The Seminary Student Writes

Deborah Core

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780827234727
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kreatives Schreiben

Deborah Core offers practical guidance for beginning seminary students who feel overwhelmed and under-prepared to write the number and quality of papers their courses require. The book begins with reflections on writing as a sacred action, then addresses such practical matters as choosing and researching a topic; outlining, drafting, and polishing a paper; and using the proper format for footnotes and bibliography. Also included are sample papers in MLA and Chicago styles and an overview of grammar and usage.

CHAPTER 1

Why Write?

In this book, you and I are beginning a journey together. As seminary students, thinking about journeys is something we do a lot. We think about all the journeys of the people of God in the Bible. We think about our relationships as journeys. We think about our life with God as a journey. We think about our years in seminary as a very special part of our lives’ journeys–a special part with its own gifts and demands. Our time in seminary offers us an unparalleled faith community and also a world of new challenges, challenges to develop our faith and our intellects.

One aspect of those challenges, for many of us, will be the need to do reading and writing on a level we’ve not encountered before. The very tools of seminary education may seem more like obstacles or adversaries for students who have been out of the classroom for a while, or who simply lack confidence in their abilities. This text is intended to aid you in meeting the challenge and to support you on this journey. It is my hope that you will come to see reading, and especially writing, as tools for your growth.

A helpful companion will be a journal. If you’ve ever tried keeping a journal, you know that it can be a wonderful resource, providing comfort and insight. Whether we write about our internal or external worlds, we are gaining benefits and preserving our thoughts and experiences for future reflection. A further benefit is that a journal gets you in the habit of writing! If you don’t currently keep a journal, I encourage you to start one now, today. Some will wish to use a computer journal, whereas others will prefer a simple notebook. People have different ideas about what a journal should look like and what kinds of things should go in it; you should go with whatever you find comfortable. Elsewhere I’ll make some suggestions to you about keeping a journal, but right now, I’d like you to use your journal to do a little thinking about the act of writing.

What is writing to you? Is it a time of grace, when you are able to experience the word of God through your words? Or is it a time of struggle, when you are like Jacob wrestling with the angel and emerging with a blessing? Or is it a time of despair, when you wish only to be done with a very alien task? When you have writing to do, whose biblical story comes to mind? To understand our lives as writers, let’s begin by taking some time to remember writing experiences. In your journal, jot down your answers to these questions:

1. What is your earliest memory of writing?
2. What are some positive responses you’ve received from your writing?
3. What are some negative experiences you’ve had with writing?

(Hints for using the journal: Begin with today’s date and give specific details.)

One purpose of this book is to help you see the blessedness of the act and accomplishment of writing. For many of us, writing began as a creative and exciting action; as little children, we were thrilled when we could make lines and circles into block letters, and then make those block letters into our own names. As time went on, we learned to use writing to convey our learning and to tell our stories. As we mastered the skill of writing, it belonged to us, a tool we held in our hands.

Then, for many of us, our relationship to writing changed. It became a dreaded chore, and part of our self-image was that we were just no good at writing. We dreaded classes that had lengthy paper assignments or even essay tests.

How did this change happen? I suspect that several events and attitudes work together to corrode our confidence in ourselves as writers. Many of us began to be judged for correctness in our writing long before our ability to be correct could catch up. Effective writing has many aspects, and correctness is an important one, but it is not the only one. However, many of us were at some point scolded for making mechanical errors in writing, errors we were perhaps helpless to avoid. Meanwhile, what we did well went unremarked.

Or perhaps it was not correctness but the content of one particular paper that was criticized. Because writing is an intimate, subjective, and personal action, we generally find it much harder and more painful to deal with criticism of our writing as opposed to, say, a low score on an objective exam. An attack upon what I’ve written can feel very much like an attack on me.

If we identify ourselves as “bad” or hopeless writers, for whatever reason, our problems continue to grow, because the need to write never goes away. While we can pretty much leave behind our terrible experience of trying to master college algebra or physics, we cannot do the same with writing! G. Lynn Nelson has written a persuasive and helpful book on journals called Writing and Being: Taking Back Our Lives Through the Power of Language. For our purposes here, I might retitle his book Taking Back Our Language Through the Power of Our Lives. With some prayerful reflection on our experiences, we can indeed come to realize that the worth and blessedness of our whole lives may be reflected and understood through our own written words. We can, all of us, appropriate for ourselves what Kathleen Norris calls “the hard grace of human language.”¹

Therefore, I suggest that we begin to think about writing from a religious viewpoint and open up this part of our intellectual (or even emotional) lives to the transforming power of God. Let’s explore the idea that the communicating, writing part of our lives—regardless of our past experiences—can be enriched, blessed, and used by God.

