Laughing and Dancing with God: A Spirituality of Writing

Writing runs the gamut from agony to ecstasy, aggravation to elation, and atrophy to engagement. Writing involves mind, body, spirit; is personal and communal; and is sacred and political. As writers, we use the mind as we think, read, process information, and offer commentary. Our minds, housed in our bodies, affect our capacities to be imaginative and articulate. Our spirits help us integrate our total selves, made holy by God.

Writing is contemplation and analytical. Writing, as critical thinking, becomes a major interest during seminary, for the serious seminarian. Why must there be trauma-drama around self-expression, reflection, and researched analysis when it becomes a permanent text? This personal kairos moment moved me profoundly. I promised God that if I ever had a chance to help facilitate writing for others I would. After a few years of teaching from undergraduate to doctoral teaching and administrative work, I have developed my writing paradigm.

This dialogical, improvisational essay explores my experiences of writing as spiritual joy, introduced by phrases from literature and film. After reflecting upon my methodology, time and space, I continue with: explorations of my writing rituals and practices; examinations of my writing-based epistemology; explorations on writing challenges, and writing as vocation.

Just as Alice ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror in Lewis Carroll's Through a Looking Glass, and St. Paul ruminates on us seeing in a mirror dimly (1 Cor 13:11), I ponder on how/what we see, how life works, how ideas interact, and what it all means. Such questions have moved me, as a seminary professor, toward an interdisciplinary, incarnational lens for scholarship and writing.

My Womanist poetics of power pedagogical epistemology—being aware of all things that oppress people as I think holistically, including, artistically about how people teach, learn, and know towards transformation—involves the total self, imitating the directive of breath and blood for a human body—creating health, to discern the distinction between a pathology and a practice of creativity that brings life. As teachers/learners, every engagement is an opportunity to explore, discover, and grow: praxis of empowerment. My pedagogical strategy reflects my writing. My writing strategy emerges out of respecting the Imago Dei in all persons, believing everything belongs to God, and we are called to be good stewards of our gifts and graces. These characteristics include: engagement of analytical, critical listening from all possible places; capacity to be curious and imaginative, juxtaposing apparent antithetical constructs or apparently unrelated images, symbols, or thinkers; my commitment to people's wholeness and survival frames my writing with a humility amidst dialogue, collaboration, representation, and joy; gifts of fluidity and flexibility energize me to develop projects where I can change my mind; God's immediate presence incarnates writing metaphorically; the capacity to use and move beyond categories and assumptions, presses and stretches me intellectually; the process and ritual of writing, as an organic, efficient process involves a close reading, creativity, discovery, discernment, participation, learning, and wonderment. Writing is never work for me, despite omnipresent, omnipotent deadlines. These seven characteristics frame my writing, providing mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical engagement affecting time, and space.

Just imagine a clock striking one after seeing a mouse run down the clock: this nursery rhyme's humor is present in my life daily, when I learn not to take myself too seriously, in life and in writing. Improvisation frames hours and places I write. With the twin blessings of a high energy level, and the joy and sheer delight in writing, I am able to write throughout the day, in diverse places. Writing for me is organic, thus when and where one writes best is personal.

Disciplined improvisation is essential. My undergraduate years as a double major (voice and piano), where I daily spent five hours rehearsing, provided the space and mental/emotional/spiritual/physical sensibilities that support my writing: an ability to create and follow a schedule; being comfortable being alone for hours; knowing when to return from a break, to continue rehearsing. My schedule of 18 hours meant taking...