My son John was a senior in high school. We were having the family over to celebrate the monthly birthdays that occur in our large family. My parents, my brothers and sister, their children and mine were all talking about what we imagined was coming up for each of us.

John broke in, enthusiastically, “When I graduate from college, I’m going to drive off in a Porsche.”

“Yeah, right,” my brothers said. “Don’t count on it, John,” the rest of us piped in.

John looked all of us in the eye and responded, “I’m talking about my dreams.”

I’ve never forgotten that. It’s so easy to squash young people’s dreams, to trivialize and discount what stirs their soul. How many soul-bashing experiences do you remember in your young years? when others pooh-poohed something deep and wonderful in you? when you were enjoying something near and dear and someone sucked the joy from it?

I remember when I was thirteen and James Dean was killed driving his silver Porsche. My girl friend and I languished in one another’s tears and stories of his young, disgruntled life. We enjoyed the permission to feel. It was grand. When I turned fifty, one of my lifelong friends gave me a pair of James Dean earrings, which I playfully wore to my fiftieth birthday party.

My dad teased me unmercifully when I spent the summer of my eighth grade crying over Gone With The Wind, as I had closeted myself away with the book and delighted in every image and  emotion stirred in me. “Rhett! Oh, Ashley!” my dad would drone as he passed my adolescent hideaway. I knew he delighted in my youth, my fantasy. I didn’t take it personally. You know when you’re being put down, criticized, demeaned. In that instance, it was playful.

I asked my mother recently how she had felt about my dreamer bent as a child, as she has always been so practical. She said she had secretly enjoyed that part of me, but that she had worried it might set me up to be too soft. Now in her 80s, she can enjoy that softness in me and in herself. She trusts it more. We share on levels now we never could.

The life of soul is soft, yet as solid as the eternity to which it binds us. Soul adds depth and texture to our otherwise routine life. It is our venture into images and sounds and feelings that color all our musings. We need to encourage it in children, to protect it in our youth. It can save us from becoming a callused world; it can add reflection to a reactionary culture.

Soul isn’t sentimental; it is feeling. It places value. It oils our connections. My early inclinations toward a large imagination opened me to wider paths of soul. This provided me with eyes I could not inherit from my family or my culture. It held my hand as I walked beyond my own parents to become a child of the universe. It sweetened my life.

How do we protect soul in our young? By listening to and delighting in them. By enjoying what stirs their imaginings, the creative way they see their world. By allowing what our children say about what they think or see or feel to take us on a journey, to open up a window in us that has been closed by practicality or jaded disinterest. We acknowledge their soul guide this way.

To encourage a child’s interior life encourages their openness to the sacred. That’s why we encourage small children to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. It softens their heart to mystery, to believing in a non-physical reality they cannot see. It fosters in them a sense of reverence. It gives permission to their soul to wander, to dream, to discover the personal story inside themselves that will unleash their unique gifts.

Playfulness is important in developing soul. How else can we stand before an unseen God and experience that presence, in a wild flower, in a puffy white cloud, in the hush of a quiet evening? Enlarging the imagination enlarges one’s capacity to believe in life, to believe in unseen realities that make life only more rich, to step beyond the veil that separates us from transcendent energies and revelations of the spirit.

Children get the wholeness at the Center much more easily than adults. We have to jump on every chance we have with them to encourage this connection with the sacred. They see it in a Robin’s egg or a turtle’s nest or story they watch on video. We adults are usually the culprits that knock this capacity out of them, by minimizing their enthusiasm or little dreams and pleasures. 

Which brings me back to my John in high school with his Porsche fantasy. John has always had a large interior life. As an adult, he’s learning how to channel this into a full, productive outer life. He moves in both worlds easily – the inner and the outer – and his heart just grows the larger for it. 

This past winter John dropped by the house to do a heavy chore I could not tackle without his help. He drove up in a new, leased black BMW convertible.

“Wow!” I said.  
 
 “I got my Porsche,” he smiled.