A couple of weeks ago I watched Phantom of the Opera (the movie) for the first time.  I have no idea how it compares with the stage production, but as it was, I really enjoyed it.  Since watching it I’ve thought a lot about the ways the show depicts so much inside all of us.  So much inside of me.

The scene in the dressing room where Christine meets Raoul for the first time since childhood, though – that was hard for me to watch.  Not the part with Raoul, but the part after Raoul leaves, where the Phantom gets jealous and possessive and Christine says to him (he’s still speaking to her from hiding), “Angel, I hear you.  Speak, I listen.  Stay by my side, guide me.  Angel, my soul was weak, forgive me.  Enter at last, Master!”  Oh, that was hard to watch.  Hard to hear her desperate pleading, offered to the tyrant she mistook for a god.

It was hard to watch because that was me in that scene. 

I have phantoms, too.  Things that pose for a long time as promise – promise of safety, of popularity, of being in on some insiders’ game – but that ultimately reveal themselves as threat.  The hardest part about that dressing room scene was the way it reminded me of the phantom I mistook for God for so many years.  A God who really seemed to talk to me, coach me, comfort me, stay faithfully by my side.  But who had a really awful flip side, too.  One that was gamy, pouty, insecure, demanding, self-centered.  One that would intentionally cause me harm in order to make me a better person.  One that would objectify me in order to get his own agenda accomplished, and be glad when I bowed my head and broke my will and silenced my voice in order to make that possible. 

He wasn’t all bad.  No – if he were, he wouldn’t have had such power over me.  Christine wouldn’t have been mesmerized by her Phantom if he had shown his cards too blatantly or soon. 

But he wasn’t an angel.  No.  Most definitely not.

I think phantoms come in many forms.  I think they can be blogs.  I think they can be self-talk.  I think they can be clubs or churches or jobs or people.  Alcohol, even.  Pornography.  Anything that’s magic for us, pulling us in with a sense of promise, making us lose ourselves and our better judgment in a swirl of assurances of wished-for things…or warnings of all that would be lost without them.  Our phantoms do all this, but simultaneously seep poison into us.  Jail us.  Demonstrate themselves to be dictators, twisted and jealous lovers.

I want to be free of my phantoms – the ones posing as God and otherwise.  I want to cultivate my inner Raouls, and friendships with outer ones, cause Lord knows I can’t get free on my own.  Lord knows the second our phantoms whisper in our ears, we’re melting again, swooning again, relocking our handcuffs willingly.  “Don’t leave me,” we say to our offended kings.  “I’m sorry I thought about freedom.”

In my moments of clarity, I say no to all that.  I say no to captivity and darkness.  No to un-gods.  And I sing a massive, operatic YES to freedom.  This kind of move may not let me live anymore in the magic of a personal “angel,” like Christine long thought she had.  I may no longer sing the songs that such “angels” can inspire.  And I grieve both losses.

At the same time, though, I think life outside the caves, outside the haunted opera house, is magic enough for me right now, and is full of hope and love and light around so many turns.  This makes me so happy.  This truly makes me want to sing.

My husband is reading a book called Chimpanzee Politics, in which a scientist documents 6 years of observing power dynamics and pecking orders among colonies of chimpanzees.  Fascinating stuff.  Apparently the author notes that those who study chimps long enough often face destabilizing questions.  Chimps are so much like humans that they force you to wonder just how fair it is to classify them as animals and us as, well, not animals - different, civilized.  When questions like this are asked, worldviews and self-definitions get wobbly.

We were talking about this this morning, wondering whether it might be true that no matter what you study, if you study it long enough, and with enough openness to the broader implications of your discoveries, you will inevitably face a crisis.  Or many of them.  Sure, crises come to varying degrees, and with varying amounts of pain and disruption.  But the thought is that they come.  They happen.  My crises came initially with impassioned study of religion.  But scientists face them, too.  Physicists.  Mathematicians.  Psychologists.  Anthropologists.  Even Joe Bloe, diving deeper into self-knowledge.  Study anything deeply enough, and with that openness to broader implications, and WHAMMO!  Worlds collide.

