Journal Writing As a Spiritual Quest

THE ROLE OF DISORDER
When I was only twenty-three years old, a few weeks after I^'d declared my journey on paper and was preparing to leave for Europe, an older friend whom I much admired asked me if I'd ever gone through a ^"dark night of the soul^" It was the first time I^'d heard this phrase, originated by St. John of the Cross. It is an evocation: if you've ever gone through a dark night of the soul, you know it. But while you are in the middle of it, you may not know. I thought then the notion sounded romantic. It is not. A dark night is a shattering, confusing, painful experience that is also an ordinary, to-be-expected part of the quest.

Despair is the ultimate blackness that every person must endure in gaining full maturity... and this is not such a bad thing as we have been led to believe. —John Brantner

Naming What^'s Happening

·         What reasons can you see for your current disorder and despair?
·         How long has this been coming?
·         What hints have you been avoiding? What ways have you put off facing disorder?
·         What do you know intuitively about this time in your life?
·         How are you willing to facilitate the process of disorder?
·         What old expectations of order are being cleared out?
·         What new order is emerging?
·         What assumptions seemed to bring this on?
·         How is life different right now?
·         How has your perception changed?
·         What is despair teaching you to pay attention to?
·         What blessings can you imagine coming out of this time?

Do not attempt to answer these questions all at once; they are set here together to provide a framework, a way of normalizing your experience.

The spring I turned forty, anguishing about the lack of creative direction in my writing, feeling as though everything I knew how to do was over and I didn^'t know what was next, a friend in my writer^'s group used the word despair. ^"You sound in despair,^" she said. I promptly burst into tears of relief; someone had seen my condition and given it a name. Now I could begin to interact and respond. I could use the naming as a rock to stand on.

It^'s a strange thing about life with gravity: we cannot leap without first pushing off from something solid. Until we admit our despair, or until someone/something helps us name it, we are in free-fall. We have no mechanism for gaining enough ground to jump. And what despair requires of us is tolerance during the free-fall, and then the courage to take a leap of faith.John Brantner, for many years the chair of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, was a philosopher who specialized in helping people understand despair, grief, and difference, all ele­ments of life and spiritual experience that we tend to overlook. Even though we have been told by saints and sages that there is a dark night, that we will lose ourselves in the woods, we may still be shocked and surprised to find ourselves there. It is part of human nature to hope that spirituality will save us from this experience, that we can combine enough luck and faith not to suffer.

In Brantner^'s worldview, this is not only not possible, it^'s not desirable. He defined despair as an integral part of human maturity, an avenue of learning that should not be avoided. This seems to be true. Despair is such a nearly universal experience among people who have chosen consciousness, that you and I would do well to accept it, name it, and prepare ourselves as willingly as possible to submit to the process.

I like to read biography, to see how other lives are going along. I am especially interested in the lives of the great human role models. I want to glimpse what it takes to be a person capable of carrying that kind of stature. When I look at the records of their lives—words left in their own journals and private writings, words recorded by biographers—an implicit code emerges, a telegraphed survival. The insights that inspired these people were first endured in private anguish: they did not fit in their surroundings; they were not comfortable with their socially prescribed roles; they found they could not settle for satisfactions others seemed to enjoy; they felt alone, isolated, alienated from community and spirit; they des-paired, cried out to the sacred, ^"What do you want of me, then?^"

And slowly they made their way through. They did not shirk despair. They did not turn back. And they did not destroy themselves or abandon their dreams even at moments when all seemed lost. These people used despair as an avenue for deepening con­sciousness, for allowing themselves to be changed. Reading their course to maturity, we can find a map adaptable to our own course. A hopeful message: If despair comes to our own small lives, so comes the avenue for allowing it to deepen and change us.Each of us has expectations about what life ought to throw our way. We get up in the morning with the assumption that we know approximately how the day is going to go. We hug our loved ones, drive carefully through rush hour, walk around ladders, and look both ways before crossing the street. These little rituals create a sense of order. Order is seen as one of life^'s favors bestowed upon us. It works most days, works for long stretches of time, but we sell a bit of our souls in exchange. We come to expect order, but we have to deal with reality.

