Dear God,
Thanks for reminding me today in the reading from the Book of the Prophet Habakkuk (1: 2-3, 2: 2-4) that I need to write down my vision—so that I can see that it really will come to fulfillment, even though all I feel right now is disappointment and discord. You promise that if I hang in there, and record what’s in my heart, that I will eventually get there.
Two years ago I didn’t believe you. Every morning, I recorded five things for which I was grateful—Starbucks coffee, a husband who hadn’t left me, two kids that had four limbs each, two Lab-Chow mutts that didn’t have diarrhea like the rest of the family, and, of course, Hershey’s dark chocolate with almonds.
Each afternoon, I’d jot down five things that I had accomplished: peeled a banana, made four cups of strong coffee, took the kids to the park without crying, wrote my gratitude list, and almost completed my list of accomplisments.

And then in the evening, I cataloged all my negative thoughts (“I am weak,” “I am stupid,” “I am lazy,” “I am a bad mom,” “I can’t write,” “I have bad gas”) on the left side of my journal. On the right side, I used the “examine the evidence” technique (one of those cognitive-behavioral exercises I learned to help me untwist my distorted thinking) to arrive at a list of positive qualities (my nose is cute, my fingernails are thick, my acne cleared up after I went on Acutane in the nineth grade).
I also wrote down my vision: if I survive this nightmare, want to help other people who live in this hell.
I recorded that vision over and over again like a first grader who, held in detention, had to write “I will never throw rocks at pigeons” 500 times. In capital letters.
And just like the prophet Habakkuk, I cried to you, “How long, O Lord? I cry for help, but you do not listen I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’, but you do not intervene.”
And you repeated to me exactly what you said to Habakkuk:

Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets [although I still don’t see what you mean there], so that one can read it readily. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late. The rash one has no integrity; but the just one, because of this faith, shall live.

So, God, what is it about recording the vision—writing it down—that leads us to its fulfillment?
Does it have something to do with becoming an ex-suicide? Not a person who has attempted suicide, but what novelist Walker Percy called “ex-suicides”: writers overcoming despair by emptying themselves onto paper (and into the Internet) and forming a bond of communion with the reader in the pursuit of the truth?
Am I trying to escape despair by what Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard described as a self-emptying before God, a becoming “transparent under God,” a spilling out my guts in order to find out who I really am, somewhat like Humpty-Dumpty after the fall?
I think all of this time with a pen and my computer (and tech support) is ultimately about getting to the truth. That’s really why I write: to get to the guts of things, in their raw form (without make-up), and in so doing I hope that I stumble upon the Beatific Vision, or at least a quick glimpse of God, that I somehow will run into rapture.
I write to form some connections in a network of people and places and things that don’t make sense, to see the pattern in chaos, and to steal a minute or two away from Chuck E., the life-size rat at the pizza joint, and Toys-R-Us and Blue’s Clues to ponder the bigger questions; that I might be able to reflect ever so briefly on the redemptive powers of being
nearly pecked to death by little people needing to know what EXACTLY we are going to include in each “Little Mermaid” goodie bag at a birthday party 21 days away, and where we can find the right mask for a teenage mutant ninja turtle Halloween custome.
To write is to preach, as my writer friend Brian Doyle once wrote: “Because writers are deep in their souls didacts who itch to deliver the Unvarnished Truth and cannot help but unburden themselves of that which burns in their hearts.”
I write from deperation, that’s true. For the same reasons Anne Lamott explains in “Bird by Bird“: “[Writing] is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.” Yup, she’s right when she says that writing can give you what having a baby can: attention to detail and softness. (Because they both hurt.)
Or maybe I write hoping that one or more words of mine will make it into someone’s heart, and will make her feel less alone and more hopeful about tomorrow. That the chains of depression and anxiety might loosen, if only for a moment, so that she can enjoy a slight reprieve from sadness. That I can do with lanugage with my priest friends do on the altar—make people look up, in praise and in supplication, and form a communion of people that can help each other by their common experiences.
Or maybe I’m just trying to become a better person myself—by getting all of it down—so that, like a map, I’m aware of the desired destination: to be a loving friend, a devoted mom, a faithful wife, a kind daughter, and an honest writer.
Brian (my writer-friend) nailed it with this:

Maybe if I work hard enough [at my writing] it’ll pour out straight and true and strong, and it’ll matter, it’ll change things, it’ll hit people in the heart, it’ll make them cry, change the way someone acts, stop a man from cracking his son across the face, give a moment of quivering tranquility to a woman in despair, make a girl laugh.