As the Spirit Moves

(c) Jill Ann Terwilliger 2007

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. ~Anais Nin

reading “A Blessing For Your Voice” by the Rev. Gretchen Thompson.

Here is everything I know about ministerial voice on one sheet of paper, getting smaller as the years go by.

May you come to know your voice not so much as a tool to be wielded but as a visitor to be welcomed.

May you welcome it as you might any stranger, with kindness, knowing that it comes from some place you will never fully understand.

May you be good to it and feed it and allow it to rest, especially this, allow it to rest.

May you refrain if you can from insulting it by tying it up in restraints of self-righteousness, self-loathing, or the need to sound some certain way,
like good enough,
smart enough,
clever enough,
profound enough,
sophisticated enough.

If your voice ever seems about to leave you, you may trust that a guest well loved will want some day to return. So I invite you, instead of clutching at it desperately, to kiss it on the cheek and send it down the road with bread and cheese. And if you wait for its return patiently, it will likely return. And may it then, knowing what it means to be loved by you, in time nestle deep in your heart, and from there, from that safe place, offer itself fearlessly to all the world.

And Jill,
may it be beautiful,
and may it be healing,
and may it be truthful,
and may it be you.

Sermon: As the Spirit Moves

It was April 20th, a Tuesday two weeks ago, it was past noon and the newsletter deadline was looming. My column was written. The extra little bits – announcements and things like that – were done. All that remained was my sermon topics. In fact, all that remained was the topic for today, May 6th. Whatever I had planned some months ago and penciled in on my planner no longer seemed interesting to me, or maybe I’d said what I had to say on the subject inside some other sermon, but nothing else was coming to replace it.

I’ve had those words from Gretchen Thompson, “A blessing for your voice,” posted over my desk for six years now and they have sunk in enough that I know forcing a topic to emerge for the sake of the newsletter is not going to end in a good way come Saturday May 5th. So I wrote a title “As the Spirit Moves” and then I wrote the little blurb, “I’m not quite sure yet what the focus of this service will be. Until then, I remain open to the movement of the spirit. … [and then] Oh wait, I’m getting something … [and you know how they say your life flashes before your eyes if you’re in a car accident or you’re near death? Well there, before my eyes, flashed all the books I’ve read about writing and about writers block, and then I knew … May 6th would be] … a sermon about writers block! And so here we are.

How many of you consider yourselves writers? … This sermon is for you! But that’s only ______ (2?) of you, and there’s another 40 or 50 here. I don’t consider myself a writer either, despite the fact that I write the equivalent of a medium sized book every year. My profession and call are to the ministry. Writing is simply a requirement of the call. But I think this topic will have something to say to the rest of us, as well.

One of the first books about writing I read was Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. She comes from a Zen Buddhist perspectives. She studied with Katagiri Roshi at the Minnesota Zen Center for 6 years. She writes:

Whenever I went to see [Katagiri Roshi] and asked him a question about Buddhism, I had trouble understanding the answer until he said, “You know, like in writing when you …” When he referred to writing, I understood. About three years ago he said to me, “Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace.”
This book is about writing. It is also about using writing as your practice, as a way to help you penetrate your life and become sane. What is said here about writing can be applied to running, painting, anything you love and have chosen to work with in your life. When I read several chapters to my friend John Rollwagen, president of Cray Research, he said, “Why Natalie, you’re talking about business. That’s the way it is in business. There is no difference.”

So, whether you write or run or paint or teach or balance accounts or manage people or garden or fix things, this sermon is for you. This sermon is about using anything to go past the point where it is easy, to move through the blocks to the point where what you are doing is beginning to teach and transform you. Natalie says: A friend once told me “trust in love and it will take you where you need to go.” I want to add: Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.

ASK: So, what do you love? Maybe writing is your thing – don’t worry about claiming the weighty label of “writer.” If you were going to answer that sentence – Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go – if you were to fill in what you love what might it be? … … …

Any of those things are things that can get blocked. Any of those things are things that – if you continue to follow them through the blocks, can take you into new and interesting places of self knowledge and personal growth, and to experiences of meaning and joy in life.

I already told you about Natalie Goldberg. My other guides in writing have been Anne Lamott, through her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. And then The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Goldberg, as I said, comes from a Buddhist perspective, and her family heritage is Jewish – both of these inform her writing. Lamott, in Bird by Bird talks some about God and prayer but it isn’t really until her later books that I learned that she is deeply Christian, but in a very quirky way. And The Artists Way, it outright says it is a spiritual path to creativity and it draws on wisdom from many of the worlds religious traditions.

The fact that all of these books about writing and creativity have some kind of spirituality attending them might mean a couple different things. It might mean that these are the kind of books that I am drawn to. The spiritual and religious has always been my draw in life. If a book about writing is going to grab my attention, it’s not surprising if it comes from a spiritual perspective.

It might also mean that there is something inherently spiritual about writing, about doing anything that you love and continuing to do it past the point where it is easy and following it to somewhere new, “to where you need to go.” Goldberg says: Writers don’t write because they know, they write to learn. They write to penetrate their lives and become sane.

It is the same reason I pray: to penetrate my life and become sane.