The thought strikes me oddly today.  Makes me feel funny.  Like all of us go about our lives, creating through that complex mix of genes and experiences a sense for who we are, how the world works, how the parts fit together, why things are the way they are and do what they do.  We create extensive webs of things to take for granted.  But in the process we’re all of us, far more than likely, really, really wrong about a lot of it.  Maybe most of it.  But we don’t know it.  And in fact we need to not know it in order to feel…normal.  Stable.  Like we’re not walking around in some science fiction novel where appearances are or aren’t what they appear to be.  Talk to anyone in crisis and you’ll get a sense for how wobbly and fluid their world has become.

Despite all the crises I’ve faced in recent years, or maybe because of them, I think I don’t mind admitting that I’m glad my web of things to take for granted is getting put back together, and I don’t even care that despite my best efforts, big chunks of it are inevitably going to be wrong.  I need it.  I need a web.  I need something to hold me up in this crazy world of relative space and time.

Here’s something I’d like to know:  How many people don’t feel on the outside of something?  I mean something they wish they could be a part of.  Cause if the answer is nobody, I think something could change for the better in me.

Last night I had a minor meltdown.  I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say they pertain to a potent little box of issues I like to keep hidden way back in the furthest corner of my inner closet.  I like to forget it’s there.  I like to live blissfully unconscious of the ways it sat open on my lap most of my life, tormenting the heaven out of me.  “You’re ugly,” it liked to say.  “You’re way too tall.  You don’t look like a woman.  You’re laughable, actually.  If your friends weren’t so nice, they’d probably point and laugh at you.”  That kind of thing.  And much, much more.

Well, the box got dislodged last night and spilled all over the place, and today I have the pleasant task of cleaning up the mess.  I have enough distance from the issues to be able to recognize their “truths” as bullshit, and their voices as far more to do with some twisted kind of self-protection than any accurate portrayal of my beauty or worth.  But that doesn’t keep me from feeling their weight, and the weight of the effects they’ve had on so much of my life.  They’ve made me feel like a pitiful outsider.

They’ve made me feel like an outsider of some desirable club of people who are beautiful and confident and clever and outgoing and world-wise and SHORT.  People who know how to dance and dress stylishly and say just the right things.  People who look good without a shower, who’ve read the right books and somehow know all the people I don’t.  And they like to travel.  They like to travel and they actually do it, and they’re completely unintimidated by new situations and cultures and people.  They thrive on such things.  They don’t have very much they need to hide.  They’re good with a camera.  They always have close friends available to hang out with them and when they get together they sip on wine that they didn’t pick just because the bottle was pretty.

Oh, I could go on.  And isn’t this what’s laughable, really?  Who belongs to this club?  How many people?  Any at all?

I have this hunch that if it could sink deep into my bones that we’re all feeling like we’re not in the club, I’d actually feel…part of it.  Does that make sense?  I’d feel like I’m on level playing ground, finally, with everyone.

So tell me the truth:  is there anyone who feels like they’re actually on the inside?  And if so, have you discovered their secret?

"Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we’re listening or not.  It is a note that only we can hear.  Eventually when life makes us ready to listen, it will help us find our way home." 

                                                                                                           ~ Rachel Remen

I’ve been thinking about this the last couple days.  Thinking about how many voices most of us have in our lives competing with that song.  Voices of those we most admire, voices of friends, voices of family members, employers, employees, children, reason – even people who have died, or who aren’t physically present to us anymore.  Voices don’t have to be literally audible to be heard and have their say.

It’s in the midst of all these voices that our little souls sing.  Our integrity calls to us, asking that we live less divided from who we are:  from what we value most, from the questions we most need to ask, from the things we fear and trust and want to imagine and make real.

I’ve been working my tail off in recent years to try to listen to that voice, to coax it out of hiding and make safe enough space for it to really get some wind.  And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this ordeal, it’s that listening, and even more so, acting in response to what I hear, is really hard work.  It’s really hard work.  I’m sure that’s why so few do it.

