What would happen if you dug through your memories looking for your soul’s journey? You would find moments of joy, shot through with brilliance. You’d find unspeakable pain and grief and despair. You’d find sweet intimacies, wrenching doubt, steadiness, and regret. You’d find meaningless suffering and profound synchronicity. Most of all, you’d find mystery. Who are you, really? What’s your life’s purpose? How is the complexity of you even possible?!
A lifetime of experiences is too vast to wrap your mind around. That’s where the magic of writing comes in! Wondrously, the page can contain our complexity, including our contradictions, including what we can’t remember or would rather not remember. The page is capacious. It holds our stories up to the light, showing us what we can’t otherwise see: How whole and holy our lives really are.
If we choose, writing memories can become a contemplative practice. The Latin word contemplari means “to gaze attentively, observe, or consider.” When we put our experiences down on paper, we attend to them in a new way. We gaze attentively. We listen deeply. We observe patterns, we consider possible explanations. Dig deeper into the word contemplari and you’ll find the root templum, a sacred space. If we let it, the page becomes a temple where we sit with our past.
But the past, memoirists teach, is not where a story’s action takes place. Writing the past changes the present. That’s the whole point of contemplation. Whatever its form, contemplation helps us experience our experiences until they transform us. Writing is an especially apt means.
Only once we’ve subjected ourselves to transformation will our stories have the potential to transform their readers. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” Robert Frost wrote. Contemplation is valuable in its own right, but it also gives our writing agency in the minds and hearts of an audience.
The doors of this temple are opened wide, much like the pages of a notebook. Join me there this fall!
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
After months of preparation, I’m excited to launch this new, two-week online introductory course on spiritual memoir. Here’s one participant’s reaction: “I appreciate Elizabeth’s wisdom and offering the depth of her experience along with examples of writers who reach for the most of themselves. It gives me permission to find the most of myself.” Please join me!
If you’d rather dabble, check out this 75 minute sampler.
And I offer ongoing drop-in support for those wanting to sustain their spiritual memoir writing practice. This month we’ll write about place, exploring our spiritual geographies and the role of setting in stories. Register here!