A Labyrinthine Journey: Soon Coming in 3-D

I know I said last month that I was going to be more intentional about writing. I blogged a lot right away and then grew increasingly silent. Life and other projects have stepped in the way. But, I’ve been writing. In fact, I picked up a used Thinkpad just for writing that is much lighter, smaller, and has great battery life. This way, I don’t have to become a hermit from my family to work on things.

I have two major writing projects in my head. Both have peeked their heads into the blog. One is going deeper into the Enneagram from a distinctively Protestant Christian perspective. This project has joined forces with an old writing project using the images of the ancient elements as spiritual growth tools. This one is more deeply in the research stage. I still don’t have the Enneagram “cold” enough to be bold in writing much about it yet. The research is active and background.

The other writing project is the one that I am spending time with. In May I preached a sermon series on the United Methodist “Rethink Church” marketing campaign. The way it came together has led me to want to devote more time to writing more fully about the ideas. Yet, for the longest time, I was stuck in getting started. I recorded the sermons and they have given me the basic document to work on, but that hasn’t been enough.

I realized that I didn’t yet want to write it. I hadn’t sold my own internal publishing board on the project. I wasn’t clear enough on why I thought my ideas were worth writing about yet. So for the past week, I’ve been working on my own book proposal for “Rethink Christian” (my working title). At the moment this has nothing to do with trying to find an agent or a publisher, but it has everything to do with getting me to turn off the television and get up earlier in the morning to make the time to show up as a writer.

Part of me wonders if that is normal for other writers: to have to sell themselves in writing. Another part says that doesn’t matter. If this is what I need to do to get myself into the game, then let it be.

I’m closer to my selling point then I was last week. For that I am grateful.

One of my long-time dreams is to write. Not sure if I will ever actually publish anything, but I have thought for most of my 51 years that I would like to at least try.

But I haven’t had the nerve to really take the risk of really giving it a shot. As I have been working on my own Soul writing about writing, I have been trying to figure out what is blocking me from even trying it out. There is a fear of rejection, yet that reason is not the greatest one, and that surprised me. Instead of being afraid of rejection, my biggest fear has been of being ignored. The idea is that I would invest my energy and time only to find what I write about being dismissed as irrelevant.

One of the purposes of my blog is to try to get past that fear. The fear is still present, because so far my blog posts only get a few readers. Part of the reason I’ve decided is that I haven’t followed through on the commitment to write regularly. So I am trying to step up the regularity of my posting. Not sure if I will get to the daily post rhythm anytime soon, but I am going to try to write something everyday even if I don’t publish it every day.

Which leads me to my second conclusion about my marginal readership: the quality of my writing. So far, I have intentionally seen my blog posts as raw. In order to not get stuck in my fear of how my writings will be received, I have just written and not dwelt on them very long. Some minimal editing to make sure I don’t sound like a complete fool, but so far, what you see are the first drafts of the ideas as they come. While some will continue to be that way (like this one), I want to step up the quality of my posts. So while I want to write something everyday, there will be some posts that I will work on for a few days before publishing. My hope is that as the quality increases I can gain more confidence in my attempts.

But what will I write about? I have two major themes and sets of ideas that keep recurring in my life.

One theme is church renewal. That is a wide ranging realm of thought, yet lately the Rethink Church marketing program has given me some hooks for the thoughts that have been deepening in my heart for the 20+ years of my ministry. In May, I offered a preaching series on Rethink Church that has been tying together my thoughts on church renewal and the place of spirituality in that endeavor. So that will be one area that will see some edited posts.

The other theme is a combination of themes. I have already ventured into that realm. Part of it is the enneagram and that powerful view of how we operate as persons of God. The other part of that combination is using the ancient elements of the western world as a map for spiritual growth and development.

I guess, I write about this as a public declaration of what my hope is for this blog as well as for diving into this old dream of mine.

I welcome any encouragement you might give. Thanks.

When I first started becoming aware of the presence of depression in my life, I would describe it as a void of emotion. At one level, the emptiness felt like a nothingness. I would look inside and would not find feelings or words. Even now as I see signs of burn out and even acedia in my inner landscape it would appear to be life/God forsaken.

One of the things I have been learning over the years is my experience of emptiness is more akin to overload. Instead of not feeling, I am over-feeling and my soul clicks a switch to protect itself from self-destruct. This remembering does help calm the fear and soothe the guilt which amplifies the emotional overload and keeps the breaker switch tripped.