Because let’s be honest:  isn’t it much easier to let inertia do its thing?  In our marriages, our friendships, our beliefs, our self-perceptions, the jobs we pursue?  It’s so much easier to dance to the pounding of driving drums and raucous choruses than learn to move gently and gracefully with much more quiet chords.  How can we even begin that path if voices within and without are demanding that we don’t?

For me the answer has been that last little phrase, “helping us find our way home.”  I want to be home. 

I want to be at home in my vocation, at home in my marriage, at home in my friendships and my very own skin.  I want to not pretend I’m someone I’m not to try to make friends or impress people or keep from disappointing those with opinions about who or what I should be.  I want to put my trust in a Sacred that feels deep and strong and good – not one I feel bullied into trusting.  And not one that would ask me to distrust that lovely voice inside.  That voice that really does have my best in mind, and the best of our interconnected planet.  That voice that is wise and balanced and can hold a lot in tension while still keeping course.  The voice that says changing directions is sometimes healthiest for all involved.  Or sticking with something hard.  That voice that recognizes I’m a community of people and desires inside, and that knows when each part needs air time, needs honoring, needs grace to be just where it’s at.

So it’s home that pushes and pulls me from inertia.  It’s home that makes the struggle worth it and soothes me when I’m out in the storm.  It’s the thought of it that warms me, the sips and draughts I’ve had of it that stick in my memory when I’m not there.  It’s home that helps me listen past that cacophonous drone for the voice of my deepest integrity.  And yours.  Because I’ve a hunch it isn’t just mine I need to hear.  Or the world needs to hear for that matter.  I’ve a hunch it’s all of our integrities we need.  I want to conspire with the world, as Remen puts it, to help us all be ready to listen.

In one Buddhist strain (can’t remember now which), teachers speak of a choice we have in relating with the Real, with the Divine…with God, if that word can be understood broadly.  Monkeys or cats, they say.

We can relate with God as baby monkeys to their mothers:  holding on to mother’s back or chest, carried along, yet requiring effort to be so.  The image is a partnership, where the supplicant sees self and God both putting out effort, and self somewhat stranded if the effort of holding on gives way.

Another option is relating with God as newborn kittens.  The image is of being carried by the mother’s effort entirely.  A kitten can no more cling than a lump of clay; it can only cry when it’s hungry, rooting blindly for milk.  Its shelter, its protection, its very survival depend on mother’s care.  My doctor has a poster in one of her receiving rooms of a mother lion with a baby in her jaw, gently carrying it to safer ground.  I think of the cat-teaching every time I’m there.

The teachers say the choice of approach is ours:  monkey or cat.  Neither is better or worse.  Just options we always have.

My roots are Christian, and I’ve often heard Christian teachers exhorting the monkey way.  Through doubts, through hardships, through seasons when life makes no sense and God appears dead (or on serious vacation), hang on.  Maybe especially through such times.  Be faithful.  Let not your heart be swayed.  “Though all else forsake you, still I’ll remain true,” the Psalmist says.

I think the monkey way may be necessary sometimes.  I think it may even be crucial, sometimes, to an important kind of survival.  But I wonder whether the kitten way can sometimes be crucial, too…whether there are cases when the deepest kind of survival requires a complete letting go.  A going limp. An admitting that this clinging business just isn’t working anymore, and, come to think of it, I couldn’t keep clinging if I tried.  God help me, but I can’t do it anymore.

Maybe falling into the “den” isn’t always a fearsome thing, and can actually be the only path, for some, of finding God.  Could those who preach the monkey way most relentlessly be those whose inner voices sound a lot like hungry kittens?  Kittens who think mother monkey’s the only thing they’ve got?

If God is like a roaring lion, as Hebrew scriptures say, maybe God’s lion-ness goes a whole lot further than that.

