On Writing for Spiritual Purposes*

I have been thinking about the students I work with in two General Education courses this semester. It has occurred to me that they write mainly to report on or respond to material in courses. For them, writing reaches audiences of one and serves the purpose of helping them to get grades. The material they are writing about involves ideas they’ve only begun learning or researching, and very little of it is connected to their experience. It may not occur to them in this busy period of their lives to think of writing as having spiritual or moral purposes.

Unlike my students, I’ve been doing a lot of writing that has to do with my experiences, and it has seemed to have spiritual purposes. I have been writing in three different genres (four, if I count writing a journal). I’ve been writing more poetry lately. I’ve been working on nonfiction dealing with grief. And I’ve been in the process of writing a novel. That’s poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. The novel has a character in it who has lost a child and is fixated on using his GPS to go everywhere in the small town where he lives.

Again, this is different from the writing we do when we are in school. I’m not sure how much of it will ever reach readers.

I know from talking to editors at writers conferences that publishing in different genres can be considered counter-productive. They caution against it. But writing poetry, nonfiction, and fiction has allowed me to process ideas in different ways. I first noticed another writer doing this when I taught some of the writing of Judith Ortiz Cofer in a nonfiction class. Ortiz Cofer often writes of the same experiences in different genres. She has a poem and a nonfiction essay about a time when her family’s car had a flat tire near a field of sugar cane. The poem, as I recall, focuses on the flat tire. But the essay allows her to explore the depth of her father’s caution in not allowing her and her siblings to stray off into the sugar cane. The poem is more about a diversion. The essay is about parental fear.

What I have found is that this multi-genre writing has helped me to really explore the various angles of what I’ve been going through. It has been worth trying to do. Writing in different genres, I have noticed, has helped me to begin to think through some theological difficulties the recent loss of my son has raised. I have been able to write about things in these different genres that I simply can’t talk with very many other people about. I have been able to push back on some parts of my understanding without worrying that I am becoming heretical.

It is a given, certainly, that most of us process things many different ways. For those who found writing to be a punishing and unrewarding pursuit in high school and college, it isn’t an activity to turn to on losing someone close. But if we give ourselves room and kick out those inner editors who seem to tower over our writing with their red pens and who argue for inflated language over the right word, writing can become a way to work through personal issues. That my poems are now to be published is an added, exciting perk I never would have expected. I’m beginning to hope that they will help others also.

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