She found moments of fear and anxiety as well as great joy and elation. As she describes it, this silence offered porousness, opening up and letting go of the self, reaching (or striving for) union with God.

This silence and its discovery of “the permeable self” exhilarated her. But one thing bothered her: she wasn’t writing. She’d sought out silence, in part, as an opportunity to write more fiction. She hadn’t. She hadn’t even wanted to.

So she decided, in best Romantic tradition, to search for silence that would “sharpen memory and lead to stories.” This silence wouldn’t be about letting go of the self but about finding and expressing the self in a more authentic way, about individual experience and emotional authenticity. This Wordsworthian notion of self would never have occurred to the earliest desert fathers like Anthony and Jerome.

These two notions of self—the permeable and the boundaried, in her terms—fascinated me. When she described the boundaried self, she talked about psychotherapy, questioning “whether psychoanalysis is appropriate or even possible for anyone who is seriously given to contemplative prayer.” (She uses “therapy” and “analysis” as interchangeable terms.)

Wait a sec.

I’ve staked a tremendous amount on both processes and I bristle at the suggestion that I’ve been wrong—or “inappropriate.” And yet, Maitland had put her finger on something I’ve worried about. “If there is a God outside the self,” she writes (and she believes there is), “then the self that is permeable has greater access to such truth than the more strictly boundaried self.”

Okay, but does it follow that if we believe in God, we’re not suited for therapy? Or that, by turning to it, we deny the totality of God’s love? To flip the coin, does what Freud termed “the neurosis of religious belief” contribute to our troubles?

When I mentioned all this to my therapist, she sighed and asked if Maitland were British (yes), implying that the Brits are about twenty years behind the psychoanalytic times. Then she said, in effect, Freud was a genius but he didn’t get everything right. Every therapist who has helped me through grief, depression, and anxiety has supported and encouraged my belief in God. And the priests and pastors I’ve consulted have spoken of the help of psychotherapy.

Maitland had a point, but the more I thought about it, I came to see that the issue—for me—was her linkage of “the strictly boundaried self” with the creative and therapeutic processes. Yes, therapy nurtures a post-Enlightenment sense of self, a boundaried self. And, yes, story-making involves expressing the self.

But therapy’s most helpful insights have not come to me through “constructing a self” as much as examining the self I’d already constructed long before I ever walked into a therapist’s office. And I’ve spent enough mornings so lost in the worlds of my own words that I am—however “boundaried” by four walls and quiet—not only permeable but lifted out of self.

Can’t writing be a kind of praying?

We tell stories to make emotional sense of our lives, on paper as well as on the (figurative) couch. But our stories can hold us back. Therapy, like writing, makes us look at events as clearly as we can and tell our truths, yes. But—at their best—both ask, even force, us to consider other truths, not as a way of cutting ours down to size or of brainwashing us but as a step toward dismantling entrenched notions that, whatever purpose they once served, no longer help. Writing demands other points of view, demands empathy, demands a narrator who can transcend the author’s self.

Therapy, in my experience, has been most fruitful in getting me to consider the Other. To trust. To let myself be permeable while boundaried. Think of osmosis: you can’t have one without the other. Dialogue not opposition.

For weeks, I’ve been praying the Jesus prayer. Some mornings, it’s Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me; sometimes it’s “on us”; sometimes it’s both. This morning, it was “me” and I added “a sinner.”

This morning, I thought of my sins, the usual and today’s particulars. I thought of the many stories of Jesus eating with sinners and outcasts, and I wondered if Jesus would have eaten with me. Not because I don’t consider myself a sinner, but with my relative privilege and wealth and complacency in this society and this world, am I enough of an outsider? With my play-by-the-rules tendencies and my “establishment” status, am I more Pharisee than tax collector?

Yes, I’ve eaten and talked and wept with prisoners and homeless and mentally ill, and then I’ve collected my ID and my keys and driven home to my two-bedroom flat in San Francisco with the nice view. Why should Jesus tend to me when around me so many suffer so much more?

All this went through my mind in the split second it took to move from one bead to the next. And then I heard the question flipped around: “Would you have eaten with me?”

I saw the ego in my first question, the way I’d gotten it backward, like the disciples arguing over who gets to sit next to Jesus in heaven. I saw the boundaried self, looking for her place in this world and the next. And then I heard Christ, asking me to open my heart.