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The Art of Spiritual Writing
words on the page, yet it forms through words. When a writer takes on the task of exploring the world of the spirit, she has invited a process that will change her permanently. If she has done her work well, it will change her readers, too. • How do we bring together our most interior sensitivities with the concrete experiences we create by arranging words into sentences, pages, and entire visions? • How do we tame the fiery truths of the universe by giving them names or descriptions? Should we even try? I believe that, for some of us, attempting to juggle fire is a life calling. A writer’s task is to discover the names of things, and the task of a spirituality writer is to provide vocabulary by which the rest of us can name what God—that lovely, terrifying Divine—is doing to us, for us, around us, and right inside us. What follows are a few chapters to help the writer who feels compelled to invite this quite spiritual process in which she lays out, in phrases and paragraphs, the realm where human meets Divine, where we truly engage and then tell the story of what happened.