Writing our own credo — a living, organic statement of what we have come to believe — is an essential process in developing soul.

Like our forefathers who set out for America from Europe with the vision of placing the privilige of governing themselves “in the hands of the people,” I set out each day to redefine myself and my beliefs in light of my experience. The seeds of the civil rights movement, the Vatican II encounter, the Vietnam struggle of conscience, the women’s movement, have formed and fed my soul from my youth. These experiences empower me; I cannot imagine living by someone else’s perspective of truth.

The myths and sacred stories of my faith that fortified me as a child carry me still, like favorite photographs whose images I digest over and over in poetic delight. I am rooted in traditions of holy men and women whose learnings and experiences I scavage daily, trying them on for size and fit, wearing what nurtures me, discarding what does not.

The trail I leave is scattered with images and expressions upon which I feasted for years, then placed gently back down, ready for those who come after me in search of their own truth and nurturing. I prune lovingly, as I find traveling light leaves me open to new and more inclusive experiences. Often it is more a reframing or reimaging of the old rather than a complete discard of it. Different metaphors for those handed me in my childhood for truths still true.

The Tree of Good and Evil, the Tree of Knowledge, stands in my garden, shimmering. I dig gently around the roots of this tree, marveling in all past expressions of belief, all music, all poetry, all sacred effort to name the Unnamable, soaking in what nurtures, passing over in silent respect what does not. Like Moses, I seek out and determine what brings life and what brings death to me on a daily basis, with one ear aways cocked in faithful attention to an inner voice.

Writing a personal credo should only be attempted in sand. It changes often, as each new taste of the divine washes over us in waves of wonder. “This is who I am today. This I believe today.” It is the language of poetry, of music, of art, of all bold attempts to harness soul.

Credo is not church. Church is home, a comfort station, a mother. Church gives structure, a place to gather and to tell our stories of God, a community of support and shared expressions of faith, a safe haven in which children can be taught all the wisdom stories that jump-start and root their own journey of spirit. Children need structure, modeling, stories, guidance, nurturance of soul and the witness of families who live out their faith.  Leaving home and finding ones identity is not the work of children, nor should it be.

Credo is not knowledge. It is about lived experience. Knowledge is of the head, what we know to be true because it has been proven, made manageable. Credo is of the heart, of the soul, what we have come to believe because of our own journey and the shared journey of those who long to join with spirit and hear its wisdom.

Credo leaps to my lips as I take my early morning walk, when everything is still and just waking up, before I step into my cerebral world. Credo moves within me as I listen to my clients’ lives. Credo holds me close as I grieve the death of someone I love. It breathes and laughs and weeps as I do. It compels me forward and instructs me later upon reflection.

Our credo will be as rich as our pursuit of it. To put a face on God we will have to stop putting a limit on God and allow God to find us in ways we cannot now imagine, through art perhaps, or music or nature or cinema or work. We have to allow our soul to wander as restlessly as feet in search of communion with that sacred other, no matter where we find that.

We must push our questions to their limit, to the very edge of imagination — keep them fluid and interesting — and when they reach one limit, push them out farther, until they open out to more creativity and wonder. We don’t have to dump what we now believe, but to reinterpret it, expand it, freeing it up from dry, flat, automatic statements of belief that no longer fit our lived experience.

When Jesus ate with sinners or blessed the “poor in spirit,” he was recognizing those who lived on the edge of established belief, those who knew they didn’t “have it,” but were grateful for God’s meeting them where they were until they did “get it.” Be, then, always on the way. Ask  questions, pay special attention to burning bushes, don’t be afraid of “I don’t know,” and be ready at every moment to throw everything you think you know into the air and to begin anew.

“Are you a Christian?” my friend asked, not as confrontation, but as invitation from one who intimately knows my spiral inward journey. I heard the chambers of my mind clang like iron gates, opening backwards through centuries of buried theologies I have embraced, rejected, embraced. Two thousand years of overlays, past early church fathers, mystics, holy men and women who addressed this question, to a time long ago when a small circle of believers stooped to draw a fish in the dirt rather than dare the question verbally. These early believers faced persecution and death if non-believers guessed their secret preference. My heart paused to soak  in this image.

