As I’ve written elsewhere, I love to journal. I’ve been doing so, poorly, since about 1985. As such, it has not been an uncommon thing to receive new journals at Christmas or for birthdays. It’s especially meaningful when my boys buy new journals for me. My younger son, Graeme, bought my last one. It is now full of my life; spillings of poetry, life musings and assorted literary brick-a-brack. I used a bookmark he once made for my wife that, along with his delightful pre-pubescent picture on it also contains the words “I love you Mom!” How could that not be life changing?

What follows is a typical example of what I might write in any given journal, especially a new one. And, as you shall see, there is no small irony in the sharing thereof.

“I wonder how many times I’ve had the experience of pen on paper, the brand new journal? Most notable is that both my sons have purchased new journals for me; Graeme a few years ago and now, this Christmas, mere hours ago, my older son, Calum. It is beautiful, leather bound and handmade in India (I guess, in the interest of appreciation for the thoughtfulness of my son, I’ll temporarily suspend my moral suspicion as to who may have constructed it!).

My spotty, irregular journalling discipline would be a poor picture indeed of how deeply meaningful it is for me. Yet, in spite of that fact I know so little about the art of creative chronicling one’s life journey. The greatest benefit of journalling is also its greatest challenge: slowing down long enough to consider, carefully and lovingly, one’s pilgrimage with God and others. It is one thing to write about life events. It is quite another to probe and record one’s thoughts assiduously, faithfully, prayerfully.

Even blogging, something else I enjoy immensely, is fast-paced by comparison, hampered only by the pace of my not inconsiderable typing skills. The sheer number of available words per minute on computer may in fact be counter-intuitive to the deeper interiority asked of me in writing out those same words.

What is it about our contemporary, Western mindset that demands such unsustainable productivity? Even as I write this I find myself thinking how much less efficient it is to write these words only to type them again an hour later for the benefit of my blog. Moreover, I can only surmise at the diminished capacity for memory and ongoing, dynamic interaction with my own interior life because of the ease of a ‘save’ button.

To sit quietly for long periods of time with small things, few words or simple thoughts is vanishing quickly from our cultural milieu. For our experience of time and space to provide enough interest it must be liberally peppered with constant stimuli, a veritable banquet of over-the-top sensory memorabilia. We are both products and victims of our own infantile detritus.

Anyway, I must now move on as this entry has taken much longer to write than the length of time it would take me to mindlessly watch a sit-com, fast forwarding through the commercials…

Fairly consistently, since about 1985, I’ve kept a journal. Well, I write in them. I write the stuff that happens to me in them, the stuff happening in and around me. It’s cathartic in one sense, having the cleansing effect of affecting a greater “soulishness” about the way I live and relate to my world. The visceral feel of pen on paper gives an immediate reminder of my mortality and the deeply sensory way God moves in us.

These days, however, I do most of my “writing” on computer and my pen is rusty, dulled through inactivity. It has sat, bored and undemanding, awaiting my return to saner pastures where the literary stream of consciousness I call writing gives voice once more to the complex confines of my inner circus. It is a life that always needs the light of day to prevent it from becoming just another cavernous, uninteresting drone of pedantic inactivity. Still, it acts as worthy opponent to any temptation toward self-aggrandizement. Try reading, honestly, your journalistic exploits twenty years after the fact and one is speedily confronted with the fact that the same shit I dealt with then is pretty much the same now, only with a few added layers of sophistication. This probably makes them more insidious since it is a common reality among us all to live out our lives, more or less, as the same person from start to finish. Our dissatisfaction with this reality dwells in kahoots with God’s unending desire to find us. The result is what we commonly call spiritual formation.

This morning’s exercise in stretching my spiritual muscles comes in the form of a feisty, deeply intelligent nun, sister Alice St. Hilaire. She is my friend, a fellow Ignatian and my spiritual director. If anyone can see through my often blinding hypocrisy it’s sister Alice. I have come to depend on this valuable insight lovingly offered. This is most likely because I live in a pretty consistent fog; a mushy, grey pudding of sleepy ambiguity and lack of focus all peppered liberally with self-doubt. There are always questions – so many questions, all of which become annoyingly absent the moment I sit down to sip tea and share God-talk with sister Alice.