One of the things that stopped making sense to me sometime during seminary was the idea that humans are born innately bad and deserve eternal punishment for this (a foundational concept taught in many Christian circles).  Why would we deserve punishment for something over which we have no control? I came to ask.  Felt like torturing people forever for eye color or hair texture or the shape of our little toes.  These, too, are innate from birth.

But the more I live and think and read and get to know people, the more the first part of that equation doesn’t work for me either.  Even the most hideous human acts seem rooted not in innate badness, but a complex web of factors, including, yes, our genetic make-ups, but going far beyond that to damaging life experiences and powers beyond any individual, like those of families, neighborhoods, cities, and political and religious environments.  Heck, I’ve even been learning about lead poisoning recently, and all the havoc it unknowingly plays in lives across our country, concentrated (where else?) in slum dwellings where occupants have little choice about whether their walls get repainted or pipes get replaced.

I’m coming to wonder whether, when it all shakes down, we have any choice at all.  You heard me rightly:  any choice at all.  I live daily like I do have choice, and it feels quite often like I do.  But when I think longer about any single choice that I make, the choice can’t be extracted from that huge web I just talked about – any hundreds or millions of things that all moved in and around and through me to bring me to today, to this choice, to this ultimate decision about, oh, what cereal to buy at the grocery store.  Or whether to forgive the mean telemarketer lady on the phone.

The more I get to know the back-story to any person’s life, the less able I feel to place blame on any shoulders for the bad things people do.  On the contrary, my compassion for wrong-doers grows, and, in many cases, I grieve for all the things they endured to bring them to whatever badness they’re presently about.  Part of my own healing in recent years, for that matter, has involved unlearning to feel personally at fault, and therefore guilty, for responding to certain kinds of people with fear or judgment or hostility, for not being able to follow through on certain things I know would be good for me…for being far from perfect.  Most of these very things are defense mechanisms that my dear little psyche dreamed up long ago to try to protect me.  They are not evidence of badness at all – not rebellion against Good and True and Right.  Salvation I’ve needed, yes, but not from innate badness.

And this gets to the heart of what I’ve really wanted to talk about today:  God.  I want to ponder God, and whether or not the divine has a rough side.

A friend responded recently to the story I posted last month with a version of this question:  Isn’t it possible that the judgment and wrath of the preacher in this story (Harris) and the love and compassion of the blind woman (Mama) are both faces of God?  Are you wishing for and imagining and dreaming only of a lop-sided God – a God that lacks the wholeness that is softness and spikes, darkness and light, judgment and mercy…Harris and Mama?

Maybe I am.  I’m uncomfortable with a God that looks too human, too full of all the limitations that come along with human territory.  I’m suspicious that such a God isn’t God at all, but a projection of our own selves, made far bigger and more powerful, but nevertheless imbued with our own consciousness and emotions and responses to the things we don’t like.  Anne Lamott wrote once, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”  And I think she’s got it right.  A God that’s going to zap all my oppressors seems appealing, in one sense, but also one who isn’t taking into consideration, in the zapping, all the things that make oppressors what they are…that make me who I am.  Again, that web I talked about earlier.

I’ve been reading Carl Jung’s autobiography this month, and he reflects a lot on God.  He’s convinced that just as there is darkness and light in all of us, there is darkness and light in God.  And I’m drawn to this wholeness – drawn in a way that makes me think twice and thrice and more about my friend’s recent question.  If all of life is a mixture of yin and yang, is never only one thing or the other completely, why would God be an exception?  Why would God be only love, only light, only softness and compassion?  Is God so “other” from us, as many religious groups and writings claim (despite the fact that the God imagined by many of them doesn’t seem so other to me)?

My dabbling in quantum physics and a handful of clairvoyant experiences make the world and everything in it seem deeply interconnected, interwoven.  “One,” if such a word can communicate.  The breathtaking magic and mystery of it all makes God seem…I don’t know…equated, somehow, with all of it.  All of it together.  All of the oneness and conscious/unconsciousness that is everything.  In moments where I’m in touch with this perspective, it seems silly to think of God as outside of it all, watching on, acting and reacting to a separate universe of his or her creation.  If anything, God and the physical universe feel indistinguishable, and “physical” an arbitrary designation to assign to anything.

