A trip to Baguio last October left me in a tunnel filled with doubts about where I was heading. I wanted November to show me the way out. I knew I needed help, so I typed the URL of Andrew James Brown’s website, navigated to the contact form, and pasted the message I drafted on my note-taking app.
Andrew, the first religious minister I ever paid attention to since 2012, is an atheist, and yet he leads a church in the United Kingdom. I was wandering around the spiritual wilderness for more than a decade, but I’ve never heard about an atheist pastor. I would later learn that atheism is prevalent even among many conservative churches, but it is especially welcomed and nurtured in the liberal religious movement called Unitarianism. If there is any way for me to reconcile my past as a devout JW with my heavily secular and agnostic present, a necessity I discovered I had to do after a relatively long walk last year, that way would be found only within liberal religion.
Seiza
I asked Andrew how one begins walking in this creative, free spirituality. In his generous response, he suggested trying seiza, a Japanese word that, based on current usage, refers to both the traditional and formal Japanese sitting posture and the meditation method Torajiro Okada (1872–1920) introduced using the same posture. I’ve been practicing zazen, primarily by myself, since 2017, so I’m familiar with the process. The main difference between seiza and zazen besides posture is that seiza never really developed doctrines, sacred texts, rituals, or a lineage of teachers, which Zen Buddhism has. Seiza is purely a method and appeals more to practitioners who care more about sitting meditation than religious teachings.
Practicing seiza for a month has taught me a lot about being mindful of my posture, especially when writing. I noticed that I breathe and think better when my spine is erect. Better thinking easily translates to better writing. More importantly, seiza introduced me to two new people I now see as partners in this creative, free spirituality I’m exploring. In November, I attended three seiza group meditation sessions via Zoom, led by Miki Nakura, a Pureland Buddhist priest familiar with the liberal religious movement. In one of those sessions, I sat silently with Andrew James Brown.
Shinichiro Imaoka (1881–1988)
Andrew also advised looking into the life of Shinichiro Imaoka (1881–1988), dubbed the Emerson of Japan and the proponent of a uniquely Eastern liberal religious concept called “jiyu shukyo.” Imaoka was raised a Pureland Buddhist but later converted to Anglicanism, Congregationalism, and Unitarianism before embracing his spiritual philosophy of free religion. Imaoka’s life and conversions were detailed in a biography by George Williams called Cosmic Sage.
Imaoka didn’t leave us a clear definition of free religion, so it can be challenging to explain the concept. However, reading and reflecting on Imaoka’s Creed of Life helps one understand free religion better. It is what I did per Andrew’s advice.
However, the absence of a clear definition of free religion should be seen as an asset of the idea: anyone learning about it could create their own interpretation. I did this through my essay “A Goodness Lurking: The Quest for a Free, Subsistent Spirituality.”
The way I understand it, religion and spirituality should always be free or, at the very least, aspire for freedom. Therefore, free religion will always be the ideal. For religion to be free, however, it has to be deeply personal. Although this is all semantics, using the word “spirituality” makes the subject more personal. Spirituality should be as simple and prevalent as possible. It has to be seen in as many human endeavors as possible, so I am partial to the idea that spirituality is simply an attitude of deeply caring about something. It is an attitude expressed and cultivated through different spiritual practices.
Writing as Ministry
One of the things that made my trip to Baguio difficult last October was that what was originally a walk to search for a Middle-Eastern restaurant became a walk down memory lane as I passed streets I frequented as a JW minister. The question I’ve been asking myself since I decided to confront the past I was running away from was this: What is it in my past life as a JW minister that worked for me that I could use and integrate into my current life as an agnostic who is still profoundly spiritual?
One of the most obvious things I missed in my past life as a JW was the strong sense of purpose I used to have and the clear path toward realizing that purpose. Everything was about God, and the path was simple: I just had to follow the rules, perform acts of devotion, and do the ministry. The ministry was a form of service that benefited a specific group of people in my experience, the Deaf and Hard of hearing community in Baguio, many of whom I taught sign language as a way to introduce the Church’s teachings.
After reading about Thoreau’s quest and Imaoka’s life, I knew I needed to reframe my life into a similar structure. I needed a ministry, a way to serve others. But what? Thinking about this made me realize that this was the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like a religious person again after giving that all up in 2012.
