“Hey, Mom!” my John called over the phone in full excitement. The connection was choppy, but I could hear the smile on his face.

“I used the money you gave me for my birthday to rent a bike. I’m calling you on my cell phone as I’m riding over the Golden Gate Bridge!”

John, in San Francisco with a friend for the first time, had just celebrated his 35th birthday. While his friend was attending a conference, John was biking San Francisco, soaking in the experience and, joyously, wanting to share the moment with me.

This is a child who, 35 years ago, suffered grand mal seizures with every fever. This is a child who, in grammar school, had a learning disability and was scape-goated by classmates. This is a child who, after years of my begging him to “just get through high school,” went on to get his masters in business. This is a child who, after wandering the maze of the corporate world, has just started his own small business.

The image of my John riding solo on a bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear, crisp morning, with the sun sparkling on those blue Bay waters, makes my heart sing. It is the perfect climactic metaphor for all those years I held my breath as he broke through yet another barrier to become the man he is today.

And while I was holding my breath, God’s breath was at work in John, in both his peak moments and in his bleak moments. This eternal breathing contained him long enough until he himself could come to the realization that the most important connection is his connection with John, with this divine energy in him, with nature, with life. No one woman, no one job was going to create the kind of meaning he needed, in both the chaos and the calm. 

John didn’t call to tell me where he was staying in San Francisco, where he ate, what he saw from his bike, but to let me know he was feeling fully alive and experiencing soul. Our conversation lasted three minutes at the most. He knew and I knew.

As Edna Saint Vincent Milay uttered in one of those moments, “Oh, World, I cannot hold thee close enough!”  All the pain and loss that goes with being human become, at those moments, harmonious background notes for the chords of joy pounding in us.

Then, when life looms heavy and nothing goes well, when we strain to make out the chords of  transformation at work in us, even on our knees, we sense ourselves connected to a larger whole. We are aware of God’s breathing in us from both sides of life’s up-and-down teeter-totter.

What nourishes me in both the highs and lows are the images and metaphors that provide spiritual energy. Just as the metaphor of John riding his bike solo over the Golden Gate Bridge brings healing to that place in me that grieves for the perfect childhood my children didn’t have, other metaphors heal other broken moments. I allow the metaphor to move deep into those dark places and open spaces for redemption and resolution.

Metaphors of healing abound in nature. Metaphors of steadfastness abound in relationships. Metaphors of bravery and integrity abound in our stories. We carry these in our soul. We can call on them when we need them. They allow us never to feel isolated, defeated, or singled out.

Synchronously, I was at Chastain Park the night before John called, third-row-center-seat, listening to Tony Bennett croon his “I left my heart in San . . . .” and filled with San Fran’s warm images. Next day, when the image of John riding over the bridge emerged out of those already uplifting images in my heart, I felt connected to a deep interior well that bathed my soul.

Just as my waterfall serves as a metaphor for me, for how I experience my God-energy, Jesus used the metaphor Abba, Pappa, to express his experience.

By describing my experience of God – the relationship we developed in secret on my waterfall – I have to use words that make it sound more concrete than it was. It was experiential. No one had to explain it to me. The God I heard about in church and the God I experienced on my waterfall were two separate entities. One, I heard about, learned about. The other, I knew. 
 
Jesus’ use of Abba for his encounter with God is also experiential. He used it to express how he experienced his God-energy, not to describe who God is. The distinction is important if we are going to understand Jesus’ interior life. Everything he said flowed from this. Jesus spoke in metaphor so as to evoke in the listener an experience of the truth he was trying to share.

Jesus used Abba as an address to God, explains Joachim Jeremias in his New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus, only in his prayer life. Otherwise, it was too intimate a term, purposely not used in the Judaism of his era. Jeremias shows, drawing on the Palestinian culture in Jesus’ day, how the use of Abba describes the special relationship that existed between father and son: a father took on his son as favored apprentice, shared intimate secrets, not shared with anyone else.    

“What Jesus wants to convey in the guise of an everyday simile is this: Just as a father talks to his son, just as he teaches him the letters of the Torah, just as he initiates him into the well-prepared secrets of his craft, just as he hides nothing from him and opens his heart to him as to no one else, so God has granted me knowledge of himself.” (Jeremias, 60)

Jesus expresses, with the use of this metaphor, Abba, that he finds God to be trustworthy. He bases his whole life on this relationship, this trust. He believed he had received everything he needed from God to deal with anything that came his way. It wasn’t the “Papa, take care of me!” of a dependent child. It was, “I can overcome the darkest of fears, for I know my father’s secrets and can use these in my own life.”

