People write all the time—memos, cards, or emails, presentations for speaking, teaching, or preaching. Whether you write for personal reflection or for others, this book will deepen the creative process by finding meaning and mystery in ordinary notes or analytical essays, prose or poetry, sermons or lectures, music or lyrics, committee minutes or family stories. “Writing is a form of contemplation,” wrote Thomas Merton. Exquisitely written, Writing Tides embodies Kent Groff’s passion to help anyone discover contemplative insights through personal reflections, practical notes, or work-related writing. Drawing upon the author’s experience leading courses in writing, spiritual formation, and vocation, Groff guides readers to discover writing practices that aid meditation, prayer, and spiritual growth.

Writing Tides

Finding Grace and Growth Through WritingBy Kent Ira Groff

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2007 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-687-64265-6

Chapter One

Observing—Focus on Awareness

Paying attention in all directions

Monday Morning

Since turning five, when her dad died and her mom remarried, Marin has spent her summers on Grandpa and Gram Panofsky's farm where she'd go skinny dipping and doggy paddling in the pond. Even a required swim course at North Kansas School for Youth could not prepare Marin for a long-promised trip to Gram's friend's apartment near Florida's Miami Beach. Here she is at the ocean her very first day—observing breezes, laughter, sand, clouds, saltwater, seagulls, boats, and people with picnic lunches. One minute she wants to run into the sea, the next she wants to run away. It's too scary for her child-size psyche to think of wading into the waves—let alone jumping into them—yet. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe twenty years from now when she comes back as a marine biologist to contemplate the same stuff from different angles. Today, this child just walks around mesmerized and a bit iffy about everything.

Worthy writing begins by showing up at the shoreline with round-faced innocence. Actually to a child nothing is unworthy if you can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell it. Research in any field is about clear-minded observation: being present to all the data, mind-boggling facts and feelings so incredible you can't find words for them yet.

Blaise Pascal, forerunner of modern computer scientists, was a thinker's thinker. He got so giddy observing some of his higher math calculations that he wrote, "The loneliness of these infinite spaces frightens me." But observing his fears as well as the figures propelled him into contemplation beyond calculation. In scribbled fragments published after his death as Pensées— "thoughts"—Pascal is still giving the world spiritual insights that surely rival his mathematical discoveries. Thinking and thanking come from the same Middle English root, thenken. Scientific and technical writers, take note.

Slowly Goodly

I think: Goodly things are happening slowly. I thank.

"In-Between" Spaces: Liminal Awareness

The shoreline is the place to begin. Did you ever notice how primal revelations in spiritual traditions often occur beside water? Moses and the Hebrew slaves cross the sea of reeds to enter the land of promise. Jesus calls disciples by the seashore, "Follow me!" In risen form Jesus builds a charcoal fire by the sea, saying, "Come and have breakfast." The Buddha spoke of using a raft (spiritual practices) to cross the river into Enlightenment. Depth psychology compares the human unconscious to the ocean.

The outward shoreline corresponds in space to the liminal state within each of us. Limen in Latin means threshold, the doorway in which the conscious life of thinking and acting meets the storehouse of unconscious knowing and dreaming. Likewise, sunrise and sunset correspond to this inward liminal state in time. Mountain summits serve the same purpose in primal societies. Even in our postmodern culture, shorelines and mountaintops still lure us into respite and restoration. Once while at the New Jersey shore, I woke up by surprise at 4:30 a.m. Sitting on a rock, a stranger and I watched in silence as the sun arose sliver by sliver, until its colossal arc, magnified by the ocean mist, illuminated the entire sky. I wager the effects of such environments mysteriously tap open the window of the soul—one's true self—no matter what subject or whether a person is religious, atheist, or agnostic.

Original writing—whether highly analytical or intensely spiritual—taps into some threshold of deeper awareness. Such ripe moments often occur in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep or semi-dozing, in meditation or prayer.

The problem in a fast-paced society is not how to produce liminal experiences; it is how to allow time and space to notice what's already there. Writing begins with observing, so awareness is the first layer of our response to what surrounds us. Since our ancestors first learned to speak, then write and read, words have been a way to respond, record, and reflect on lived experiences.

