For years I understood that to be praying or meditating, I had to do one of two things. Either I gathered with other people of faith in common liturgy and corporate worship such as the Holy Eucharist or the Daily Office, or I participated in emptying the busy mind-chatter through silence and centering prayer (or meditation) as taught by Thomas Keating, Tilden Edward or other teachers of meditation and contemplation or as found in an Eastern discipline. Both kinds of prayer activities have been and remain important for me. They are not mutually exclusive.

But I discovered a long time ago that I could rarely  sit alone in silence successfully. I enjoyed and still enjoy sitting meditatively with a group of people or practicing a walking meditation with them, much the way I am attracted to reading the Daily Office in community. As for the Eucharist, Anglican tradition forbids private masses in which only the priest is present, so that isn't really an option. Besides, I don't understand Eucharistic worship in that privatized way. I often find regular and simple weekday Eucharists or creative experimental liturgies led by someone else to be real focusing spiritual moments. But most priests I know, and this certainly includes me, do not find adequate spiritual nourishment when they are "performing" liturgically. These can be heady experiences, but there is too much pressure in public liturgy for priests to rely solely upon the conduct of public worship as their own primary spiritual exercise. And dare I say that too much of an ego rush can be associated with the conduct of liturgy for God to break through adequately to the mind of the priest during it?

So what is a person to do about this dilemma?

Again, most priests I know spend years in search of a way of focusing their attention so that the Spirit of the Holy One might speak to and through them. I have also traveled that well-worn path. Following the move out of the church rectory into our own home a few years ago and feeling like a new era in my life had started, I succumbed to an old compulsion to write fiction, a desire that I had first explored in High School and had touched on a few times since. What I discovered in writing Flying to Tombstone is that creative writing, at least for me, combined a kind of spiritual letting-go with an exercise of joining God in the act of creation--co-creation, as it were--that had all of the focusing and spiritually renewing results that I had always sought in centering prayer and only rarely ever experienced.

Since 1999, I have written for at least an hour and for as much as four hours every morning, almost without fail--unless, of course, I still needed to finish a sermon on Sunday morning! I usually get up somewhere between four and five a.m., make some coffee, perhaps tidy up a bit in the kitchen and then go to my laptop and begin to write. Sometimes I polish and edit. Sometimes I draft new narrative. Sometimes I go back and forth between the two. And I have come to see this daily labor of love as prayer and/or meditation. And that goes for the "racier" passages as much as it does for the theological ones. When I am writing, I am not stewing over parish problems, deficit budgets or some angry parishioner who is threatening to take his pledge and leave. Nor do I worry over health or family or personal issues. I also don't fret about finding a publisher or an agent or what I'm going to do with this writing. When I do begin to move away from the focused writing onto worries or plans, that's a good sign that I'm no longer connected to the creative power of the sacred, and I might as well call it day or simply acknowledge that I'm working and no longer "praying."

While I write about things I know and, at some level, have experienced. My fiction is neither autobiographical nor is it about my parishioners, friends and acquaintances. Not that I don't find inspiration in my experience and from people I know. I certainly do. But my protagonists, though they may do things that I do such as teach or work in parish ministry or fly small airplanes, they are not me, and their stories are not my stories. I'm not sure that either autobiography or gossipy writing would produce the same spiritual results for me that writing fiction does.

Does a person need to attend a writing or a journaling workshop or go on a retreat in order to "pray" through the act of writing? No, I don't think so, though I have often found those experiences very valuable. In the final analysis, prayer and meditation come from whatever connects one with the source of all being, the "I Am" encountered by Moses. If you, like me, find the sacred in the act of writing, then by all means write. And then know that you are connecting to the Holy One as surely as when you are standing on a mountaintop or kneeling at the altar rail to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.