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.