If God is something like the All (how in the world do I talk about this???  I feel at a loss for language here), then of course God is not all softness and light.  God is thunderstorms and avalanches and raging wildfires.  God is attacking lions and tantruming two-year-olds and oppressive dictators.  And yes, God is peacemakers, too.  And prophets.  And sages.  Community organizers.  Disaster relief agencies.  Babies, suckling at our breasts.

God is Jesus on a cross, living and dying in such a way that our darkness is exposed, our intolerance of those who challenge our systems, our religions, our gods.  God is death and loss and unutterable grief. 

And resurrection, too.  New hope, new life.

A God like this is bigger and more pervasive than any God I’ve ever otherwise dreamed of.  I’m not sure I like it entirely.  But right now, nothing else rings quite as true.

What do you all think?

Last week’s New Yorker ran a powerful short story called The Gorge, by Umberto Eco, a heavy piece about Italian life during the Second World War.  The two main characters are a young Catholic boy, and an endearing older man named Gragnola – an anarchist, with all sorts of faith and love and valor hid well beneath a crusty, cowardly exterior.  The two are friends. 

One day the old man talks theology with the boy.  While I don’t see everything the same way he does, his words, and the boy’s reflections on them, dig deeply into the realness and messiness of life.  Here’s the end of a conversation about the Ten Commandments.  The old man speaks first:

“And now we come to the last commandment:  ‘Don’t covet other people’s stuff.’  But have you ever asked yourself why this commandment exists, when you’ve already got ‘Don’t steal’?  If you covet a bike like the one your friend has, is that a sin?  No, not if you don’t steal it from him.  Don Cognasso [the local priest] will tell you that this commandment prohibits envy, which is certainly an ugly thing.  But there’s bad envy, which is when your friend has a bicycle and you don’t, and you hope he breaks his neck going down a hill, and there’s good envy, which is when you want a bike like his and work your butt off to be able to buy one, even a used one, and it’s good envy that makes the world go round.  And then there’s another envy, which is justice envy, which is when you can’t see any reason that a few people have everything and others are dying of hunger.  And if you feel this fine sort of envy, which is socialist envy, you get busy trying to make a world in which riches are better distributed.  But that’s exactly what the commandment prohibits you from doing.  The tenth commandment prohibits revolution.  Therefore, my dear boy, don’t kill and don’t steal from poor kids like yourself, but go ahead and covet what other people have taken from you.  That’s the sun of the coming day, and that’s why our comrades are staying up there in the mountains, to get rid of Fat Head [Mussolini], who rose to power funded by agrarian landowners and by Hitler’s toadies, Hitler who wanted to conquer the world so that that guy Kripp who builds Berthas this long could sell more cannons.  But you, how could you ever understand about these things, you who grew up memorizing oaths of obedience to Il Duce’s orders?”

“No, I understand, even if not everything.”

“I sure hope so.”

Justice envy.  What a clever distinction.  And what a beautiful reflection more generally on the complicated nature of envy, and the need to parse the implications of “don’t do it at all.”

Later on the boy notices that Gragnola always wears a long, thin sack hanging from his neck and tucked beneath his shirt.

“What’s that, Gragnola?” he asks.

“A lancet.”

“Were you studying to be a doctor?”

“I was studying philosophy.  I was given the lancet in Greece by a doctor in my regiment, before he died…And I’ve worn it ever since.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a coward.  With the things I do and the things I know, if the S.S. or the Black Brigades catch me, they’ll torture me.  If they torture me, I’ll talk, because evil scares me.  And I’ll be sending my comrades to their death.  This way, if they catch me, I’ll cut my throat with the lancet.  It doesn’t hurt, only takes a second – sffft.  I’ll be screwing them all:  the Fascists because they won’t learn a thing, the priests because I’ll be a suicide and that’s a sin, and God because I’ll be dying when I choose and not when he chooses.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

(Did I mention the man is crusty?)

