June 17, 2002 

"I Can't Journal!"

Sometimes people say, "I can't journal.  God isn't speaking to me.  He's  not responding to me."  When they share their journal, we usually find that they are getting everything out-there can be pages and pages-and then they are waiting for God to respond to all of those words and questions and feelings all at the same time.  When this happens, God will be silent.  If He does respond, we wouldn't have any idea what He is really responding to because we have put so much information before Him.  Then we can go into a guessing game and come out of the prayer period, come out of the journaling experience, not really knowing anything more than when we started. 

So I encourage you to put one fear, one question, or one aspect of a problem before the Lord at a time and let Him answer that part.  Then go back and ask another, and let Him answer so there is a dialogue going back and forth.  It's all being done in this writing process in tremendous simplicity-one thing at a  time.  Again that's like a child.  We really don't tell a child to do two things at the same time.  We only tell them one thing at a time.  God sees us as children, and He's not usually going to tell us two things at the same time.  One thing at a time.
 
In journaling let especially your feelings come into the light.  This is very important.  We encourage you to journal daily because we have events in our lives that need to be brought before God daily.  We have things happen in our lives that we need to hear from God daily.  There might be certain times when we get that prompting in our heart and we know.  Many times when it has to do with our emotions, we have a tendency to suppress or gloss over and pretend, "That really didn't bother me.  After all, I'm a Christian.  I can love everybody."  We respond to a lot of things that the world tells us or the shoulds, but that's not who we really are.
 
This happened to me one time in the cloister when I got very upset with one of my superiors.  I felt she was leading a double rule-the rule for her friends and the rule that the rest of us followed.  I felt the hypocrisy and  was really struggling with this.  One morning when I first got up, I blurted out, "Lord, I hate her."  I was so shocked!  I thought, "Oh, thank goodness no one's in this room.  Thank goodness nobody heard that.  I mean, I'm a nun."  We can live out of that-who we should be, but that's not who we are.  So I headed for chapel fast.  I took this to the Lord in my journal.  I said, "I can't believe that I said that, but I did.  So what are You trying to show me?  That's the real honest feeling in my heart.  I don't want that feeling, but it's there.  What is happening?" 
 
I was asking just one simple question.  Right away He gave me an image of when I got my first spanking as a little girl.  I used to run away a lot.  I had a problem with rebellion.  In fact, my mother tied me to the clothesline for some time, so I would just run up and down the backyard.  Finally, when nothing else worked, came the spanking.  That's the image the Lord brought to me.  He said, "What happened is that you felt that she shouldn't have done that to her own flesh and blood.  You were her little girl.  How could she do such a thing?  You felt it was wrong, and you hated her right then for that."  But He said, "As a little girl, you couldn't express that to her.  Now, you're grown up, and you're seeing some hypocrisy going on now with another woman in your life who is the authority figure also, and you don't hate her, but you hate what she's doing.  You hated what your mother had to do to you, and you hate what you see your superior doing, but you don't hate these women." 

So thanks be to God, He got that clear.  So I asked Him, "What was I doing all the time that my mother finally had to spank me?  Was it more than running away?"  He said, "Yes, you were running away and stealing the neighbors flowers." 

So journaling is wonderful!  He explains things and we usually end up laughing at ourselves, and it's much easier to forgive those who have offended us or who we're holding a grudge against.  We don't only journal about our feelings, but I wanted to emphasize that because many times people don't realize that this is what we bring to the Lord because we begin where we are.  Our God is a God who comes.  Wherever we are, Jesus will meet us there.  So if I'm hurting, that's where He will come. 

We also journal Scripture.  There are so many beautiful passages of Scripture that we are praying throughout every day or things that we hear at Mass where we experience that anointing, that quickening of our hearts and we know that there's more here, and so we take that to our journal, "Lord, this is what You said in Scripture.  But this is what You didn't say.  What's missing here?  What do I need to know?  Teach me the deeper mystery.  Break it open for me."  There are many teachings that come in journaling through Scripture.  Many priests who have made retreats at Bellwether actually get their homilies this way-beautiful teachings from God Himself.
 
