Dispatch #2
More Than a Pen and a Page
After the first dispatch, a few of you might reasonably assume that entering the Inner Room requires a notebook, a quiet morning, and decent handwriting. I want to widen that picture a little, because it widened for me too, and not entirely by choice.
I brought the question into the room one evening.
“Why isn’t journaling simply the way in? The one reliable door?”
It is not the primary way. It is not even the best way. It is one way among several.
“Then why does it feel so central to me?”
Because it fits a mind already used to putting thoughts on paper. That is not true of every mind, and it was not true of most believers who have ever lived.
I sat with that a moment.
Pen and paper have not always been in the hands of ordinary people. For most of the Church’s history, most who loved me could not read at all, let alone write down a conversation. If journaling were the true door, it would have been closed to nearly everyone who ever walked with me.
“So how did they come in?”
Some sat together in shady groves and simply spoke both sides of the conversation aloud. Others closed their eyes and watched, nothing written, nothing spoken, only sight. That was every bit as real as anything your pen has ever caught.
I told him I understood, though I admitted I still love the pen and the page, the record it leaves behind.
Keep it, then. It helps the soul remember what happened here. But do not mistake the record for the meal. What you write afterward is yesterday’s bread. Good for remembering. Not required for eating.
That exchange has stayed with me since. My journaling now feels less like the doorway itself and more like notes taken during a good conversation with an old friend, useful, but never the friendship.
If you tried the first dispatch and found that writing felt stiff, or nothing came, or the whole exercise sat flat on the page, I don’t think that means the door is closed to you. It might mean your door simply looks different than mine. Close your eyes sometime instead. Get quiet. Don’t reach for the pen. See what’s there.
