Journaling and un-journaling: Discover God’s grace in the pages
Dr. Nancy Kate Dunkerley recalls an Ash Wednesday several years ago. She and her friend knew of a house with a fireplace. They put on some music, prayed and blessed the day’s activities.
They were planning to burn their journals.
And they did.
It took longer than expected.
In those days, Dunkerley says she was journaling quite a bit in spiral notebooks. She learned a few things that day:
You can’t throw a journal into the fire. It won’t catch.
If you want to make ashes, you have to throw pages in one or two at a time.
Something surprising and wonderful happened. As the pages floated into the flames, she began to catch glimpses of words and phrases.
“After a while, I started being overwhelmed with gratitude, noticing all of the many ways God had graced me or tolerated me.”
Fast forward to 2015, an article in Spiritual Director’s International’s publication Presence caught Dunkerley’s attention. The piece talked about journaling and “un-journaling” as a spiritual discipline. This article, combined with the experience she had with her friend on Ash Wednesday years prior as well as her work as a spiritual director and her own regular practice of journaling all began to culminate into a new awareness:
When we journal, we are coming to prayer.
Dunkerley says this article triggered the creative side of her, and she began to think about all of the ways one can “un-journal.” She also began to think about the reasons this spiritual practice could be helpful:
We don’t want our journals, the space that includes intimate and innermost details and thoughts about our lives, to be used against us. It is a vulnerable place.
“I had a directee who didn’t journal anymore. I asked her what that was about. When she was in process of divorce, her journaling was used against her. That has always stuck in my mind. ”
After we are gone, there are things we might be happy for our loved ones to read but others not so much. Not everything needs to be left behind to be discovered.
A significant part of the “un-journaling” process, is the idea of reviewing them. While you can burn a journal or practice another way of discarding the pages of it without reflecting and re-reading them, the real beauty and gift in the process is recognition and understanding one’s life in a new way. This encourages to take time to review in a way that feels right to us.
It reiterates the idea of being aware of one’s life. This is especially true if you are serving in the role of spiritual director. If we don’t have some understanding of our own spiritual journey, it stays tucked away. It is going to come back up in the director’s chair, and we are more likely to project those unprocessed wounds onto our directees.
There is a freedom that can come from reading and seeing yourself from how you were “then” with the eyes you have now. Perhaps there are graces in the words and phrases of our journals from years ago that God wants to give us now?
Beginning June 1 at Retreat House Spirituality Center, Dunkerley will host at three-part series on journaling and un-journaling where she’ll guide us through a deliberate and thoughtful process to engage in reviewing past personal journals in a way that both honors and releases all that you have poured into them.
This exercise can be experienced and carried out in many ways. Consider tearing out certain wisdom words or phrases and putting them into a jar for safe keeping or even a gift. Or perhaps you might consider using gesso paint to cover up the words of pages creating a canvas for new designs.
Let your creativity and the Holy invite you into a process that makes sense to you! Want to discover more? Join us! Space is limited.
Dr. Nancy Kate Dunkerley is a trained spiritual director, retreat leader, co-founder of Spiritual Ministries Institute and a partner of Retreat House. Learn more about Nancy here.
This article was by Emily Turner Watson. Emily is a trained spiritual director, storyteller and writer. Part of her ministry is to bring healing, truth and joy through active listening and writing. Have a story to share or interested in direction? She would love to hear from you.