The Discipline of the Pen
“Get your pens ready! Take notes! It’ll help you remember! Your pen (along with the dictionary) is your best friend!” — Me in class, all the time.
Isn’t it funny that that I am yet again — afresh — surprised at what I constantly tell others? Over the last two weeks I have discovered, again and again, that the pen is indeed my best friend. If only one takes the trouble of actually taking the pen and writing, physically writing down one’s observations, ideas, and impressions, tying one’s disordered thoughts to paper and making them solid and concrete, wonders of meaning and learning begin to happen.
Confession: I have always had a really difficult time engaging with Psalms. So when I was asked (as part of my current training in Ignatian Spirituality) to read passages from the Psalter, I inwardly winced. Besides, the passages were just SO familiar! I could sing or recite them all, almost in their entirety. What could I possibly glean there?
But! — I had enough trust in the exercises and the process to simply do what I was told (secretly hoping all the while that an obedient teacher makes for obedient students). So, I (semi-grudgingly) took a pen and started doing JUST what the exercise told me: I read the passage slowly, jotted down as much of it as I could from memory (yay for a translator’s quick and thorough recall!) — and then simply used the pen to think it through. And — unexpectedly and strangely — there it was: new meaning and new learning! New insights almost leaping from the page. New connections I had never seen or suspected. New contrasts, new questions, new appreciation of artistic mastery, a new call for obedience and new pathways for the imagination. I am still amazed and only wish I could describe the explosions that continue in my brain even as I walk to work and mull over what I wrote down earlier.
(I wonder if this simple schooling is a necessary mental discipline for what is to follow — just as the seemingly empty time of ‘reception’ and ‘listening’ when one tries to quiet down the noisy mind and when nothing seems to happen is a prerequisite for any sort of genuine connection with Reality. )
Anyway, three cheers for the Discipline of the Pen! I am definitely looking forward to more. God help me remember the dangers of acedia (“It is is all pointless! and who cares? and oh, it is JUST so booooring!”) and not give up.