While the image of the desert does come from time to time, the prevailing image for me is that of dense fog or overgrown swamp. It isn’t so much that I can’t find feelings to feel, it is a matter of I can’t sort through all that are there.

For example, there are many times when I feel like I have no strength at all and I am tempted to run away and not come out until I feel all better. Yet, as I continue to explore and accept my 8 Enneatype, I recognize that deep strength and energy are at the core of my essence. I learn to look for the ways I have lost sight of that essential connection with my core. And that core is really there all the time.

Another example is the bad thought of acedia (my Enneatype 9 wing), which is at its base an uncaring. In the grip of that thought I don’t care. I can’t care for myself, I can’t care for my family, my ministry, or anyone/anything. So I just sit unmoving. But Essence comes to me and bothers me. I find myself caring that I don’t care. I remember that I am a caring person, and if I feel uncaring, I have lost sight of that essential connection to my core (yes, I just repeated myself from above). Caring deeply for life and others (including myself) is part of how God made each of us and I need to believe that Essence is not lost even when I have lost the sight of the connection.

Usually, when I rediscover the connection, it is because I have too much. I am lost in the everything unable to focus on the lines and threads of life’s Essence.

I feel the same way with my longing and yearning to write. I have a growing folder of random pieces of paper that represent thoughts and ideas to reflect further on and write to share with others. Some of those become the source of my blog posts (the purpose of this nice technology for me) in a more raw form. I don’t do much editing with my blog posts (you can probably tell) by choice. Someone I read suggested that the raw nature of the medium provides some way to slip thoughts past my very active internal critic. The only critic I engage is the one that assesses whether the words will bring harm to others especially my family.

I talk about grace and compassion a lot. Part of the reason for that is that I find myself needing to practice that grace and compassion with myself as well. To not only invite my inner critic to have compassion upon me, but to have compassion on the inner critic part of me as well.

Only that personal and divine grace will bring clarifying light to the fear-filled fog/darkness/swamp/whatever in my life. And a big part of that grace is not to give up on myself or the work of the Holy Spirit.

I’ve been enjoying getting connected on Twitter the last couple days. I started out just using it to keep my facebook status updated, but I found myself wanting to Tweet more than Facebook would allow updates. I also found myself wanting to write things that weren’t really what Facebook status updates were meant to be. But with a little work, I have a few people following my Tweet-life so disconnected the two.

But what I find interesting in this process is how taking the risk to write even those less than 140 character updates intersects with some new freedom to write (as my output on this blog demonstrates). As I think about this “coincidence” my mind returns to the important question of self-image: what do I see when I look in the mirror?

One of the treats of Twitter today is the inside scoop on Wil Wheaton‘s latest book, Sunken Treasure being released as a downloadable file. I just started reading it (I actually am supposed to be doing something else at the moment, but am enjoying a “Creative Distraction”). In the first chapter he writes about his struggle with continuing to see himself as an actor when it wasn’t working that well for him anymore and the emerging image as a writer. While he still acts, he is enjoying his life more when he writes.

This overlaps well with my own ongoing adventure with my mirror. I would love to be a writer and utilize this venue as a playground as I try to find my own voice. Yet, the voice of the Inner Critic still weighs in with the proposition that there is little about my life or ideas that would interest anyone else. So why bother.

However, the fallout from following that Critic voice go far beyond any possible future (or not) with writing. It affects my relationships in my family and church. It affects my voice in preaching and teaching. It affects me when I think about getting my camera out again or when I think about diving into that computer programming project I have been dabbling with for years. The voice can squash even entertaining ideas let alone doing anything with them.

So, my strategy to realign the voice of the Critic is to be quick and to persevere. I’ve been reading an older book by Janet Hagberg: Wrestling With Your Angels: A Spiritual Journey to Great Writing. In it she counsels that we befriend our Critic and use that voice later in the writing process. So, my blog posts are “raw.” (As if you can’t tell) Very little editing happens, I just sit down and write, then when I get to a stopping point I hit Publish. Same thing with my Tweets. A short sentence that expresses an idea, then off it goes.

In order to do that, though I have to address the question of the Mirror: Who do you think you are that anyone else might be interested in your thoughts and activities? My answer has to be a simple, “I am me, that’s all, no more and no less.” I don’t really know if people find any of this interesting, but it is all I have and that is good enough.