve had a bit of help. Perhaps the help comes from God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Mary, guardian angels, or one saint or another; perhaps it is immaterial from whence the help originates.

Writing can be an act of prayer, but it isn’t always. Sometimes we write and it’s just writing, but other times, it is prayer. Any act of ours to connect to God with the intention of falling deeper into His gravitational pull, falling more deeply in love with Him, is prayer.The early Greeks, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine of Hippo discuss the “faculties,” which includes, will, memory, perception (the senses), reason, intuition and imagination. To be authentic and integral, writing and praying both must involve all the faculties. When we write we must explore our memory, using our senses, reason and imagination to do so, but that writing must be rooted in desire (will) and intuition, which must, in turn, be grounded in God. Writing as a method of praying contextualizes each of the faculties in terms of its influence on a soul in a relationship with God.

Through our faculties, as we come to know and understand something better, we are capable of naming and describing it, whether it be a feeling, insight, object, person, situation or experience. Psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, and poets tout such wisdom—but when we are done with all the naming and describing, when we have exhausted our word banks, we are left with the indescribable essence of the thing, where words are insufficient and unnecessary. The spirit and soul of the thing; where God lives.

“Writing to pray,” is the notion that exploring our lives, through writing, affords us the opportunity to surrender faculties to God. It gives us the chance to find and use all the words to grow beyond the real world realm of words, into the spiritual world. Writing with this intention, this seeking of God, is prayer.

 

© 2014 Marilyn MacArthur, all rights reserved