This fish, drawn so simply in the dirt — a recognition beyond familiarity: Do you know him? Do you believe? Has your life changed because of him? I stood, silent, in my mind’s eye and strained to articulate my own journey with this image/question. Do I believe in Jesus’ principles, his searching, his steadfast heart, his final gamble and transition into something other? Has knowing Jesus changed my life? No words were shared by those early faithfuls as they drew this fish in the dirt, only recognition. Connection. Intimacy of the deepest kind.

There’s something mystical about an image. An image is more articulate than a verbal question. It connects with the heart. It unleashes the imagination and draws in the soul. I can join fully with you in an image without squabbling over details of the truth of it. Images open, whereas words can so often be, as Saint-Exupery suggested, “a source of misunderstanding.” My heart knows how to answer. My head knows better than to answer. My soul feels full in the silence of it.

How do you bridge the chasm of experience and inner journey between one person and another? How do you trace your inner knowings and articulate a mystery? How do you step into a spotlight whose blazing eye often sees only in black and white? Pontious Pilate washed his hands of it. People usually argue and take sides about it.

Only the image joins us in it. That’s why Jesus used images to speak a mystery — of shepherds and mustards seeds and wedding banquets. He knew the image could teach, could carry his listeners where they needed to go, would allow them to bathe in the mystery of it rather than be entrapped by the answer in it.The answer had to happen in the heart of the receiver. Jesus trusted the image to do that.

My own dance with the Jesus Question has been a lovely encounter. My attempt to articulate the mystery of who he is for me changes over time but the presence of him never wavers. When my  friend asked in earnest, “Are you a Christian?”, I felt safe and treasured. It was not a trick question or face-off, but an opportunity to reflect, to share our depths of soul.

Articulation of a mystery should be approached only if the intention is a joining. It is not in the agreement of the answer that we join, but in the promise to keep struggling until our question becomes inclusive rather than exclusive. The question should wander as the soul wanders, enjoying the shift of metaphors and meanings, leaving the imagination free to play.

The early Christians teach us a lesson in dialogue: the image can lead us. If a representative of every faith expression on earth met in a room and worked together on an image of the transcendent until everyone in the room could agree on an image that was inclusive of their belief, there would be less territorialism. There would be a modernday Pentecost with every image offered seen in the native image of every seeker.

Different theologies, one image. We could sit with one another in this image and be one. Not a meeting of the minds — no dogma distinguished — but a connection of the heart. Divine intelligence does indeed enter us through the heart, not mind. We could then, perhaps, move beyond the image to the experience of that holy transcendence beyond our naming.

I am reminded of a poem my friend Bob wrote years ago that urges us to “praise the irrational, the sweet compulsion to unname the works of earth,” “to turn poets loose on dictionaries,” and
“to keep one question always covered, to make tomorrow worth coming back for.” 

May we struggle to unname the truth of what we believe and to share in the sheer experience it affords us until we find ourselves in a new place of spiritual growth. It may be that we reaffirm our faith as it expresses itself today. It may be we go full circle, as T.S. Elliot says, and return again to the place we began and see it, “as if for the first time.” 

If someone stoops to draw a fish in the dirt and waits for your recognition, fall silent. Do not allow words to divide you. Struggle with the image in your soul until it is ready to speak

My mother has unleashed her Woman.

At 83, my mother is so vital, we have to put a bell around her neck to keep up with her. If she doesn’t have a new canvas going, splashed with vibrant images, she’s taking Civil War courses at the History Center and riding buses to the local battlefields, driving herself to St. Simons Island for the month, or refinishing furniture. She can pull a gourmet meal together from what she calls leftovers and put a wardrobe together that is walking art.

Women of my mother’s generation were mothers first, women second. Their identity grew out of their role as mothers and wives. They did what they saw their mothers doing and felt accomplished if their children surpassed their hopes for them. They put their own inner work and outer achievements on hold. It wasn’t until the children left the nest that the Woman in them could climb out of the closet and enjoy the light of day.

