Writing Through Cancer

On Monday morning I’ll welcome a group of students to my annual summer course, “Writing as a Healing Ministry,” offered each July at the Pacific School of Religion.  Participants include divinity students, clergy, helping professionals, academics and other writers, all interested in the healing power of writing, whether they wish to incorporate it into their own practice or simply write out of their own pain or suffering.   The week together is, ultimately, a spiritual journey, writing deeply, honoring and exploring what is sacred in our lives, and sharing that, through stories and poems, with others in the class.  As May Sarton observed, the writing process itself is a means to spiritual growth.  In Journal of Solitude, she wrote, “Perhaps we write towards what we will become from where we are.”

Each day will be a blend of the didactic and the experiential, exploring the domain of therapeutic writing and its many forms while writing from the deep well of our life experience.  “I am the only person who can tell my story and say what it means,” Dorothy Allison wrote.  Wallace Stegner agreed.  “The only life we know well, the one on which we are the ultimate authority, is our own,” he wrote.  “The only experience to which we can bear witness is that which we have personally endured or survived.”

The first morning we are together, we’ll begin with personal narratives, writing that comes from our hearts.   I begin with a photograph of a heart, asking the participants to take out a blank sheet of paper and respond to three questions, quickly listing whatever comes to mind.   ”What people do you carry in your heart?” “What places do you carry in your heart?  What experiences or events–joyous or painful–do you carry in your heart?”

Within minutes, the participants will have covered their papers with words—at least a year or more worth of triggers to inspire life stories or poems.  But instead, I’ll ask them to choose just one out of everything listed, taking that name, a place, or an event that has the most power for them and expanding on it.  “What is the story you want to tell?”  I’ll ask, encouraging them to trust that if they can write deeply and honestly, the writing will invariably take them where they need to go.  The writing process, like the spiritual journey, demands we stay open to discovery, even to being surprised.  “The spirit,” native American Black Elk said, “always finds a pathway.”

Margaret Feinberg, in God Whispers, states, “A journal can become a sacred place…mere blank pages are transformed into a site where you can record the most intimate parts of your soul.”  That kind of soul-searching, the honesty and vulnerability required to write from one’s deepest feelings can be intimidating.  Even Rainer Maria Rilke once said, ”I am afraid that if I lose my demons, my angels will take flight as well,” and yet he found the courage to explore the questions and conflicts in his own life.  Because he did, his poetry and letters remain a source of inspiration to many writers even now.

Writing honestly and deeply takes courage, and yet, it is exactly that courage demanded of us when we write out of pain, illness or suffering.  Where do you start?  Begin with what’s in your heart.  Fear?  Sorrow?  Old anger or betrayal?   Take ten minutes and list the people, places and events you carry in your heart, whether the memory of them is happy or tinged with sorrow or regret.  Read over what you’ve listed, then choose the one person, place or event that holds the most power for you.  Set the timer for twenty minutes and write about it.  See where it takes you.  As honestly as you can, write from your heart, and remember, as William Stafford said,

…What you fear

will not go away: it will take you into

yourself and bless you and keep you…

(From: “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid.”)