A Fresh Look at Writing as a Spiritual Practice
Karen Hering’s new book, Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within, hits the bookstores next week, and I want to encourage everyone interested in writing as a spiritual practice to get a copy. In her role as literary minister at a Unitarian Universalist congregation, Hering developed what she calls Contemplative Correspondence, a practice of writing from prompts around theological themes like faith, prayer, sin, grace, and redemption. If this sounds heady or dull or too religious, hold your horses. This book is far more than what you might expect. Karen’s reflections and prompts are meant to exercise our metaphor muscles—our capacity to make connections between disparate images or ideas, and therefore our ability to communicate across differences, resolve paradoxical problems, and relate to mystery. Her choice of tough theological terms is deliberate. We need to reclaim the language of mystery; we need to remember language’s capacity to…