A few months ago my spiritual director – a wonderful Catholic nun over at Transformations Spirituality Center, Sister Gertrude, whom I sit and talk with about my spiritual life for an hour each month – a few months ago toward the end of an uncharacteristically non-helpful session – a session that came in the mid afternoon on a day when her after-lunch nap had been filled in with something else and where she could barely keep her eyes open as I talked and where I was starting to get a little resentful of her sleepiness – toward the end of that session a few months ago as I mentioned that after all these years still I couldn’t seem to commit to any daily spiritual practice where I stopped and intentionally sought out a connection with something greater so that I could get filled back up by plugging into that spirit, she said to me, what if you thought about it as sitting down with a friend and you are doing it as much for your friend as for yourself. What if you treated it as a relationship, not as an energy and inspiration service station? The fact that this gem came from a nearly-sleeping woman only gives me more respect for the depth of her wisdom. Or maybe it was the spirit speaking through her.

So for a few months now I have been sitting regularly with my friend. I don’t know who or what this friend is. It is entirely possible that this friend is my own highest self. I have decided it does not much matter. The point is to sit with my friend, penetrate my life, and become sane. As I sit I give attention to another little gem of Sister Gertrude’s: Be attentive to truth however it comes, taking the essence and leaving the rest. I have not accomplished the task of penetrating my life and becoming sane in three months time. I am sure it is the work of a lifetime at the very least. But I have noticed something, and that is that I am more open.

I am more open to digesting unflattering truths, to considering their consequences with less personal defensiveness. I am more open to considering there may also be flattering truths, and that these are important to look at, to take stock of, to learn how to use more fully. I am more open to letting a sermon follow its own path, working to shape it rather than control it. I am more open to leaving doors open in hospitable welcome to whatever and whoever may come in to disorder and inspire my life.

As I read through these three writing and creativity guides again this week and jotted down all the things I thought worthwhile to say to you this morning, I noticed that all of them, in some way, related to hospitality.

Prepare the guest room, each guide said in their own way. There’s a prayer I came across recently credited only to “an African schoolgirl” that says
Oh thou great Chief,
light a candle in my heart,
that I may see what is therein,
and sweep the rubbish from thy dwelling place.

So, prepare the guest room. If it is writing, choose tools you can both enjoy and afford (a nice enough pen and notebook, but not so nice that you’re afraid to write something BAD in it) and, commit to writing something every day. Julia Cameron has two pillars to her 12-week course to higher creativity. One of these is writing “morning pages,” these are for everyone, not just writers. You wake up in the morning and before doing anything else, write three pages, long hand, of whatever comes to you. She calls it a brain dump. It’s cleaning out the rubbish so you can see what else is actually in there. Preparing the guest room doesn’t guarantee that brilliance will turn up for you, but without the preparation, the likelihood is very small. And if brilliance does show up, you might not be prepared to notice it or welcome it unless you have prepared the room.

Keep the cupboard stocked. The other pillar of Cameron’s 12-week course is a weekly “artists date.” It’s a time you set aside to do something BY YOUR SELF, something that you really want to do, each and every week. Cameron has some pretty tight rules about what is and what is not an artist date, but there are lots of ways to fill yourself. If you’re a writer, in addition to going movies, swimming in the lake and playing with watercolors, you need to read good writing. If you’re a painter, you need to see good painting. A few weeks ago I spent seven hours driving from here to Traverse City and back just to attend the installation service of a new colleague. It was a wonderful service. It was a LONG service – nearly 2 ½ hours. I got to hear what amounted to four different sermons, hear and sing spectacular music and be surrounded by such high energy. It was worth the drive. It restocked my cupboard.

Open the door to each experience as though it were the first time each time. That’s advice from Natalie Goldberg: Go in curious and wondering.
§ What will it be like to write a sermon on writers block? I wonder what will happen?
§ I’ve run 5 miles before but I wonder what it will be like today?
§ I’ve been managing this same working group for a year. They’re usually so ornery, but I wonder what will it be like today?
§ My mother is visiting. She’s usually a delight. But I wonder what it will be like this time?

Going in curious not only lets you notice different things, it actually lets new things happen. When their nieces knocked on the door and said “let me come in” the Three Grown-Up pigs were so stuck in their past frightening experience that they couldn’t even notice the difference between a grown fox’s deep voice and a young pig’s excited squeal. If you think you know what to expect, you won’t notice what is actually happening around you.

Finally, Practice acceptance when the guest does not come or decides to leave. This is that little crux of the moment that is called writers block. Lamottt says:
The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty. … This emptiness can destroy some writers, as do the shame and frustration that go with it. You feel that the writing gods gave you just so many good days, maybe even enough of them to write one good book and then part of another. But now you are having some days or weeks of emptiness …
The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feeling. But if you accept the reality that you have been given – that you are not in a productive creative period – you free yourself to begin filling up again.

In other words, if there is no guest, make sure the guest room is ready (write a page of anything, even a page of how much you hate writing), and then go out and stock your cupboard with some more supplies. Go for a walk and notice the trees. Call and friend and notice the inflections in their voice, their turn of a phrase. Go to a park, with your own kids or without, and watch those little bodies do such spectacular things. Let the sun soak into your bones.

I’ve heard it said that hospitality is essentially a spiritual practice. It is also true, that spiritual practice is essentially learning to be hospitable to the movements of the spirit.

Who are you preparing the guest room for? Is it the Great Creator, your inner power, your best friend from college or a research breakthrough? It does not matter. What matters is the practice. What matters is the opening. What matters is the movement. What matters is the deep patience that you are doing the right thing within the vast possibilities of life.

If your voice ever seems about to leave you, [Gretchen wrote] you may trust that a guest well loved will want some day to return. So I invite you, instead of clutching at it desperately, to kiss it on the cheek and send it down the road with bread and cheese. And if you wait for its return patiently, it will likely return. And may it then, knowing what it means to be loved by you, in time nestle deep in your heart, and from there, from that safe place, offer itself fearlessly to all the world.

May it be so. May we make it so through our living.