When we think about writing or being creative in some way, we often suffer from negative messages echoing in our heads.
“No one will think this is good.”
“What makes you think you can paint?”
“Who will want to read this.”
“You don’t have what it takes.”
“Your brother is the talented one.”
“You can’t make a living from art.”
“It’s too late in life for you.”
When we do think about starting a project, these voices can halt progress before the first word is written or the first photograph is taken. As a result many who long to be creative stuff our impulses, appreciating the work of others from a distance.
How can we can get out of this wearisome cycle? Julia Cameron, in her classic book The Artist’s Way, offers a simple solution. Simple but not necessarily easy.
She calls it morning pages. Each morning for twelve weeks we commit to filling three pages with text. We can recount what we did the previous day or describe what’s in the room or why we like our dog (or hate our neighbor’s dog) or the fact that we have nothing to write about. Stream of consciousness is fine. Our pages don’t have to make sense. And most important, we promise ourselves to show them to no one.
What’s remarkable is that whether we want to sculpt, make movies, paint, or do interior design, writing our morning pages each day helps get us unstuck. The negative voices will carry on even as we write. But after a week or two they typically begin to fade. We drown them out with output, quieting our inner censor, and getting in the habit of actually producing.
Eventually something that finds its way into our morning pages may trigger and idea or project we want to pursue. That’s fine. We can work on it outside of our time set aside for morning pages, and that we can show to others for input if desired. But we never show others our morning pages themselves. A friend of mine, Bill, who didn’t think he was very creative undertook Cameron’s disciplines and started producing some remarkable poetry.
Writer’s block can be one of the most challenging obstacles to face. We need every tool and tactic at our disposal to overcome it. Morning pages is a powerful option.
Photo credit: Andy Le Peau
I think the answer is a lesson in our tendency to take things out of context. Understanding what’s going on depends on seeing the whole sweep of the narrative in all thirty-six chapters of Numbers and the whole sweep of Psalms, not an isolated chapter or verse.
When we firmly, completely, uncompromisingly put our trust in a particular way of viewing the Bible, ironically we put ourselves at risk of disbelief. Why? Because if one brick of the structure we have built crumbles, then the whole edifice falls. 
The emphasis on conversionism has had another effect. It has made evangelicals more individualistic than Catholics, who are oriented more toward the community of faith as a primary means for drawing closer to God. Certainly American individualism has had a tremendous impact on American Catholicism as well. American Catholics are much more willing, as mentioned earlier, to disagree with and act contrary to the Church’s teachings than Catholics in many other countries. Nonetheless, when it comes to spirituality, it is primarily a matter of the community.
I said, “The Road to Emmaus is a paradigm of Catholic spirituality, right? Spiritual growth is a journey that we go on. And Christ travels with us on this journey even though we may not know he is there. But we recognize him in the breaking of the bread, in the Eucharist. And our immediate instinct at such times of significant encounter with Christ is to go to the community, just as the two on the Road to Emmaus did. So we have in this paradigm the key elements of the journey, the presence of Christ, the Eucharist and the community that make up much of Catholic spirituality.”2 He looked completely bored, as if I were telling him the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
“Exactly. Spiritual growth happens in crisis events when we are suddenly thrust to a higher or deeper level of intimacy and commitment to Christ. From that moment we are radically changed. Spirituality proceeds dialectically. There is a radical discontinuity of the past from the future. Sometimes that moment is the crisis of conversion. Sometimes it is hearing a calling or some other new spiritual experience. So I think your Protestant friends may be expecting a Damascus Road experience.”
Catholics, by contrast, are very happy to think in terms of both/and. John Paul II was highly revered by Catholics, yet large majorities of Catholics (particularly in North America) felt perfectly at peace disagreeing with him on birth control, priestly celibacy and stem cell research. The inconsistency bothers them little.
For evangelicals, the game is thought to be won or lost on statements. If we can’t have fixed truth expressed in words, we are subject to every wind of doctrine. We lack an anchor and may drift into heresy or at least into the shoals of liberalism. While Catholics lean toward analogical thinking, Evangelicals tend to embrace what Tracy calls the dialectical imagination. Since we have a tendency to deceive ourselves, we seek certainty. Symbols are too vague to achieve this. Propositions warn us clearly against error, set limits and call us back to truth.
It could only have been someone with God’s sense of humor who had brought us together. But we both loved Jesus and each other, and assumed that was enough.
For Catholics, it was not the document at all that was primary. It was the community, the people of God, the unity of the people of God. If signing the document could help preserve that unity, by all means, sign it—and then do what your conscience requires.