Some would say this is how it should be, for women to put their children and families first, for women to postpone their own emotional and spiritual development until the patter of little feet no longer rings in their ears. As a therapist, I’ve seen both sides of the question.

Sometimes, the reason a female isn’t in touch with her Woman in the first place is due to her own childhood relationship with her father. As a young girl, she may not have received the cherishing and positive affirmation she needed to feel special as a female. She grows up thinking she has to prove her worth before she deserves the attention she craves.

I’ve heard it said that a woman loses her soul in relationship with a man, whereas a man discovers his soul in relationship. This must occur when the man gets more in touch with his aliveness and his feelings and his passion for life, whereas the woman makes it her job to keep him happy. She neglects herself and thinks her time will come when the family is all set.     

I often meet this woman in therapy many years later, having raised her family, reporting to me that, either her husband has told her he no longer loves her, or that she’s experiencing emptiness and is confused about her identity as an adult woman. “I put my needs aside to take care of my family,” she’d tell me. “Then I’d get depressed, and I never knew why.”

A female loses touch with her inner Woman if she never makes time for herself, to really enjoy herself. She doesn’t develop her creative fire, her curiosity for life, her passion for whatever makes her soul sing. She neglects her soul life. She’s so busy perfecting her outer world or nurturing external relationships, she misses the sweet adventure into the self.

This not only has an adverse effect on the woman in question, it often wounds and imprisons her children in a web of unmet needs. The more vital, creative, involved in her own inner work a mother is, the less she expects her children to meet her emotional needs. She frees them up to discover and develop their own needs, identity, and creative instincts. They don’t have to live their mother’s unlived life, or to feel guilty should their happiness surpass hers. 

My mother came into her own, in the fullest and most liberated sense, after we left home. She was always creative, but usually when she stole moments for herself without feeling selfish. Every step she has taken toward developing her true and most fulfilled self has opened up space in me to do the same thing. Her Woman liberates me to claim my own. 

My 31year old daughter, on the other hand, stepped into her young adult life and marriage with no intention of losing her inner Woman. I don’t know how she knew to do that, but I see many young women today attempting the same balancing act. My daughter is Woman first, Mother second. Her toddler and baby enjoy the vitality, the creativity, the self-satisfied energy she brings to her family. She knows how to take care of herself, and this gives her more energy to take care of those in her family. She kneads the balance every day.

Some think we’re slipping backwards, that we’re losing the family — ruining our children by making parents’ needs as important as the childrens’. Maybe we’re in the process of discovering the right balance, the healthy blend, the not-yet-determined mixture of outer and inner nurturing needed to raise healthy families. 

It’s not that women should put themselves first at the expense of their families. It’s that the woman who cherishes her inner Woman will be a more vital, authentic, relevant model for how to balance fulfilling one’s own destiny while allowing those in her care to fulfill theirs. She won’t become jealous or resentful, or even competitive, when her own daughter blossoms and receives all the credit for becoming such a divine creature.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. While I’m all for my mother unleashing her inner Woman, I’m not going to discourage her, in any way, from her usual pattern of bringing chicken soup by my house when I have a bad cold. I’m not crazy.

Oh, what a friend we have in our body. She feels for us, thinks for us, cares for us in ways we are not aware, even as we ignore, neglect and betray her. It’s as though God wants to cradle us in arms so loving, we cannot even detect her presence.

Our body is our connection to the outer world, our interface with everything and everyone we meet. Our body is our connection with our internal self, with our inner world of feeling, choosing, creating meaning. Slow moving, non-judgmental, inclusive, patient, our body knows before we do what is best for us, what is not. Her feeling component companions us throughout our day, signaling joy and pain and disappointment and comfort. Her thinking component connects us to the world of spirit and ideas and eternal wisdom.

Spirit and matter dance within her in interlocking energies, releasing soul and sexuality and infinite possibility. She is a wise guide, careful, watchful, discerning. Only our decision not to feel, not to allow her wisdom to shield us, can untangle her protective hold on us. She stands by us, waiting, during troubling times, when we choose unhealthy relationships, when we sabotage our physical and emotional well-being, when we do whatever it takes to survive loss, fear, and abandonment. She holds us until we can feel again.

