Helen Cepero - Journaling as a Spiritual Practice: Encountering God Through Attentive Writing

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M y husband and I traveled to the tropical islands of Samoa for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Before we left, both of us thought we knew why we chose to travel so far away from our home in Chicago. For my husband, who loves planning trips, Samoa was uncharted territory for exploration and discovery. For me, visiting the Samoan islands was an opportunity to be in a relatively unspoiled tropical setting and walk along pristine beaches next to turquoise water. For both of us, it was a time to celebrate the life that we have together.

Walking along the white sandy beach on the island of Ofu in American Samoa, I did find myself gazing out at a clear turquoise sea. But if that was all I did, I would have missed the best of Samoa. Beautiful as the landscape was, an even greater beauty lay beyond the sand, underneath the oceans surface. When I share pictures of our visit to Samoa, I point to the shadowed area on the clear water and express my regret that we did not bring an underwater camera, because I spent most of our ten days on Ofu wearing a snorkeling mask and fins, looking at some of the most varied coral reef in the world and swimming with fish of indescribable variety and color.

These pages are also the beginning of a journey, one that you have chosen for reasons at least as varied as any other trip you have taken in your life. Some of you are longtime journal keepers who wonder what could be added to a practice already so firmly established in your lives. Others of you might have tried to keep a journal at times in the past but never really kept it up as a regular practice. Perhaps some of you have never kept a journal at all. It does not matter where you are in your journaling experience. What does matter is your desire and willingness and commitment to honor this spiritual practice by intentionally going below the surface. It is here that God wants to surprise you with the beauty of your own life, growing and alive, filled with movement, light and shadow. It is here that God wants to meet your own longing for a deeper life with the Spirits even greater longing to be with you, in all of who you were and are and will be. The journaling practices presented in this book are simply the mask, the snorkel and the fins that will allow you to make this journey. You will carry your own underwater camerathe journal itselfrecording all that you see and hear, know and understand.

Every chapter of this book gives you opportunities along the way to use your journal reflections as a way of bringing your own life and world into sharper focus. Using your journal as a camera lens will allow you to zoom up close on a particular aspect of your own journey or take a step back and see the bigger picture of what might be going on within you and around you. These opportunities for seeing and remembering and recording are woven into the text of this book, just as they are woven into the text of your own life. If you do not actually stop to journal, you will only stay on the surface of my words and may not capture the greater beauty that is there right now in the context of your life. But if you stop as you read and take some time to follow the journaling suggestions along the way, you will meet your own exploring self beneath the text of this book as well as the God who longs to be with you on your journey.

Sometimes we might choose to explore with our journal as our only traveling companion. But there are other seasons in our life when we are helped in our own journey by having times and places to share the trip with others. A regularly meeting journaling group, even if it is only two or three people, can keep each person accountable and provide a group context for prayer and celebration. At the end of this book is an appendix with suggested guidelines to make the journaling group a safe place to write and reflect together. Especially in the beginning, it will be important to discuss the whole process of journaling, using questions such as, How did that go for you? or What did you find helpful for staying with your journaling practice, and what made it difficult for you to keep writing? As you become comfortable, try writing during the groups meeting time as well. Being in the presence of others, reflecting and writing together on the same journaling suggestion, can push us to go to a deeper, truer place within ourselves and with God.

The more authentically we travel into our own lives and our own stories, the more we will lay claim to Gods image deep within us. This is both the beginning point and the destination. The more deeply we immerse ourselves in the story of God, the more our lives are filled with the love of Christ. This is my hope for all of you who read and write from these pages. And the more available we are to God, the more available we are to truly love ourselves, one another and the world. This is my prayer for all of you who make this journey, that through your reading and especially your journal writing you might comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:18-19).

So we begin with a blessing for the journey ahead and below and above and in us:

In the name of the God who creates us, may we deepen our awareness of Gods presence.

In the name of Jesus Christ, who goes before us, may we be led into pathways of truth.

In the name of the Holy Spirit, who is power and breath, may we sense the Spirits movement in our lives.

May your journal be your companion and friend, your guide and counselor, through him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20).