Creative writers naturally have profound spiritual experiences in and through their writing, but this sacred dimension of the creative practice is easily hijacked by a consumeristic milieu (we understand our work to be a product) and by an elitist understanding of art (these products are either good or bad). We’re often indoctrinated to dismiss the spiritual as irrational conservative religiosity or new age fantasy or self-centered, ineffectual interiority—attitudes detrimental to the awakening potential inherent within writing. This broad cultural denial of the interior life, and especially the ardent atheism of the academy within which much of the literary community resides, means that writers’ organic experiences of personal and collective awakening, healing, and connection are rarely cultivated and more often denied or denigrated. As a result, they wither. Writers are deprived of the life-giving potential of their contemplative practice, and their creations are drained of this moral, relational, meaning-making, mystical energy. 

My work is to help writers rediscover the sacred dimension of writing and reclaim writing as a spiritual practice. I help writers see the creative process as the seat of a broader Creation. My work, through writing texts (Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art & Practice of Spiritual Memoir and Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice), through one-on-one coaching, and through my teaching at The Eye of the Heart Center, generates a culture where writing’s natural, transformational powers and the rigorous development of art go hand-in-hand.

Our purpose as humans is to most fully become ourselves, in all dimensions of our being. “Thus the task for every person is to build her or his soul; that is, each must assemble the widely scattered elements of one’s experience into a unified whole” (Ursula King). I understand spiritual memoir writing especially and creative writing in general to be a practical framework for this sacred work, accessible to all who write, regardless of faith or spiritual background. “Aliveness,” Ann Belford Ulanov writes, “springs from our making something of what we experience and receiving what experience makes of us.” The work of composing memories, stories, essays, and poems invites us into this co-creative dynamic; we make meaning of our lives, and that process is itself meaningful.

Stories matter. If, as Teilhard writes, “Life in the world continually rises toward greater consciousness proportionate to greater complexity,” our life in literature is moving toward a vast diversity of true, fully formed stories. We live in a reductionist culture that’s always pushing for what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls a “single story.” Single stories are the stuff of stereotypes, “and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” My work helps writers understand the multiplicity within their own stories—that we can vision and revision our life experiences, over time and over drafts—and also supports this multiplicity within our public discourse by nurturing a diverse range of stories about the inner life. Every person’s realized story illuminates a facet of divinity.

Thus I understand my prophetic work as reclaiming the sacred dimension of the writing practice, illuminating the significance of this dimension for healing a broken world, and helping make it accessible to all who write.

Elizabeth is a co-founder of the Eye of the Heart Center, a new collective of artists and wisdom teachers dedicated to nurturing meaningful community and supporting spiritual transformation through the arts.

Listen to a podcast interview with Chris Bohnhoff from Plymouth Congregational Church of Minneapolis.

[Elizabeth’s] words are always a quiet nudge to keep working from my heart and not my head.

–Baxter Clare Trautman