Our body serves as gatekeeper and soulcatcher. She knows when we draw too heavily on one energy over another. Some of us will our way through circumstances, relationships, careers,  paying no attention to what our body tries to tell us. Some of us are more in tune with the urgings of soul, the sweet lead of feelings.

When we are too much in our will, when we go against the natural feeling value in the body, when we refuse to consider messages or interventions, like illness, misfortune, broken relationships — when we choose will power over the slower movement of soul, reflection, feeling — our body becomes exhausted, robbed of zest and joy.

She knowingly intercedes, floods us with feelings, dreams, unexpected happenings to get our attention. If we are in touch with our emotional and spiritual self, we slow down our frantic drivenness, get in touch with our feelings, check out our direction, get ourselves back in balance. Our body knows better than we how to listen to deeper needs.

I would not have been so angry with my body as an adolescent if I could have held this awareness of myself as miracle. I would not have taunted her that she was the wrong shape, that she was less than others who had a larger IQ, that her beauty was marred by the birthmark on my leg. I would have stood in awe before her, amazed by my opportunity to walk on this earth.

I find wonder in quantum physics’ view of our bodies as localized occurrences of vibrating energy.  Energy, or spirit, comes together for a brief moment, localizes as our body, carries us through life, allows us to interact with all other forms of vibrating energy, then disintegrates back into pure energy. Our moment in time, our opportunity to participate in this miracle called life, is an instance of localized vibrating spirit.

We would all be mystics if we could hold this awareness of ourselves as spiritual beings on a human journey as we move and interact in this vast universe. We would all be saints if we could lean into this awareness and be compassion for all we meet.

I read a book in college by the naturalist, Loren Eisley, called Immense Journey. It was the author’s imaginings of himself as the Flint River as it made its way through the countryside. He became the river, saw and felt the landscape, the vegetation, the life he passed from the river’s perspective, as if he were himself the river. I would take such a journey through my incredible body, become one with its energies and feel and see the marvels they are.

I’m masculine and feminine energy — focusing, organizing, doing, directing, as well as feeling, creating, being, receiving energy. I’m will energy and soul energy — driving, objective, quick to judge as well as discerning, personal, inclusive, compassionate energy. I’m metabolizing energy, processing food and blood flow and cellular transformations.

I’m skin pigment, hair color, body odor, body fat. I’m love and anger and laughter and tears. I carry within me sickness and wellness and learn from each. Energies all, dancing and changing and flowing and breathing. An immense journey indeed.

We do not have to hold this awareness of how our body works, or of ourselves as spirit, as  energy, as much as we have to allow our body to hold us in her awareness. Our body knows better than we our deeper needs. We have a friend as close as our skin.

What is spirituality anyway?

Perspective is a grace that comes with age, with life experiences, with wisdom-grown-deep. It is one of the hallmarks of the spiritual life.

We each live a universal story that winds and intersects its way through our own personal story. There’s a wounding of innocence, a healing or understanding, and a coming to an experience of wholeness that unites. This occurs in spirals, over and over in different ways, deepening into an ever-widening perspective of all this as one movement from different vantage points.

This occurs in every life, at different levels or intensity, in different circumstance and periods of history. The spiritual movement is the same. Seeing our story as part of the larger story of human kind offers courage, resilience and meaning to our own walk in the dark.

When wounding happens early in life, a person develops defensives and distractions to protect their wounded child within. It takes a long time to dissolve and integrate these protective walls or energies back into our natural energy flow. When wounding happens over a lifetime, in natural, everyday woundings, it comes with wrinkles, wisdom and, hopefully, a lightness or sense of humor about things.

Spirituality is about becoming more comfortable with the rhythm of this experience of wounding and deeper awareness; coming to see it as, not only part of life’s normal journey, but as something that enriches and enlivens our capacity to experience life in general. Our wounds hold the blessing of our being opened to the non-physical world of spirit so we can integrate more spirit into our person. How we respond to this so called blessing colors our spirituality.

