On Journaling & Wasting Time
First, a confession. Much like Bernanos’ Priest of Ambricourt I, too often scrupulously self-aware of that which I write, destine my musings and meditations to the garbage bin. When I cultivated this malignant scrupulosity, I am not sure. Too often journaling strikes me as a sublime waste of time. What is accomplished by my incessant writing, editing, deleting? Nevertheless the pressing urge to dictate and articulate my thoughts unto the written word afflicts me like a canker sore that I can’t stop tonguing. So here I am again, across time and space, writing to you, my beloved reader; bear with me.
I will use this space to interrogate my most immediate insights, melancholic meditations, and ecstatic encounters. (I can tell that fifteen years down the line that I will cringe at my penchant for alliterations, and paltry attempt at humor.) Nevertheless, I will keep writing. I am keeping a public journal for a few reasons. (1) The first reason why I would like to keep a record of my thoughts is because I have the suspicion that journaling is, at least, a pragmatic practice; the American Psychological Association writes that “expressive writing reduces intrusive and avoidant thoughts about negative events and improves working memory. These improvements, researchers believe, may in turn free up our cognitive resources for other mental activities, including our ability to cope more effectively with stress.” Beyond the therapeutic ends of journaling, I have heard it taught that habitual writing and introspection breeds creativity and thoughtfulness. (2) The second reason I would like to keep a record of my thoughts is due to Girardian mimetic behavior; Growing up I always admired that my father regularly wrote through his blogspot Praying Mantis. And just as it was an existing thrill to stumble upon my father’s deleted and hidden posts (exposed, as all things inevitably are, through an internet archive), I hope that my children find a similar excitement thumbing through my old thoughts. (3) And finally, journaling is itself a form of prayer. Simone Weil writes, in Gravity and Grace, that
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself. Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious. The amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention and thus of authentic religion at that period.
Prayer is the ultimate end of man. Isaiah proclaims that the seraphim in heaven cry aloud morning and evening, never ceasing, “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.”
So that is why I am wasting my time writing, editing, deleting-because to journal is practical, paternal, prayer (I told you I liked alliterations). I would like to close with the inimitable Herbert McCabe, on the grave importance of wasting time;
…For real absolute waste of time you have to go to prayer. I reckon that more than 80 percent of our reluctance to pray consists precisely in our dim recognition of this and our neurotic fear of wasting time, of spending part of our life in something that in the end gets you nowhere, something that is not merely non-productive, non-money-making, but is even non-creative, it doesn’t even have the justification of art and poetry. It is an absolute waste of time, it is a sharing into the waste of time which is the interior life of the Godhead. God is not in himself productive or creative. Sure he takes time to throw off a creation, to make something, to achieve something, but the real interior life of the Godhead is not in creation, it is in the life of love which is in the Trinity, the procession of Son from Father and of the Spirit from this exchange. God is not first of all our creator or any kind of maker, he is love, and his life is not like the life of the worker or artist but of lovers wasting time with each other uselessly. It is into this worthless activity that we enter in prayer. This, in the end, is what makes sense of it…