The Tree: Paradigm of Contemplation and Manifestation

How can we cultivate the art of listening beneath the surface of family dynamics, corporate scandals, political angling, global warming and warring, tensions in our bodies?

The most important Hebrew prayer is the Shema, named for the first word meaning hear, listen or pay attention—or obey. "Listen, O people of God, the Lord your God is one." Deep listening draws us into loving connection with God, neighbor and self, as Jesus reaffirmed in Mark 12:29. Mindfulness is the term for such contemplative listening in Eastern traditions. Shema means attentiveness with one's soul, one's whole being—heart, will, mind, and body. To write of anything significant begins with awareness of its significance for you.

The tree stands as a paradigm of the spiritual life in Judeo-Christian and scores of indigenous traditions. Imagine the upper part of the tree as a manifestation of our life of action, bearing fruit in the world, risking stresses of wind and weather. Imagine the root system as the hidden life of contemplation, beneath conscious awareness. Its trunk—interacting with earth and sky— represents mindfulness (shema): listening attentively as the Ground of our being nurtures us to listen attentively in the world of action.

Yet it is one tree: a union of attention and expression. Mozart could contemplate a complete symphony, then furiously pen the notes to manifest the masterpiece he had heard from start to finish in his head. Contemplation focuses the imagination to create keen action.

Life is ultimately defined by what we pay attention to. What we focus on feeds us—my translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's idea that "man is what he eats." Writing is a way of paying attention to things twice, savoring their layers, their essence. The same thing can be said of art, photography, cinema, music, dance, or any of the sciences. And each of these in turn depends on writing to pass on tools of the trade, as in the give and take that occurs in healthy commerce of life.

Thomas Merton received countless letters demanding to know how he could produce so many books and pretend to keep a Trappist vow of silence in his hermitage at the Abbey at Gethsemani, Kentucky. He answered that writing was a form of contemplation, "writing and praying as I write." Since prayer is not the opposite of action, but rather a form of action, we could also say writing is a form of action. A group of Palestinian and Israeli authors gathered at the Sheikh Hussein Bridge, a symbolic link to Israel and Jordan, to discuss new ways to achieve peace in the Middle East. Israeli Etgar Keret described it as "kind of like an AA meeting. It's that kind of a support group" for writers on both sides to imagine a better future. The pen is mightier than the sword.

Most mornings, before beginning the day's work, I take some time to practice physical and spiritual exercises (like some in this book) and to write in my journal. But when I do serious writing, I hide away for a few days in a retreat center, a monastery, or our cottage in upstate New York. Since I frame writing as action, I tell myself to settle into contemplation first, so I can draw from its taproot while I write. A decade ago, at the Jesuit Spiritual Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, I wrote this prayer poem, and it now guides my writing for short or long periods.

    Writer's Asceticism

    Merton-like I hide away
    to pray to write and pray
    in this my hermitage,
    to birth my heritage:
    the gift of the burden,
    the burden of the gift.

I invite you now to pause and reflect on the place writing has in your life: What gifts does writing bring? What struggles? What invitation do you sense in relation to your writing? (see exercise 2).

"Focal Experiences": Active Contemplation

Meaningful writing can spring from times of testing and gestating. John Fitzgerald Kennedy wrote his bestseller Profiles in Courage while flat on his bed from back surgery, on leave from the U.S. Senate. Laura Hillenbrand wrote Seabiscuit from her bed of chronic pain that surely mirrors the broken horse and characters of the story. Life may hand us sabbath in the form of an illness, a car crash, a failed career. But how can we cultivate active contemplation without needing forced sabbaticals?

It begins with focusing on drops of experience all about us. High-tech environments insulate us from the throbbing messiness of nature, substituting the third-hand stress of cell phones, e-mail, and virtual conversations. After probing the impact of technology on culture for over two decades, philosopher Albert Borgmann coined the term "focal experiences."

Direct and messy. Focal experiences refer to direct involvement in the blessed messiness of life. You change a diaper, get your nails dirty digging, smell a musty book, sit with a homeless person—or cook a meal from scratch. Focal experiences are about being present rather than alienated from life.

