Include in your personal canon all texts –books, poems, films, music, art, etc.– in which you have experienced the sacred. (Don’t include those you merely liked or found meaninful, or you’ll end up with the world’s longest list.) They do not need to be what you’d traditionally consider religious texts. It’s okay to include fragments (say, a particular paragraph in a book or a scene in a movie).

Pay particular attention to include texts you’ve returned to again and again over the years and texts you’ve been known to push on friends. A good criteria: would I want to pass this particular text on to folks I care about? Another good criteria: does this world read me and my world?

What patterns do you notice in your canon? Is it predominantly one medium (say, scifi films or renaissance poetry) more than others? Are there any common themes? Are any of those themes at odds with each other? Are your selections dominated by one or more periods of your life? If so, why? If your canon doesn’t include traditionally religious texts, is it from lack of familiarity or lack of experiencing the sacred in those texts?

Does you personal canon challenge you? A canon that only affirms what you already know and believe will not feed you over time and indicates a stagnant spirituality. Does anything in your canon trouble you? Absense of prophetic imagination signals hollow character. Do you understand everything in your canon? Absence of mystery indicates a denial of life’s ambiguities and crises.

Allow your canon to shrink and expand. There is no shortage of new texts that could be windows to the sacred, and it’s likely that forgotten texts will return from time to time.