The boy reflects on things like this that Gragnola says:

“Gragnola’s speeches left me sad.  Not because I was sure they were evil but because I feared they were good.  He lived in a world made sad by an evil God, and the only times I saw him smile with any tenderness were when he was talking to me about Socrates or Jesus.  Both of whom, I would remind myself, were killed, so I did not see what there was to smile about.

“And yet he was not mean; he loved the people around him.  He had it in only for God, and that must have been a real chore, because it was like throwing rocks at a rhinoceros – the rhinoceros never notices a thing and continues going about its rhino business, and meanwhile you are red with rage and ripe for a heart attack.”

Could this describe the experience of raging at God any more poignantly??  Or the paradox so many God-haters are:  people so compassionate, so in touch with the beauty and pathos and suffering of humanity, that they just can’t stomach the idea of God being the jerk they’ve understood God to be.  They love so deeply they have to hate God.

I respect these kinds of people.  I guess I was one for a good bulk of time.  I still feel rage toward a certain image of God, but am coming to trust more and more deeply that that is not the God we’ve got.  My trust makes me say to “God”-haters whole-heartedly:  “Rage on!” I respect their (our) reasons for doing so.  And I hope and pray that all of us have occasion to experience God as other than jerk.  I pray that if that takes being raging atheists for a while (which probably means not atheists at all), we find the courage to live and be that storm for as long as it takes to find the Calm that comes after.  Or sometimes, if we’re lucky, the Calm that’s right there in the middle.

Lately Christy has been sharing some really beautiful things (read all of her March posts.  Seriously.) that have made me think again about what it means to suffer, what it means to grow when it really hurts to do so, what it means to feel really alone, even when supportive and/or well-intentioned others are around.  And also what it means to want to be gentle with yourself, even when you don’t exactly know how…to wish you could accept others’ love.

The darkest season I’ve experienced so far took place a few years ago.  It was just on its heels, when I was actually beginning to see life at the end of all that death, that I wrote a poem to try to understand what I was experiencing.  My life and faith and identity felt like “death-strewn shores,” and, having experienced a lot of hurt, it had become very, very difficult to trust.  Even those I knew in my gut to be trustworthy had become suspect.  Thankfully (the word feels now like an obscene understatement), a handful of people stuck it out with me, offering, as best they could, what presence and patience and compassion they had to give.

The stranger-friend in the poem is a prototype of this Compassion, this Presence.  Someone like Jesus may have been.  (I wonder what the poem would look like if he were female…)  He embodies the idea that resurrection sometimes cannot happen – in ourselves, or the ones we walk alongside – apart from us acknowledging our own suffering, and standing in solidarity (often wordlessly) with those we care for, not as “outsiders,” but as ones who know from personal experience what it’s like to be there, in the struggle.  Near the end I work with the idea that each of us, in the days and months and seasons of our lives, are at various places on this death/resurrection cycle, and we cannot expect even the most powerful of stranger-friends to escape the death part of it; they, too, (will) need presence and compassion.

Here’s the poem:

(more…)

The last many years of my life can be characterized, on one level, by awakening.  Not the kind that happens with a start, like when something goes whap in the night – the kind where you’re instantly alert, heart pounding, intensely aware of surroundings.  No, this has been a drawn-out process where consciousness comes slowly, layer upon layer, the kind of drip, drip that’s innocuous in a moment, but with time can actually move mountains.  My inner world is getting (re)created.

Part of my awakening has had to do with deep fears and beliefs and prejudices I’ve carried in relation to my identity as a woman – a devaluing of most things feminine, a drive to disassociate myself with stereotypically feminine roles and ways of being in the world, an incessant tug to work hard at earning the respect and admiration of men.  The pinnacle of all of this was probably the years I spent in seminary, developing all the left-brain capacity I was capable of, through logical, academic questioning of my faith, pursuing friendships with male classmates over female, dreaming regularly of attempts at hiding my womanhood, often, to my dismay, to be “found out” by male colleagues.