Where do I look for my ministry? First, I looked at what I’m currently doing and see how I can convert it into a personal ministry. I even entertained the idea of joining a new religion and considering a pastoral path.
But then, I realized that after leaving a ministerial and pastoral life, what preoccupied most of my 20s was an exploration of writing. It was mostly an untrained writing life. I began by tracking my mood every day in a large notebook during the weeks of my depressive episode. Then I discovered blogging and blogged my life into the world. Journaling came only after I realized writing on paper was its own experience. I was primarily self-taught, and most of my writing was highly personal. And yet, it was a writing life nonetheless. My relationship with writing is so personal and too spiritual that I only came out this year and tried my luck with my very first workshop at age 31.
In my journal entry dated 2023-11-23, I began to dream:
“While I adhere to free religion, I don’t think being a pastor is really for me. I am not close to the possibility. But I am currently so in love with writing that it is what’s calling me strongest right now. The only difference now is that aside from a personal writing practice, I intend to write with others together. I see writing as a vehicle to fulfill my ministry as a serious writer and a writing teacher following the tradition of the writing process movement.”
And so, I asked: why not convert writing itself into a form of ministry? I liked the sound of this idea. But how does one convert writing into a form of ministry?
The first thing I did was to return to spiritual writing. Spiritual writing is something widely explored by the American Transcendentalists, a group led by no other than Emerson himself, Imaoka’s hero of free religion. According to Lawrence Buell in his book Literary Transcendentalism, one of the things the transcendentalists explored in the nineteenth century was how writing can both be a tool to go deeper into transcendentalism (i.e., to live a unique ethical life) and a vehicle to express the creative genius they believe reside within every human being.
These goals make sense. For writing to become a spiritual and religious practice, it has to help one strengthen one’s spirituality while simultaneously helping one express that spirituality through words.
Something was missing here, though. What the transcendentalists did with writing was turn it into a spiritual practice. But it wasn’t necessarily a ministry. A ministry is a service; one must identify who to minister to. Although I love the solitary experience of writing and the challenge of improving my craft, I missed working directly with people, something I did with the Deaf in the past. How can I convert writing into a ministry that allows me to experience a similar direct connection with others?
Enter pat schneider. I discovered her after her book How the Light Gets In appeared in my research on spiritual writing. While reading the Wikipedia entry about her, I learned that she developed a relatively popular writing method known as the Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) method after the group that Schneider started. The technique was detailed in Schneider’s book Writing Alone and with Others, which I am currently reading. I have yet to finish it, but I am starting to agree with Peter Below, who wrote the Foreword of the book when he said that Schneider might be “the wisest teacher of writing I know.”
Schneider used the AWA writing method in creating writing groups for writers from different walks of life and writing workshops for those who wanted to deepen their craft. What interests and inspires me the most is that Schneider started writing groups for low-income women and children and those in prison. Schneider passionately believes that everyone is a writer and that writing is a powerful method for self-actualization for all.
The AWA method espouses the following five essential affirmations.
- Everyone has a strong, unique voice.
- Everyone is born with creative genius.
- Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level.
- The teaching of craft can be done without damage to a writer’s original voice or artistic self-esteem.
- A writer is someone who writes.
I have yet to articulate fully how I intend to combine a personal writing practice with a writing ministry with the AWA method as an inspiration. I have yet to express how to infuse my writing practice with the creative, free, subsistent spirituality I’m exploring.
For now, here’s a journal entry I wrote about this:
This sitting down on the floor in front of a small Japanese table you bought surplus over a shade of dim sunlight to write on a new page is love. It is faith. It is believing that you still have something to say to the world, even if you’re unsure what it is. It is believing that something good, something necessary, will come out of writing. And for someone who refuses the idea of submitting to a big brother in the sky, this is the only true act of faith.
This is grit. Doing it not out of joy but out of belief. The world is not here to make you happy. It is not here to serve you. It is here to slap you on the face so you can see happiness lurking behind the moss-covered crevices of your soul. To pursue only things that make you happy is hollow—hollow as the cage that it is.
Therefore, the first principle is to believe that this world is worth walking, no matter how bleak the evidence for it. The practice is to simply wake up in the morning and trust. This is all the work that has to happen. A journal entry begins with faith and ends with joyful expectation.