Now take a moment to go back and read what you wrote in your journal. Are any of those memories still shaping how you respond to writing tasks today? When I look back, I recall Mr. Romick, one of my high school English teachers, who told me that my writing was thoughtful and persuasive. I recall how encouraged I was by Mr. Romick—even when he pointed out the shortcomings in my work. But I also remember another teacher, for whom no work was good enough. And I recall the sinking feeling of getting a paper back from this teacher (I’ll call him Mr. X), who would just mark a C at the end of each of my essays, with no comments to show me how to improve. In Mr. X’s class I felt that writing well was a mysterious process, one that always eluded me. The C marked me as just average, unable to communicate as well as I wanted. While I was under Mr. X’s influence, I saw myself as a mediocre writer at best, with no hope of improvement. Soon after, though, I encountered Mr. Romick, and my self-image improved substantially.

(If you are using this text in a classroom setting, I hope you will take some time now to discuss in small groups your responses to my three questions. If you’re using the book on your own, you might want to find a friend to work with.)

Now that we have remembered a number of our writing experiences, what do we do with them? I suggest that we first take a few moments to consider how these experiences, positive and negative, are still with us in our attitudes. When facing a writing task, do we tend to revert to the self who felt hopeless? Do we recall the empowering and encouraging moments? Let’s accept those past experiences for what they can teach us and for what they don’t teach us. In my case, I need to recognize that Mr. X didn’t really teach me anything about my writing. All he did was give me a flat assessment; he did not help me understand my weaknesses or find ways to improve. His methods caused me to feel powerless and stupid—feelings none of us enjoy. So I need to recognize when those Mr. X–rooted moments of cosmic self-doubt occur in me, and I need to banish those ghosts. And if this remembering has made me angry with him, I also need to do some forgiving! Similarly, my act of remembering calls me to pray in gratitude for Mr. Romick and others who fostered a healthier attitude in me.

(Spend some time now reflecting and writing about what these memories have revealed to you. Do you understand more now about your attitudes toward writing?)

The kind of writing you have just done in your journal is meditative writing. It has the goal of recording and nourishing us. We do this kind of writing simply for ourselves, not necessarily for communication to others or to feed into other sorts of writing. Although journal writing is not the focus of this book, we should recognize that it can be an excellent companion on our journeys: It can help to cleanse and develop our personal lives, thus freeing us for other tasks, and it can develop skills that will transfer to other work.²In other words, if we value our writing skills or our spiritual lives, journal writing is never a waste of time!

Many contemporary writers have reflected upon the profound ways that our past and present may be intertwined meaningfully through the experience of writing. Dan Wakefield, for example, believes that “the past isn’t just a set of experiences that are irrevocably set, like concrete blocks that can be hauled up out of memory and the unconscious to be reexamined and better understood.”³ Rather, he argues, we may constantly reinterpret our experiences, not just understand them better: “Since our past only exists now in our own mind—it only ’lives’ in our recreation of it—our changed experience of it becomes the reality, and in that sense we really do have the power to change the past.”⁴ John Leax recounts the same sort of experience: “What I’ve set down, I’ve discovered as I’ve written. What remains to be written, I must discover as I write.”⁵ For Leax, writing is an essential tool for understanding the relationship between past and present, and language, he says, “is the foundation of my knowing and my being known.”⁶

G. Lynn Nelson believes that we do more in writing than just record what we are already aware of: We actually grow in our knowledge; we create.⁷ Often, traditional Christian language or thinking suggests ways in which we are God’s partners in creation (for example, in becoming parents). Here, we may begin to see ourselves as similar to Adam, giving names to creation and thereby comprehending it more fully. All our life experiences are somehow gifts of God, and when we seek to know them and ourselves more fully through the gift of language, we are surely acting respectfully toward the complex blessedness of our lives.

Natalie Goldberg, a Buddhist, speaks of writing in language that parallels the Christian experience. She claims that “each time we sit down to write we have to be willing to die, to let go and enter something bigger than ourselves.”⁸ This is worth thinking about. What holds us back as writers? Whatever it is, we need to let it go, be willing to take the risk and “die” to ourselves and enter into the great mystery of creating. Let’s praise God for this gift, this chance. And let’s pray that any fears we have will be lifted and that our blessed voices may come out clear and strong in everything we write.

Further Resources

The books I’ve listed here are only a small sampling of what has become a genuine growth industry. As cultivating a spiritual life became a driving force in the self-improvement line of the publishing world in the 1980s and 1990s, so did books about the recording of that life. The books listed below have been selected because they offer a variety of “takes” on a spiritual approach to writing. Some are specifically Christian and some are not, but all are worth a look.

Baldwin, Christina. Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Cameron, Julia. The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996.

Cheyney, Arnold B. Writing: A Way to Pray. Chicago: Loyola...