By the time seminary was over, my masculine side was a well-developed, perilously over-worked mess.  My feminine was an atrophied waif.

Time, friends, therapy, books like Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter and Secret Life of Bees, Loreena McKennitt, Indigo Girls – all of these became my doctors and surgeons and medications in a blessed move toward health, a gift of recovering in increasing ways a love of myself, a love of women, a love of the wholeness of life lived masculinely and femininely, together.

Which brings me to today.  I find myself mostly still burned out on the world of debate – theological or otherwise; I did more than my share in seminary.  I find myself far more eager to explore life and faith through unworded experience, ritual and intuition than through exposition on a page.  And I’m undeniably pregnant, full with the mystery that is life inside.  None of these lend to the kinds of thinking and writing and relationship-building I grew so comfortable doing in the past – activities my confidence and identity were tightly wrapped around.  I’m a fawn in this new space, uncertain how to stand.

So I’m asking, these days, what it means to be this me.  What do I do with my ongoing need to express myself with words when words right now (apart from fiction-writing) feel often a) freighted with the lop-sided me of my past, the me I’m burned out on and don’t have energy to maintain, and b) strangely foreign to the kinds of things going on in my soul?  What do I do with my need for relationships when relationship-building takes so much…talking, so much trying to explain who one is, who one was, what one likes or wants to avoid? 

I’m sitting, today, in the space between words, recognizing my need of them, but not quite sure what to do about my need just to be.  To be wordless.

I think somewhere inside each of us lives a tender, sparkling soul – a kind of Christ child pulsing to grow into all the Wisdom and Power and Love and Purpose that are actually its nature to become.  But like the infant Jesus, it can’t get there right off.  Its path is an unfolding one, beginning with much dependency, much need of gentle food, deep rest, attentiveness, nurture.  A vulnerable god, in need of our protection.

I don’t think a soul can ever fully die, but I do think it can get lost inside of us.  It can be ignored or beaten down or scolded for its strangeness or inefficiency so long it learns to be silent when it most needs to speak.  For years my soul felt too afraid to tell me things it urgently wanted to say. I’m sure some fear remains.

But in those golden moments of freedom, as I learn to listen, to wait, to honor, to encourage it toward Becoming – watch out!  I feel a source of Wisdom and Love and Power that makes me shake.  Or smile.  Or laugh.  Or sit silently reverent.  From its cracks seep hope and confidence and humility and courage.  Its roots drink Purpose, and in its presence I feel more deeply happy with who I uniquely am and with all the ways I’m just like everyone else.  My darkness and light become less adversaries than companions, each respecting the necessary role the other plays.  My fears become less hurdles, less roadblocks to thriving, and more like folks to whom I tip my hat as I move along my way.

Last night I had the most wonderful dream.  As a child I had a parakeet named Buddy, with whom I spent a lot of time.  Often he’d sit on my books or the tip of my pencil as I did homework, or sing from the ceiling fan in my room.  In the tenth grade I guiltily sold him at a yard sale, bearing the burden of abandoning, for convenience’s sake, my trusting companion.

Since then Buddy has become a persisting figure in my dreams, popping up particularly when I’m not taking care of myself…when I’m consciously or unconsciously ignoring my soul.  He represents my soul.

In many dreams I’ve forgotten to feed him.  I haven’t given him water.  His feathers are bent and unpreened.  His cage is filth.  In one, his eyes were even plucked out.

But last night – last night I dreamt I came to where his cage has always been, and the cage was gone.  Buddy sat serenely on a free-standing perch, the essence of youth and beauty.  His feathers were soft and more colorful than they’ve ever been, the look in his eyes all life and health.  I went immediately to him, exclaiming how beautiful he was, and how delighted I was to see him.  I woke up smiling.

My prayer to all of our souls:  may we love and honor you into becoming what you pulse to become.  May all your wounds and silencings be transformed into beauty, flight and song, and the resulting chorus become a contagious balm to a world in which there is much darkness, and the need for thriving souls is great.