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Write and Share Your Spiritual Autobiography
ONE WAY OF INCREASING your awareness of your own spiritual journey—its beginnings, influences, changes, and current direction—is to create your own spiritual autobiography. Consider these two quotations:
“The spiritual path represents the process of becoming whereby the soul remembers itself and the self discovers its true identity as spirit. Every spiritual tradition offers a map for the seeker. Each metaphorically depicts a journey of the soul from darkness to enlightenment, or from ignorance to knowledge.”
—From Susan Wittig Albert (author)
“A spiritual autobiography focuses less on the people, events and experiences of a person’s life and more on what these people, events and experiences meant for him/her and how they formed him/her or shaped the course of his life. It allows the writer to communicate who she or he is as a person and what is important in her or his life.”
—From Jesuit brother Charles J. Jackson
As Brother Jackson notes, a spiritual autobiography tells of meaningful events and circumstances in your life and how they have shaped your purpose, your path, your life, and yourself.
In fact, sometimes the writing (or drawing!) of a spiritual autobiography can itself be a meaningful event, bringing to you new insight into your past and present or inspiration for new action in the future.
The activities below offer two ways to begin; perhaps you'll come up with other ways. However you do it, you'll certainly learn something about yourself. And if you'd like to share your spiritual autobiography with us here at the Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, we'll be able to learn something about people's individual spiritual paths as well.
Two Activities for Creating a Spiritual Autobiography
1. Draw or describe your spiritual metaphor
Instructions: As you move through your life—the days and seasons, the ups and downs, the joys and hardships and lessons learned—is there an image that you use to describe the shape of life? For example, some people imagine life as a ship sailing across uncharted waters, and their faith, values, and beliefs as the wind in the sails. Others imagine it as a spiral of experiences and realizations, or as a journey over mountains and valleys. You can visualize your life as a river and describe its flow, twists and turns, depths and shallows, etc. How do you see it? Draw your image and consider using it as a metaphor throughout this spiritual autobiography activity.
2. Use these questions to guide your thinking and writing.
Note: You don’t have to answer all of them, just the ones that are interesting or useful to you.
- What is your first name and age and where do you live?
- Does your name have a meaning or a story attached to it?
- As a child, what did your parents teach about religion? What did they teach about good and evil? How has your family’s religious background affected you?
- What scriptures or other books did your family regard as holy? How seriously were the teachings in them taken?
- How did you perceive God or the sacred when you were a child?
- Did your family observe any religious rituals? How were those rituals related to their beliefs?
- Have there been times when you felt the presence of the sacred outside your place of worship, when there were no priests, pastors, rabbis, or other teachers around? What was that experience like?
- How is your present religious affiliation or spiritual life similar to or different from your parents’? How did the change, if any, come about? Was it a long process or short? Easy or difficult?
- When have you experienced awe or wonder? Where were you, and what happened?
- Who are your saints, holy people, spiritual teachers?
- What are the important words and stories of the philosophies or religions that have shaped you?
- What holy days do you celebrate?
- Are your spiritual beliefs or values relevant to what you wear, what you do, who you are friends with?
- Has a belief in God, other deities, or a sense of something larger than yourself, shown itself in the ordinary, everyday events of your life?
- Do seemingly random events of your life seem to reveal interconnectedness?
- Call to mind the significant turning points in your life; what are they?
- What are the most significant decisions you have made?
- What are the most intense struggles and conflicts, successes and failures you have experienced?
- Have you ever felt or experienced a sense of being “called” to do something?
- How do you plan to live out your beliefs in the future?
We'd love to hear about what you created. If you’d like to share your spiritual autobiography with teens, researchers, and others around the globe on this website, send it to: Kay Hong by email or fax 612-692-5553. Or include it as a comment to this article. Thanks!
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