Our early years provide us with all the energy and entitlement required to embrace with full exuberance every experience we can get our hands on. Our middle years provide space and time to sort out the importance of and meaning of the choices we have made about how to use this energy and how to embrace this world.

Our later years slow us down, weight us down, just long enough so the grieving process, the letting go process, has the time it needs to befriend us and to not frighten us. Our intuition deepens. We become more comfortable with listening to and trusting the non-physical world. We move ever so slowly, as if swayed by this non-physical presence, toward our last, and perhaps our greatest, performance — our final-letting-go.

All of this comes with gifts and challenges. Whether it’s through a wounding and healing process, or through the normal aging process, our perspective softens, becomes less judgmental, more compassionate. As we experience wounding and allow healing, we become more curious about other people’s stories, how they did, what they learned. We don’t waste energy on regrets, but use these energies to enjoy the little things of every day life.

When all this happens naturally, our spirituality flourishes naturally as well. There is an open and free dialogue with the imagination, a curiosity about new metaphors and perspectives. A healthy spirituality is free to investigate these new metaphors, new ways of expressing emerging truths without threatening the tradition given one by one’s family. There is no reason to block the new.

If we are burdened by others’ biases – religious certitudes, demands made on our natural preferences – our spirituality gets sidetracked from its natural ability to assist us in the life tasks we face. This can actually foster in us a reaction against life as trustworthy. We cannot trust our own experience or intuition, for fear of what others will think of us. 

Soul grounds our spirituality in life. Soul dialogues with the non-physical world of spirit; asks the transcendent to inform the soul while it is in the body. Soul seeks to connect with the transcendent in the world, not separate from it.   

Spirituality devoid of soul tends to focus on transcendence, perfection, righteousness, places the goal beyond human frailty. It suggests that the meaning of our suffering and wounds lies beyond this life, that the earth is not our home and the body is not our friend. Soul softens this perspective. Soul draws meaning from our struggles, suggests that our suffering gets us more in touch with our humanity, makes us more aware of what it means to be fully alive, not less.

With Jesus the Christ, said Paul the apostle in 2nd Corinthians, it “was never Yes and No”, as it is with us. “With him,” said Paul, “it was all Yes.” Yes to the wounding in life, yes to the healing possible, yes to the brokenness of the world, yes to being broken by the world himself – all Yes.

It is all one movement, cannot be separated out. Jesus taught that, and the Buddha, and Muhammad – as did all the wisdom teachers. Blessing comes with wounding; they come as a pair, inseparable, one movement. Our spirituality, if it is grounded in soul’s deep commitment to life, will witness to this life truth.  

Soul reaching in, spirit reaching out and up, each dancing in rich communion, always in motion, working together, never stagnant. The longing and the reaching and the finding in continuous flow, up and out and in, again and again, up and out and back in again. Spirit that loves soul’s depth, soul that loves spirit’s soaring radiance — unafraid and alive, the two move together.

Several ancient creation stories speak of God’s loneliness, God’s longing before creation. God “longed” and this longing, this need to connect and to be connected on God’s part, created life as we know it. Other stories speak of God being “roused,” from within, that this was what sent God seeking other. This early oral tradition suggests that this longing, this reaching out to connect, is something universal in man, implanted from the very beginning.

I suggest soul is this longing in God and in man, for life, for one another. Soul is the medium between spirit and matter — the longing each has to connect with, to touch, to be touched by, to be in relation with the other. This divine discontent, this divine longing and restlessness, “created man in his own image,” so man’s essence, too, reflects this longing, this discontent, at its core.

Isn’t this what Buddha said: “Life is discontent, life is suffering”? There is a restlessness, a longing in man that does not cease. I see this in soul. Buddha’s second noble truth is that  discontent or suffering is caused by clinging and attachment; desires are endless and distract from the path. Desires, run amok, make one want what doesn’t exist anyway.  For me, the dark side of soul – everything has its dark side – is possessiveness, a desire to control and dominate.

