The Soul of Soul

What’s the one thing you need to get right about spirituality?

I opened my last post with the story of me sitting on a therapist’s couch in the summer of 2015, numb to my own heart and certain that life was hopeless. I closed highlighting a whole different set of feelings I discovered during my time on that couch … feelings like, “graciousness, compassion, empathy, generosity, and love.”

What made that possible? During that season of therapy, I finally came to experience the soul of soul, the one thing you need to get right about spirituality.

Note: My faith grew through the Christian tradition, but I’m not into promoting Christianity. Rather, in Christ I find the embodiment of an undergirding wisdom that informs how I see and live in the world. But for simplicity sake, I will use popular terminology. I hope you can read the heart of what I say rather than a potentially painful history with specific words.

Photo by Vicky Sim on Unsplash

The crazy thing is, I walked into my therapist’s office with a deep and substantive religious background. I grew up in the church, spent four years after undergrad doing youth ministry, went on to get a Masters of Divinity (at the kind of Seminary where they make you take the Bible’s original languages of Greek and Hebrew), and was just a few month out from graduating with a Doctor of Ministry degree in Spiritual Formation.

Now, to be totally honest, my whole doctoral dissertation was driven by an awareness that faith as I knew it was spiritually deforming me and that I needed to come up with an entirely new framework to keep the Christian tradition palatable, so I had already unpacked the soul of soul while writing, but it was still taking root in my being.

What kept it from embedding itself in my psyche? Well, as my therapist put it, submersing yourself in grace, the relentless love of God, feels like you’re being drowned because you’re unaware that you can breathe underwater. And grace is the soul of soul.

Religion vs. Mysticism

Now, just in case my earlier reader note wasn’t enough, let me assure you that you don’t have an altar call coming. When I unpack my faith, my Buddhist friends tell me I’m one of them, I just talk more about Jesus. For the Taoists out there, I see the teaching of Jesus all over the Tao Te Ching (although the Tao Te Ching is older so maybe in some sense it’s the other way around). Are you part of Islam? One of my favorite spiritual books is Love Poems from God which contains the poetry of both Sufi and Christian mystics. I’d challenge anyone to read them without knowing the authors and tell me which is which.

And this inability to tell the difference between the mystics is part of the point. I’ve got a rather “manly” illustration that unpacks why.

Odds are good, at some point in your life, probably in your teen years or college, you tasted some bad whiskey, some cheap tequila, and some lousy rum. It’s also quite likely that as you’ve aged you’ve had the opportunity to taste some really good whiskey, some pricy tequila, and some high end rum.

Now, the low end versions of each product taste radically different from one another, but the high-end versions share a common complexity on the tongue, each bringing in other flavors and elements to create a far grander and dare I say potentially religious drinking experience. I would go so far as to say that the high-end versions have more in common with one another than they do their cheaper counterparts.

I’d say the same is true of religion, be it one of the monotheistic faiths or a more structured version of something from the Eastern world and their mystical counterparts. And the thing that binds the mystical traditions together? They all get the soul of soul, they get grace, the get the relentless love of God (or Allah, or the Universe, or the undergirding wisdom of existence, or whatever you want to call the source of relentless love).

So, if you want to tune into the soul of soul, don’t worry, you don’t have to go to church. In fact, especially in the US, more often than not, the church is just as good at stripping away soul as pop culture.

But why? What makes grace, the soul of soul, so difficult?

Relentless Love? Really?

The idea of grace, the notion that the divine is relentlessly loving, is a hard pill to swallow for a number of reasons:

• Some people assume that makes God like some hyper-permissive parent who lets their spawn wreak havoc wherever they go. But that is fundamentally unloving because we all know that child will grow up to be an asshole. So love demands discipline, but not punishment.

• Others assume that if God is relentlessly loving that there wouldn’t be suffering in the world, but that’s only true if we see God as some chess master in the sky moving pieces around based on, well, who know why because the good people seem to get screwed just as much if not more than the bad ones. But what if God isn’t standing above time but one who sees the end of time clearly and steps into any situation, no matter how tragic, and seeks to move us towards what is ultimately good. In other words, God is not the cause from above but the ever-present cure.

• Then of course there’s the whole thing that we as people desperately want to prove that we’re worthy and good enough. After all, we’ve constructed an entire society around performance-based acceptance. If God loves us relentlessly, no matter what, it’s impossible for us to do anything to earn love because we are already beloved.

If you’re a Bible-lover thinking this can’t be in the Bible, here are some verses worth reading.

So rather than embrace grace, we do things to try and de-gracify it like putting conditions on it. This is all the, “God will love you if…” stuff. Sometimes it’s about believing the right things or doing the correct rites and rituals or making certain changes in your life.

In other words, we try and turn grace into something we earn rather than something that is given. Thus the idea that we feel like we’re drowning because we don’t know we can breathe underwater, so we do anything and everything we can to pop our head above the surface and take a breath. That’s fighting grace.

And you know what’s even harder than believing God is gracious towards you? Believing that God is gracious towards the people who aren’t like you, whether it’s those who practice another faith, are part of another political party, and in some places, those who drive the wrong brand of truck (**cough** Cybertrucks **cough**).