This trust, this relationship, allowed Jesus to remain open in times of terror and crisis; he could call on this power within. In remaining open, Jesus could learn from every experience, find the gold in them, allow them to stretch him into the person he was called to be. There was no retreating into his shell like a turtle with the first sign of threat. He stepped in and through it.

Jesus could respond to the threat, remain open from the start, as his father’s presence in him was greater than the darkness and fear in him. This presence in him gave him the assurance that, no matter what happens, Papa knows, for Papa is within. Jesus felt safe. Even in the face of death, he reminds Pilate that they can kill his body, but they can not rob Jesus of who he is.

Because of this trust, Jesus learned not to cling. “In my father’s house, there is enough.”  This allowed Jesus to be generous with himself, to hold nothing back, for there was more than enough to his father’s love. The metaphor of the eucharistic banquet colors all of Jesus interactions.

Everything, for him – no matter how much or how little in the way of money, possessions, power – were all gifts only temporarily entrusted to his care by a God who intended him to use them with those less fortunate, as God himself would do. Jesus saw this as God’s intention – to share everything, to free captives of any kind, to heal suffering – so it became his intention.

Jesus came to proclaim, to heal, to save people by reminding them they were more than their jobs, more than their riches, more than their religion. He knew his father wanted his people to be healed now, in their present circumstance, not in some distant future. That is what Jesus’ proclamation was all about, the rainbow color out of which he lived his life.

Because Jesus could experience, in his lifetime, the healing hand of God, he wanted others to experience this. This is Kingdom – God’s presence – spread out upon the earth, already among us, yet hidden to those with no spiritual eyes. Jesus’ relationship with God was so strong and so complete, he felt empowered to speak in God’s name, to do God’s work. It happened through Jesus. He became, at that point in time, the Center, the Stillpoint, divine energy incarnate.

Jesus lived his life out of this experience of God as Abba, Papa, in such a way that there was a slow whittling away of the person of Jesus until those around him could only see before them the God that Jesus proclaimed.

As my friend Bob has so beautifully said: “Upon reflection afterwards (after the death of Jesus), the community of his followers was unable to delineate clearly where Jesus left off and God began. In their recollection of him, to have seen Jesus was to have seen the God of their fathers. To have known him was to have known the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. To have been in his presence was to have been in the presence of the holy one of Israel.”

Whether we consider Jesus to be God’s son, to be God himself, to be a great prophet, or to be a man who experienced in his lifetime the person of God in such a way that when Jesus spoke, God spoke – Jesus’ entire life released into our universe a model of love and truth and beauty  we have never fully absorbed.

“We try to change the hand we’ve been dealt just by shuffling the cards,” Sheila said with a sigh. “It doesn’t work. I know now we have to deal from a new deck.”

Sheila is a woman who suffered much from childhood wounds. She attempted to carve out a life for herself in lots of different areas, but her wounds got in the way. Her relationships, her career, her life satisfaction always reflected the same dysfunctional patterns and dead ends. After several bad marriages, she was distraught to see her own negative patterns showing up in her children’s struggle to thrive. She entered therapy.

We are each dealt a hand from the deck of life. Our family, the country in which we are indoctrinated, the tradition and values we’re given – these all influence how we interface with and receive life. Our wounds put us on a path, deepen our capacity to experience, as well as offer clues as to how to out-step the narrowness of possibilities we’ve inherited.

Repeating old patterns, carting around the same old expectations, hiding behind the same old self-talk and perspectives that colored our life until now, will not change our story. We have to “deal from a new deck,” as Sheila says. We have to change the program, the self-talk, the possibilities. We have to have the courage to let go of the old deck.

We have to let the happiness in. We have to envision ourselves and our life in new ways, with new opportunities, in order for new energy to transform us into new possibilities. Coming to that place where we finally realize all we’ve done is cycle and recycle dysfunctional patterns gives us the message we cannot do this by ourselves.

We must engage a new helper or assistant who reports to us we have a number of other sets of cards in us we don’t know about. This new energy, this new helper, is sometimes a dream, sometimes a therapist, sometimes an epiphany, sometimes a twelve step program, sometimes an affair. It’s something that captivates us, creates interest in us, because this “helper” knows something we don’t.