Soul cannot adequately be defined. An image that comes to mind, when I think of soul, is Stephen Speilberg’s “E.T.” with his finger, dimly lit, raised in longing to connect. Light, reaching out to darkness, darkness reaching for the light, yearning, wanting the fullness that true connecting brings. Spirit reaching for matter, matter reaching for spirit, with soul being how they connect. Talking about soul is talking in metaphor.

The body, matter, is heavy, grounded in the things of earth, full of emotion and complicated urges and drives. Spirit is airy, would steal us away from the body, have us caught up in ideas, tempt us to leave the earth behind. Soul wants to bring these two together, to feel, to reflect, to experience most of all.

The body can move through an event and not experience it. The mind can move through an event and not experience it. The soul wants to experience it, to be pulled headlong into it, to be absorbed by every detail of its character and story. Soul is the inner angel who embraces each experience as it enters us. What is imagined, felt, celebrated, brooded over is more important to soul than what is visible and collectable.

Buddha said that we are “souls on a journey of awakening.” This implies a sensitivity, an agility to be able to walk simultaneously in the eternal realm of spirit and the temporal realm of earth. Soul holds this reality for us, allows us to experience both while standing on the earth. Soul is how we experience wholeness in our lifetime, how we come to Center and experience the silence at the core of us, the wholeness at the core of life.

Soul is the pull between our remembrance of wholeness and our ground in matter. Both are vital for soul – the sacredness and the earthiness of life. Questions of meaning and purpose take soul on a journey through the invisible world while the beauty of earth delights soul’s fascination with the visible world.

To be soulful is to be filled with deep feeling or emotion, to be connected in an intuitive, felt way with something or someone, to wander events and feelings like a labyrinth until we find the center and the meaning of them. Every step is important to soul, a part of the whole, none more important than the other, each essential to the journey. Soul is a starting point, an opening, different for each person, with the journey different for each.

Soul tracks the human journey on its continuum, from its roots in the material to its ultimate evolution into the immaterial — from unconscious matter to conscious spirit – delighting in the longing, the reaching, the extending of self it takes in order for this to happen.

By paying attention to the non-physical world through introspection, self-awareness, attention to dreams, identifying purpose, plus other internal exercises, man becomes more inner directed than outer directed, more spiritual than animal, directed by the presence of the sacred within. Images and symbols speak the language of soul and nurture this internal, intuitive reality.

Plato taught that the soul resides in the body and is freed at death. For him, the body was a prison of sorts; the soul was something to be saved. For post-modern writers like James Hillman and others, it is the soul that saves the body, saves man, by allowing man to experience divine energy during his lifetime; by releasing more conscious light into the unconscious body.

This suggests that it is not in death that we come face to face with the divine, but in our lifetime, in our body, through the conscious soul that resonates with wholeness wherever it can find it. The wholeness we experience, in beauty, in reflection, in love — in life — evokes a remembrance in us of the wholeness at our core, present from birth, from before birth perhaps.

If we accept this as our birthright, that we are eternal spiritual energy in a human form, on a human journey, this remembrance evoked in us is the sacred in us. When this remembrance is evoked, we experience it, briefly. Walking in pristine nature, a lovely piece of art, music, prayer – this evokes the sacred at our core.

The sacred is “roused” in us, reaches out for us; we reach back. For me, this reaching, this finding, this moment of intimacy is soul.

Soul is a felt presence, in a room, in a person, in nature, in a piece of music. It is a haunting, an awareness that something magnetic is pulling on you, absorbing you into its essence, as if your essence feels home in its essence. It is a resonance, a coming together of sacred and ordinary energies, the eternal and the transitional, each longing for the other.

You know you are touched by soul when the deepest part of you is totally engaged — lost almost in the feeling of connectedness. You feel refreshed, resilient, empowered. There is no theology to it, no cerebral explanation. You just come to Center alive in the moment. Even in moments of deep sadness, there is a feeling of being held at our core, the awareness that we are part of something larger passing through us.

This is the force of the immortal soul moving in us, stirring in us, awakening in us a memory of the wholeness of which we are part. Something happens in the imagination, in the heart of the one who experiences it. It is not of the mind, not intellectual, but felt, experienced, an intuitive knowing in the body. Like the combination of a lock, the numbers tumble and then “click,” you know you have reached the exact moment you seek, even without knowing it was this moment you sought.