Yet, when you do embrace grace, everything changes.

How Grace Changes Everything

There aren’t very many things in life that have the power to change everything about everything, but embracing grace is one of those things. I’ll highlight three key examples here:

• Grace disempowers the shame that either crushes us, drives us to perform, or both.

• Grace invites us into the vulnerability needed to not be lonely.

• Grace is what enables the shift from ego serving self to ego serving soul.

Let me unpack each of these points.

Disempowering Shame

In the Hebrew Bible’s story of Adam and Eve, a story that I believe aims to unpack the human experience, the first couple goes from being “naked and not ashamed” to seeing that they are naked and feeling shame so they covered themselves up. Then when God confronts them, they go off blaming anyone and everyone they can including God. Sound familiar?

When is the last time you found yourself feeling defensive? Or maybe working really hard to prove yourself? Then again it might be asking your partner for a list of things you can do to please her?

All of that ties back to shame, which Jungian researchers call the Swampland of the Soul. It’s that feeling in our gut that we’re not good enough and we’ve got to prove our worth to ourselves and others. Shame is why we don’t go to the doctor and shame is why we disconnect from our emotions.

Grace disempowers that shame because, rather than not being enough, we are beloved. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t have room to grow, skills to learn, or that whatever we do is justified, but it does mean that we have a bedrock to stand on, and no matter what happens, that foundation won’t be pulled out from under us.

Now the reality is that our bosses or investors are still going to set expectations for us, and we’ll have to work to advance or just keep our jobs, but how different would life be if every moment of every day wasn’t accompanied by that voice in the back of your head that demanded performance?

And oddly enough, when we get to that point where the voice of shame quiets, our performance improves, not because we’re afraid of failure, but because we’re operating from passion (more on that in point 3).

How To Not Be Lonely

If you hadn’t heard, there’s an epidemic of male loneliness. Don’t believe me, just Google, “male loneliness epidemic.” And it’s not just men who are concerned about it, women are too, even Lefty women (well, at least Shoe and one other Lefty woman):

The question is, why?

While it was on that therapist’s couch that I came to see shame sitting at the root of pretty much every issue in my life, it wasn’t until June of 2020 that I really got it on the relationship front, be it something romantic or a friendship.

But then before a flight from Denver to Portland, I randomly grabbed a book that had sat on my shelf for years but had largely gone untouched. It was Henri J. M. Nouwen’s, Intimacy.

The book is a collection of essays that unpack the broader concept of intimacy from a number of perspectives, but it’s the second essay that’s been working me over ever since. The essay title: The Challenge to Love.

He opens asking not, “How do I find deep love?” but wondering if that kind of love is possible at all. Then he offers his diagnosis on what hinders deep love.

In the midst of his diagnosis he writes:

We are judged, evaluate, tested, and graded, diagnosed and classified from the time our parents compared our first walk with a little neighbor’s. Gradually, as time goes on, we realize that our permanent record is building a life of its own, independent of ours. It is really not so amazing that we often feel caught, taken, and used for purposes not our own. The main concern then becomes not who I am but who I am considered to be, not what I think, but what others think of me. In this taking existence we find ourselves operating in terms of power, motivated by fear.

I think another way of saying, “operating in terms of power, motivated by fear,” is ashamed.

Then he goes on to apply it to a relationship:

Isn’t this true also for many dating relationships? Sometimes it seems that a boy feels more relaxed in the classroom than when he is alone with a girl. Instead of feeling free to give his affection, express freely his moods and concerns to the girl he loves, he is more self-conscious than ever, wants to make the right remark at the right time, and is everything but spontaneous.

This sounds a lot like what shame research Brene Brown learned when she was confronted by a man while on tour:

Offering another way, Nouwen writes of a man who dares to be vulnerable, to acknowledge his “deepest despair, weakness, hate and jealousy,” that he has broken through the “walls of shame” and believes that his friends won’t destroy him. Instead, he chooses to believe that his vulnerability will invite the same from his friends and there will be a chance for all of them, at least in that moment, to not be lonely.

Ego Serving Soul Over Self

Finally, as I alluded to earlier, grace disempowering shame gives space to live, not from duty, obligation, or fear, but from passion. Our egos, which typically spend the vast majority of their time countering shame now have the freedom, in the words of Jungian Eco-Depth Psychologist Bill Plotkin, to serve soul over self.

What does Bill mean by soul here? Your unique ecological niche in the universe. It is you embodying and living out of the very essence of who you are, something David Whyte explores in his teaching, What to Remember When Waking which opens with a poem that includes the lines:

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

And here’s the thing, odds are good that your unique ecological niche is found in the part of your life where you’ve felt the most pain.

Why are you here? Look to the pain point that grace most profoundly touches and ask how this core wound can become a sacred gift to others.

It’s Time to Breathe

Do you want to disempower shame? Embrace your belovedness.

Do you want authentic relationship? Risk stepping into vulnerability.

Do you want to live from passion? Embrace grace and dare to ask how your core wound can become sacred.

It’s so simple on the surface, but in truth the soul of soul is anything but. Yet it all begins with imagining you are submersed in grace and daring to inhale.