For some, realizing they have another set of cards within from which they can create a new life is difficult; they’re clinging so tightly to the hand they’ve been dealt. Only as one learns to loosen the grip on one deck can one draw another deck from within. This means taking risks, allowing oneself to be loved even when it feels too scary, taking on new creative opportunities even though we don’t think we’ll be any good at them.

“I’m holding new cards,” Sheila smiled one afternoon. “My cards are different now than they’ve ever been. I have to be willing to play them in ways I’ve never allowed myself before.” Sheila has learned to open herself to new experiences — a loving relationship with a man who wants to cherish her, new friends, a thriving career. All this feels scary when we’ve never before experienced it. It feels foreign, unpredictable. 

We have to allow that part of us that is older and wiser than we are – our soul – to project on to the new cards whatever we need to create the kind of life that will open up those possibilities we haven’t “allowed” in our life before now. We have to pay attention to that other energy source – that spiritual helper – to allow it to show us what we really want, what is possible for us, what lies within. Our old wounds blind us to new possibilities. We ourselves block them by “just shuffling the cards,” by doing the same old things, responding the same old way, in each new experience offered us.

“I’ve got to start using my new cards – be open to my new relationship, my new creative energy, my new friends – if I want to grow,” Sheila reassured herself. She knew she had new opportunities, but, unless she activated and embraced them, they would only turn out like all the old opportunities she allowed to crash and burn in the past.

Sheila is creating a life. She’s trading in her tattered, used-up cards from her past and allowing in new energy, new cards. Her old cards have lost their freshness, their truth for her. She won’t be anxiety-free as the new energy enters her. New energy always brings anxiety at first, until the way we are becoming is the norm, the familiar, the way we are.  But she has a vision of herself in her new energy and she likes it. She wants it. She’s done the work up to now to be able to allow it.

Life is always trying to deal us a new hand, open up new possibilities, but we have a hard time trusting ourselves. We don’t think we can handle the new experiences this new way of being requires. The old cards, the old ways of being, are so familiar and safe. We know we would lose too much of what we think we have to hold on to. We’re afraid of the new woundings that come with new cards, think they will be too much for us.

Can we get the blessing without the wounding? Can the new cards come without any adjustment? Do possibilities come only in one flavor? Probably not. Creating a life comes through the birthing of something not-yet, something freshly imagined, deeply desired. In the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “There’s more between heaven and earth than men dream of.” There’s more to be experienced, more to be surprised by than we can dream.

I was 9 or 10 years old when I jumped headlong into soul. Another way you might say that — I was 9 or 10 years old when I was born.

My family had just moved to the country, to a suburb of Atlanta called Sandy Springs. Sandy Springs at that time consisted of a grocery store, a drug store, a hardware store and a filling station. It was wilderness on the edge of a growing city. We lived on 35 acres of land along the Chattahooche River that my grandmother bought when Atlanta was young. She offered some land for building a home to each of her five children.

My father chose a hill overlooking the lake. The land meant everything to him. He finally built a home and seduced my mother into moving the family.

There was tension in paradise. The more my father and my siblings and I grew to love the woods, the more my mother grew to hate them. She felt isolated; tired of driving the sixteen or so miles of country roads to and from Atlanta several times a day, angry my father chose to live his mother’s dream instead of hers.

My childhood was spent wandering the woods, making forts, and discovering my inner life. The silent presence of the woods and the whispering sirens of nature created in me a temple.

Whatever needs I couldn’t get met in my early life, I got them met a hundred fold in the experience of my waterfall. This lovely, natural sanctuary was a short distance from our home, near the lake. The Van I know was created at that time.

My waterfall was the kind of presence who knew exactly what I needed whether I was upset, excited, or just looking for someone to talk to. Just stepping on to her moist, mossy rocks opened up the closed places in me and released my soul to tell her everything.

I felt safe with her, felt cuddled by her warm rocks, bathed in the lullabies of her water music. Those whispering waters allowed me to access that delicate chord of oneness with all of life. From that experience, that early encounter with wholeness, I carried within an awareness, a resonance that zeroed in like a homing pigeon on experiences of wholeness throughout my life.

It seems God took the soul of that waterfall and placed that soul in me. With the matter and spirit of rock and water music, God created my essence. The hours I spent just sitting and listening in that sacred space allowed the slow wearing away in me of any resistance to what it was God wanted me to know. I knew God in an intimate way and God knew me.

I carry that waterfall within me today. It continues to nurture and to inform me. It creates in me a safety that nothing outside of me can dismantle. It serves as container for all the experiences entering my psyche, a holy place within where I can sort out feelings and reflections. It defines me. It forms the center of my personality. 