John the Contemplative talked about this when he said, "Now that you have the Spirit, you have no need for anyone to teach you when that anointing is upon you" (see 1Jn 2:27).  There is an anointing that is upon us when we journal.  We may not be sure of it at first.  This is why it's important to have a spiritual director, someone who knows you and the way God works with you.  There will never be two journals that are alike.  There will never be two souls who are alike.  God works with us individually with our individual temperaments.  So it's good to check out what we are journaling with our spiritual director. 

When we begin journaling, ninety percent of it might be just us, and maybe only ten percent is the Lord.  But as we keep at it, our listening antennaes become more sensitive.  We get those rabbit ears of the heart and start to pick Him up.  We will begin to discern, "Oh, that's the Lord."  "Oh, that's me again."  We will start to see the difference.  Then we put it aside, and the next day when we reread it, we will see very clearly when it was God speaking and when it was us.  Sometimes we think, "It's just me" because it can come so naturally, but God became one of us, and He can work through us in a very natural way.  When you reread our journals, we begin to see, "I couldn't possibly have thought of that.  I couldn't have said that."  What we receive in prayer will always build us up.  Our journaling will never tear us down.  This is one good way of knowing if it's the Lord.  He will always affirm us and build us up because He's a God of love.  He will speak truth, but it's truth in so much love that we want to embrace that kind of truth. 
 
There are events that happen throughout the day that we might want to journal out.  We take advantage of journaling when we're at airports.  There is something about waiting at airports or waiting on the plane or waiting on the runway that feel drawn to journal.  We may journal, "Lord, why did we miss this plane?  Why did we miss the connection?  Why are we waiting?  Is there anything You'd like to say to me?  Is there anything You'd like to show me?"  It's amazing the revelations that can come in these little windows of time. 

So use these opportunities and journal wherever you are.  There's something about journaling that keeps us focused.  We can talk to the Lord, but some of us are dreamers, and we can say something to Him and then all of a sudden we're off in our own dreamworld before He even had a chance to reply. 

Journaling is a safeguard to help keep us focused.  We've written down our question, and we are focused.  Now very simply we start writing whatever way that we think God would greet us.  Maybe we start the salutation.  We start the first line.  If it's the Father that we're addressing, He might say, "My very dear beloved son" or "My dearest child."  We begin writing whatever way that we feel God would address us or the way we would want Him to speak to us.  Then that deep Wisdom gift within will start to take over in a very gentle way and thoughts will just come.  They will just come and flow out from our pens, and there it is. There it is!  "Look at that.  I just heard from God."  It's a beautiful experience. 
 
One of the major blocks to journaling is when a person is angry or upset with God.  The block could be that we're not really open to hearing anything God has to say.  Another block could be that we may doubt that God really wants to speak to us.  If we are childlike and really want to hear from God and expect to hear from God, it will happen.  Someone once said, "If life is worth living, it's worth logging."  I have always liked that because life to us is Jesus.  Jesus, the Word of God, is worth living.  Whatever this Life says to me, it is definitely worth logging and remembering. 

Excerpt from "Journaling," Pillars Album, Omaha, NE, 2001.
 

Fear is never of God.  We will find that the enemy will always make us think less of ourselves.  So if we start to think less of ourselves, we will know that the enemy is working on us.  So we go to Jesus right away and say, "I'm having these thoughts, Lord.  I need some help right now."  We get it into the light.  We don't keep it in our own minds and hearts.  We journal it out, or we get it out to a friend, our spiritual director, or our confessor, but we get it out into the open.  We get it out into the light because God will always make us think more of ourselves.  God builds us up.  We're His creation.  We're His work of art.  Scripture says, "He saw that we were very good" (Gn 2:31).  This is how God sees us.