Another metaphor that may describe soul is that glorious button Shug speaks of to Celie in The Color Purple: “There is a place in you,” says Shug, “If you can touch that, you will never again be dependent on someone telling you who you are.” Once you experience soul and trust its wisdom in you, you can’t be a slave or an object or an inadequate person, no matter what others tell you or do to you. You can’t ever be the same again. You know you belong to something deep and fine, larger than life yet activated by life.

We speak of soul residing in a thing as ordinary as food – soul food, that food passed on to us by the black experience. When black people enslaved generations ago cooked and tasted their soul food, they felt themselves connected with divine energy rather than the debilitating slave energy imposed on them. It allowed them — freed them up — to remember their worth, their essence as human beings.

Soul unlocks the feeling of wholeness in a thing. Something in us is touched on a deep level, at the level of essence, and we know it, we can’t escape it. For an instant, we feel whole ourselves, not splintered or stressed, but lifted up and graced by our higher angel. Like winged creatures, we long to follow soul’s lead till morning, till the light shines through the mystery of it and lets us know what it is trying to say to us, the gift it is trying to leave with us.

“Everyday life is porous,” Thomas Moore says in The Soul’s Religion, “full of holes that open onto the sacred.” Only one steeped in soul can see through the distinctions made in this life between the secular and the sacred, to allow all experience to touch and inspire their higher selves. Life is rich and alive, if only we will allow it to touch us in more than superficial ways.

We’ve spoken of how Archaic Man had a profound but unconscious sense of the sacred. Post-modern man drowns in his race for secular gains. His conscious awareness of the sacred in daily life is often stunted. “All that is needed,” says Eliade, “is a modern man with a sensibility less closed to the miracle of life; and the experience of renewal would revive for him when he built a house or entered it for the first time,” or created something, or performed a meaningful ritual.

This is the activity of soul — to unmask the sacred, the eternal in things, to decipher the messages from the universe, to interpret our dreams and experiences. Like a dream catcher, soul catches our experiences and holds them close so we can feel them. Soul collects our gratitudes and holds them, too, until we experience a fall from grace and need to be reminded of them. Soul helps us to sit with something until we get it.

Soul stirs and mixes the rainbow colors of our life until we get just the right frequency of light to create the meaning we need out of them. Soul tells us stories until we know who we are and can claim our deepest selves. Soul contributes to our resilience so we can move beyond tragedy and know that we are more than what happens to us.

Soul sniffs out the beauty of the earth so it can heal us. Soul touches us in the present moment, in the Center, through the energy centers of our body. Soul stops me on my early morning walk and reminds me, in the words of Thomas Merton, “Don’t think. Look.” Don’t miss the dance of nature. Don’t lose this moment of sacred encounter.

When I walk, I pass a neighborhood duck pond. If I allow it, I am drawn in, pulled into the experience of it. I breathe it in, take in the ducks and the wild geese and the stillness of the water and of time. I am lifted up and quieted down at the same moment. I am absorbed into the feeling of the pond, as if it is my home as well, my own body. That meeting point between the energy of the pond and the matter of my own body is blurred. I languish in the soul. It begins my day.

The longing of the divine for the human, of the human for the divine, is soul’s love song. It is the nectar that sweetens and deepens all the days of our lives.

If Center is that mysterious intersection or encounter between ourselves and divine energy, wherever and whenever this occurs, Soul is how we connect with this intersection with the divine, the personal face we put on it, the personal experience we have of it.

Like a glittering diamond or prism of light, Center and Soul are interconnecting metaphors and realities experienced from different vantage points.

Soul is that part of us that is relational, emotional, that connects with and contains experience. Soul digests experience into our psychology and mythology. Soul is how we talk about experience, soul mate around it.

Soul is how we open ourselves to life passing through us, releasing the light from the darkness of our matter, from the darkness of our struggle.

Soul dips us into the primordial formless, takes us down into our earthiness, enables us to rise again with more depth and meaning.