Our life is a page of possibility until we write on it, flesh it out, create our own personal myth. It takes time to listen, to be ready, to not make mindless moves until the energy stirs within, before the light emerges from the darkness, before the whisper rises out of the silence.

Like Michelangelo, we sit before the formless clay of our life and wait until it speaks. Only then do we know who or what wants to take form. Creating a life is a dialogue, a joint effort. We are artists, standing before the empty canvas of our life, struggling, trying things out, until the image hidden there emerges. Only then can the image move through us and tell a story, our story.

My waterfall experience became for me a paradigm for how to process information, how to access soul. It has also served to help me determine the quality of different relationships throughout my life. If I felt as safe and as alive with someone as I felt sitting on my waterfall, I knew this was a healthy, supportive, peaceful relationship. These anchor my life.

I consciously create myself one day at a time from the root of this one life circumstance: I lived in the woods as a child and was mothered by a waterfall. This colors my spirituality and the way I relate to the world. It is the rainbow color that set me on the path to creating my own rainbow out of the experiences of my life.

Other colors emerge and present themselves to me in continual flow. This was true, particularly, at significant stages of development in my life, moments of creation and re-creation, not always pleasant. I add these new colors to the base color of my waterfall experience. The external circumstances and focus of my life change as I add new color, new dimension, but the base color that directs and informs my becoming is always present.

Life is often hectic, confusing, demanding, as well as profound and meaningful and delicious. We create ourselves anew each day out of the colors of the moment.

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.

“May I have more sugar for my coffee, please,” shouts a man sitting on a barstool at a local coffee shop. The chatty waitress behind the counter is involved with another customer, more attentive to her own needs than to her restless customers.

Irritated by the distraction from her idle banter, the waitress scans the line of empty sugar containers on the counter and shouts back, “Stir what you have.”

Our waitress, as metaphor, shows up in all those places we least expect her:  in our dreams, in our prayer, in our efforts to fill a void with something or someone outside ourselves. She shouts back that emphatic No and leaves us scrambling to refocus on and rediscover what we do have.

The point? We have everything we need to have a satisfying life.

We are wired, as human beings, to know what is best for us and to be able to pull exactly that from within ourselves. No new romance, no new house, no plastic surgery, no piece of furniture or new job is going to satisfy the longing for safety and satisfaction that haunts us at our core.

If I continue to look for more and more outside myself to fill my longing, I diminish, discount and ultimately starve that creative, nurturing, eternal source within. If I project on to others what is creative, romantic, intelligent in myself, I lose touch with my own ability to meet crucial personal needs of safety, sanity and soul.

Following the lead of soul in ourselves will lead us to what it is we really want, to be alive in the moment, in all our moments. To embrace our life circumstances and to experience aliveness in them fills us with the vitality, the adventure and the sacredness we long for. We come to know what satisfies us, what is enough for us, what makes our heart sing. We can give it to ourselves.

One of my clients reminds herself this way: “Get back inside and quit giving away your power!”
We project outside that which we most need to connect with inside ourselves. We project our creative gifts on to another person and then see them as god or goddess. Only later, after we have seen through the projection, we realize that what we admired most about them was something longing to be recognized and developed in ourselves. Already ours.

We look for safety in another person’s love, in financial success, in more and more of whatever we think will make us safe. You are safe, the old witch/waitress taunts back at us, because it’s all there, already within you. Claim it as yours –your creativity, your intelligence and imagination – and you’ll never again fear that someone or something can rob you of that feeling of safe.

It takes a long time to realize our real gifts. Not many of us got the kind of mirroring we needed from our parents. Not that our parents didn’t love us, but they probably didn’t get it from their own parents. We come to recognize our own gifts through other’s response to us.

Throughout my life, I fell in love over and over with the same man, never realizing that what I loved in these different men was some unknown I loved in myself. I was drawn to the books I loved because they reflected back to me my own untapped wisdom. I didn’t recognize this for a long time. Over and over, I fell in love, was drawn to, my own soul.

This is not to say that our relationships with others, our love experiences, our knowledge gained, the wisdom given us by others, is not important. It is. We are not meant, as human beings, to be alone. It’s only when we keep looking for someone or something outside of us to fill what we can only fill for ourselves that we run on empty and keep coming back to the same starting place.