There are times when the spiritual quest stretches our expec­tations to the limit, and our sense of orderliness is torn away. The harmony we fancied between ourselves and life seems irrevocably broken. We cannot think about this clearly. We are disoriented and without language to explain. And most of us can^'t go to a mountaintop to figure it out. Ordinary life continues to demand that we function, no matter what else is going on. We are required to go through the motions of daily chores, work, relationships. These are the times when a half hour of journal writing, first thing in the morning or last at night, may be the greatest gift we can give ourselves.

Despair is the human psyche^'s initial reaction to disorder. Despair is a state of shock. We have expected certain things to be true and these things no longer appear true. The mind doesn^'t know what messages to generate or what behaviors will help.

Disorder can be generated internally or externally. When something breaks down in our belief system about life^'s progress, then disorder is generated by hidden, unseen, often unconscious, forces. Psychology has defined despair as a breakdown in communication between the self and the world. When the world is not behaving according to our deepest hopes and beliefs, the mind is thrown into chaos. We don^'t know what to believe. We don^'t know what beliefs are being challenged.

The journal may be your only way of glimpsing what disorder is about. It^'s hard to talk to others, to say, "My expectations aren't being met and I can hardly stand the pain . . ." Your job in the journal is to articulate the individual nature of the problem, to go in search of the beliefs that seem broken, to mend them and replace them with mature beliefs. Dialogue is your strongest tool in this process, along with writing after meditation and taking time to grieve. Breaking out of old beliefs is a natural part of the spiritual journey—so is creating mature beliefs.

Listing specific questions can also be helpful in reestablishing a sense of mental order, but this is only one way of writing in your journal during crisis. The blessing-a-day exercise helps you move from negative to positive focus by acknowledging that a relationship with the sacred is still occurring daily and looking for the good in what is happening. A blessing a day is your grounding point.

Disorder is also visited upon us by outside events: the business fails, you^'re fired, your relationship or marriage crumbles, a child falls in with drugs despite all you do, you or loved ones are struck with injury or illness: or the state of the world finally gets to you, the thousands of children who die of dehydration, and you feel helpless to intercede, to solve problems or prevent similar disasters. These events break into the orderliness of our lives and change them—often irrevocably—without permission. Nobody asks for disaster: we cope.

Again, the journal may be the most receptive place to dump the responses that accompany disruption: feelings of anger, fear, disorientation. The journal holds our questioning of life and spirit while we grow large enough to encompass this latest event within an expanded sense of orderliness.

Life is neither ordered nor disordered: life just is. Disorder comes through the process of having our assumptions challenged, some-times brutally challenged. In the gap, we learn to re-perceive life, to review our assumptions, to adjust to altered conditions for travel.

In despair, you feel as if life is not keeping its end of the bargain. The only problem is there was no bargain; you only assumed there was. You are confronted, over and over, with your own fantasy of life. Use the journal to probe what these fantasies are. Dialogue with your belief system, with the inner child, with the fantasies themselves. Dialogue with events and people involved in these events which have precipitated the crisis. Look for the lessons that may be learned from disruption. Ask for—don^'t demand—insight. Eventually you will be able to allow disorder to become acceptable, to make despair a friend.

A friend! All those dark nights, head laid upon the windowsill, the anguished questions and lack of comforting response; the gut-wrenching fear when you realize you are not in control of anything; the anger at being stopped in your tracks and torn apart while the rest of the crowd is still playing golf. Yes, this too is your quest.

The spiritual journey is a step-by-step process for giving up illusion. Each time illusion drops, we experience temporary disorder because we^'re not sure how to adjust to life as we now recognize it. The gift of despair is that it offers us a process for making peace with what is and becoming comfortable with new perceptions. That process of peace is a gradual understanding of what it means to surrender: from ego to spirit, from the past to the future, from despair to joy. Surrender is not an easy concept for most of us: despair is where we begin to learn it. We are challenged again and again to cope with lack of control and switch our allegiance to trust. ( excerpted from pp. 91-98)

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