Take the example of food preparation. You can heat a frozen dinner in a microwave. By contrast, procuring the food, preparing it for guests, savoring the smells, serving the meal, lingering over conversation, and cleaning dishes becomes "a focal thing." And focal things ingrain us with focal practices, habits that promote mindfulness.

Often when I eat with a group I finish last, allowing time for more conversation. If someone notices my eating, I may say, "I'm on Thich Nhat Hanh's diet." What's that? Simple, fifty chews per bite! Well, maybe thirty. This Buddhist monk who witnessed daily violence to Vietnamese children caused by napalm and land mines, responded by founding the Buddhist School for Youth Social Service in Saigon. In his book Anger, Nhat Hanh says we overeat and gulp our food to numb ourselves. (In writing, gulping down huge slices of life dulls our keen observation of reality and takes away the raw tension.) The primal experience of eating is an excellent way to cultivate mindfulness in everything.

Here's how contemplative chewing works. First, by eating mindfully you slow down. Second, you savor each morsel. Third, you eat less because your stomach gets the message before that twenty-minute gap (when you normally keep eating) and says, "I'm satisfied!" Because of that you have more energy since your body becomes less tired and has less work to do. Fourth, there's more time for conversation, or if you're by yourself, for contemplation.

Eating and drinking can become practices to savor friendship, beauty, and life. "Most people drink coffee mindlessly from a cup held in one hand while doing some activity with the other," writes Paul Jones, former United Methodist pastor and now a Trappist monk. "In the monastery we have two-handled cups, for contemplative reasons ... The monk grasps the fine shape of his cup with both hands and is thereby rendered unavailable to do anything except to be totally absorbed in the act of drinking, lost in the experience."

We cultivate focal practices by participating in play with our children, but not by parking them in front of a TV or feeding them a DVD or an iPOD. Even such tidy initials belie our compact shortcuts to living reality. Virtual chat rooms allow us to evade the give and take of real-time friendships. Of course, tech devices can also deepen lived experience, but that is the point: to be present to the raw stuff of life. So we can use arts and technology to re-present life, or to thirst for its deeper reality. That means showing up for life, self, and the Source of all life.

Another simple way to practice focal awareness is to carry a small magnifying glass. In Lost in Wonder, Esther de Waal tells how she will pull out her magnifying glass to look at a leaf, a twig, moss between concrete slabs, dandelions pushing up through gravel. What would lemon peels, paper, the texture of threads, or brush strokes in a Van Gogh print reveal?

Is this not close to what Jesus meant by considering the lilies of the field and the birds of the air? Is this not what Eastern traditions mean by mindfulness? I invite you in every occasion of happiness or danger to practice the response of guides like Moses, Isaiah, and Mary: "Here I am." The words can an act as a breath prayer for intense moments of crisis, or as a centering prayer for extended periods of meditation (see exercise 3).

By practicing focal awareness in simple matters we can train the soul to be present. Here I am, not there I might be. Here is why chemistry teachers still expose students to laboratory experiments where beakers break and smells may drive them from the room. Here is why some students of faith still learn original scriptural languages of Hebrew or Greek, Arabic or Aramaic, Sanskrit or Mandarin. Here is why people go on archeological digs or climb Everest. Here is why the disaster agency's budget manager needs to spend time with street level beneficiaries of the funds. Here and now experiences evoke something beneath facts. They take you across a primal threshold into spiritual insights nobody can teach you. One drop of experience may unlock a clue to the cosmos. It's like looking at the same facts and figures with a stereoscope.

Notice, notice, notice! And read, read, read! to harvest the observations of others. Then write, write, write! to get in touch with facts and feelings you didn't realize were there all along. Scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote in The Divine Milieu that because of creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing in our existence is ever mundane to those who know how to see. Your eye catches traces of grace in the grit.

Training the eyes of the heart to see links insight and action. Bobbie got involved in MADD (Mothers—and others—Against Drunk Driving, as she likes to say), after recovering from critical injuries in a car crash. One evening a state police officer presented the state MADD board with a group police photo for use in MADD advertising. Ordinarily a quiet person, Bobbie spoke out, "I don't see any women or people of color in this photograph." The police officials redid the photo. Sheer noticing became an act of justice.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Writing Tidesby Kent Ira Groff Copyright © 2007 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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