She is never bothered by what bothers me. Am I to be intrigued or insulted by this? To be sure, it can be disconcerting whenever someone hears the most vulnerable bits of our lives and offers back ne’er a blink. It’s as though she is thinking, “alright, is that it, then? You’re all worked up about that?” A good spiritual director is one who listens to the story behind the story, ably stripping away the layers of our experience like Shrek’s onion. “Ogres have layers” he quips. If he only knew! They are adept at sensing where God might be in our unfolding narrative and never seem to be in a hurry to suggest broad, sweeping changes that might make things all better.

If I didn’t already have at least some rudimentary awakening to the things of God, such mental vapidity would seem cruelly disappointing. Of this one thing I am certain, God does not intrude upon our journey to provide certainty and a laundry list of perfectly satisfactory answers to all our queries. Countless souls, significantly greater than myself have discovered this long before me, Job being chief among them. If Job’s experience can be considered normative in any contemporary sense, we should take away the abiding idea that God does not exist to provide us with answers. Instead, God gives us better questions.

Every time I step into sister Alice’s quaint living room, the presence of God is thick in the place, literally dripping from the walls and windows and oozing out of the carpet. It smells faintly of whatever modest breakfast was consumed earlier and bears the years of humble struggle to survive in Yakima’s tough downtown, providing shards of light in the darkness there. Where my family and I dwell comfortably in “suburgatory” (thank you ABC) in our multi-bedroom home with our multi-vehicle mobility, she chooses to live in a quiet, unobtrusive peace in the midst of the despairing milieu of Yakima’s poor and destitute.

Sister Alice is fond of saying that the ways by which God has revealed Godself to me becomes who I am and paves the way for whatever may be next. If she is any indication of the ramifications of this statement, then I need to make the journey from pen to tea and back again. It is a trip exponentially greater than the sum of the miles involved. It is a foray into the heart of God.

The next thing I remember (and wish I couldn’t frankly) was the sound of my head bouncing off the concrete floor. From this point until my arrival in the Emergency at Memorial Hospital, memories are scant at best. I can recall profound pain in my lower back and total blindness in my left eye. Yes indeed, good times.

Once I was actually taken from the ambulance on the transport gurney I became slowly aware of my changing surroundings. Questions. Someone keeps asking me questions. I probe my mental storehouse for something approaching answers. I can find neither words, nor sentences, let alone answers. My less than ideal lucidity denied me access to any coherent response. Or, any response at all.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that things were less rosy than I persisted in believing them to be. This notion was confirmed as someone proceeded to cut my pants off with unnecessarily large scissors. Now, there have been times when having some nice nurse remove one’s trousers could conceivably be a rather welcome experience. In this instance, however, the nurse in question was a rather beefy looking fellow with a biker beard and possessive of none of that delicate finesse one might reasonably expect from someone engaged in dissecting one’s trousers from stem to stern. That is to say nothing of the discomfort of cutting devices of any kind so close to my body’s southern hemisphere.

I glanced to my left long enough to see a most disconcerting sight, one that would only take root in my conscious mind much later. A different nurse, female this time, who enjoyed a healthy and welcome ability for bringing a breezy levity to an otherwise not so chipper circumstance, held in her careful hands what appeared to be an arm. The hand at the end of this arm was pulling the very cool geometric feat of reaching all the way to the forearm with the fingers and was tilted to one side. It was just this physical impossibility to which I was awakened some weeks later upon my return to what would become my new “normal” for some time.

It is at such moments when I realize what a gift shock can be. Hence, in the growing light of my situational gravity I cackled some ridiculous quip or other, pleased with myself that the tough dude on this table still had “it”, even on royally shitty days like this one. They did not need to know that historically, my best defense against the worst circumstances is to dish up an extra helping of cheesy humor.

The nurse lifted the hand-like thing so it was once again parallel with the arm-like thing it was (thankfully) attached to. She proceeded to bandage it and then box it up in some kind of triangular splint that looked more like the packing inside a TV shipping box. She seemed delighted with her work, hinting that she was perhaps a new kid on the medical block. That said, I was elated that my arm was once again a straight prairie road instead of the physical version of a u-turn; no longer a tangent but a vector pointing in the proper direction. Up.