Recognizing the witch/waitress/eternal essence that speaks in our night dreams, that calls from our prayer-place, that shoots us down when we invest in something or someone at our own expense, comes as we come to love ourselves, our bodies, our personal story. Startling at first, she points to those places we give away to someone else that which is really us, then shows us, laughing, how to reclaim our pearls.   

We live an abundant lifestyle. We live in an abundant environment with magnificent animals and exquisite specimens of nature. We keep thinking there is more to have. It’s the more of it that we misread. The more, indeed, is within. What we have is more than enough.

On one of our many trips to the library, my grandsons Archer, then just 4, and Waddy, just 2, picked out books they wanted me to read to them. Archer grabbed some dinosaur and animal storybooks; Waddy grabbed a Winnie the Pooh book.

When we got home, we sat on the floor and read aloud our treasures. One book told the story of how dinosaurs and all creatures evolved from sea animals coming ashore and developing legs and adaptive organs in order to live on land.

After reading it, I told Archer this might be a good book to share at show-and-tell with the other children, so they could talk about how the animals were sea animals before they were dinosaurs. Waddy listened, then shoved his Winnie the Pooh book in front of me to read. His turn!

Archer pushed Waddy’s book aside and said, “Waddy, that’s not important.” “It’s important to Waddy,” I said as I opened the cover to read Waddy his chosen book. Archer thought a minute. 
“This is important,” Archer said pointing to the story of animal evolution. “This is cute,” he said, pointing to the book about Winnie the Pooh. The birth of discernment!

What’s important to me, to borrow Archer’s word, is always shifting, spiraling inward towards my core identity, my center, my authentic self. That’s because each year I peel away another level of awareness about my identity – why I’m here on this earth, my meaning, my purpose. I get in touch with and release energy in my body that was previously blocked, for whatever reason.

The sounds and species of birds on my morning walk, the welfare of and my delight in my family, the fragile balance of our endangered environment, whether or not I harness my creative instinct in a day – these are important to me.  Whether or not my hair is graying, what I put on my back and what I eat for dinner is cute.  

The adventures of Winnie the Pooh were once important to Archer. Age brought with it more challenging metaphors. Archer began building a hierarchy of what, for him, was “cute” and what was “important.” There’s room enough for both. Waddy’s fascination with Winnie the Pooh was appropriate for Waddy at 2 years old. What Archer suggests for us, who are further down the line of discernment, hopefully, is that it is important to name things for ourselves.
 
A fellow psychotherapist, Paula Reeves, puts it this way:  “You’d better decide what matters to you before that becomes the matter with you.” If we do not discern what matters to us, our energy will go towards maintaining the cute in our life, draining away essential spiritual energy from what is important to our essence. The soul of us will become dry and brittle. This can show up as a physical symptom, as depression, or as a lingering case of the blahs.

I have to daily decide how I want to use my energy, for whom, and why. I have to make sure I get generous helpings of beauty, genuine expressions of love and a smattering of unexpected epiphanies in a day. I need time in nature, time with my thoughts, time with significant others, time to piddle, time for creativity and time for meaningful work. All these are important to me.

What is important to Archer and to Waddy get expressed in their language, at their stage of development. New energy is released with insight, developmental skills, spiritual experiences. Archer responded to Waddy’s killing a menacing bug with, “You don’t know about the Circle of Life yet, Waddy (a spiritual thread from the movie Lion King). You’ll learn about that.” Spiritual awareness has its own timing. We can not read one another’s heart.

Insights come slowly, through personal experience, through shared models of what is spiritually liberative and what is not. These intuitive processes thread their way through our center, our core, releasing new energy in us. This enables us to understand ourselves better, to “shed light” on our emerging character, to assist us in our effort to integrate our whole personality or psyche.

We learn to decipher the signs that point the way through the maze of our life. We learn to choose things that quiet our mind and fill our soul, like solitude and simplicity and soothing relationships. We get better at seeing universal patterns and truths as these unfold in our day to day. We become more familiar with and more open to experiences of wholeness. 

All this is a lifetime process. It begins simple, as with Archer and Waddy’s choice of library books. We choose from the wide array of experiences that are offered us every day and prune away, slowly, those things that do not nourish us emotionally, spiritually. If we are not discerning, we take in too much clutter. The energy and direction we need to feel fulfilled in our own life gets drained from us. Our life becomes a parade of cute.

Now, with all this talk about important and cute, don’t get me wrong. When my 2-year-old Waddy wanted me to read him Winnie the Pooh, I was delighted. It was important to him, and that made it important to me.

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.