Anam Cara

Good soul-searching helps you to sift the past. Often you only begin when you find yourself in crisis. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek word “krinein,” meaning “to decide” or “to sift.” When you take time to search your soul and its past you will know more clearly what belongs to you and what does not. When you sift your soul, you are better able to identify the host of various longings you carry. When you listen to your longings coming to voice, you can discern which horizons they have in mind. You understand that to pursue certain longings would probably destroy you. Certain voices would love to seduce you.

It is interesting that at the source of the Christian tradition, in the Genesis story, the future of creation is determined by longing. The desire to eat of the fruit of the tree of good and evil caused the rupture in creation. When Adam followed his longing, its immediate effect was the loss of the ideal belonging of Paradise. In Christian mythic terms, the perennial tension between longing and belonging is to be traced back to this fracture. Expelled as we were from the harmony of Paradise, our belonging will always be fractured and temporary. Our longing will be permanent and full. Towering over the Greek tradition is the longing of the wanderer to return home. The huge longing of Odysseus is going in the other direction. He is already an exile, he wants to return to the belonging of his home and homeland. The true search for soul brings longing and belonging into a creative tension of harmony. Mediocre therapy could haunt your soul with absence by reducing each inner presence to a function.

Brittle Language Numbs Longing

It is a testimony to the relevance of a science when it finds its way into the heart of a culture. In this crossing, the science is often vulgarized. Contemporary culture is riddled with psychologese. So many people speak of themselves now in the brittle clarity of disembodied psychological terms. One such powerful term is “process”: “I am looking at my own process,” or “Let us try and process that for a while,” or “You can trust the process.” In many cases “processing” has become a disease; it is now the way in which many people behave towards themselves. This term has no depth or sacredness. “Processing” is a mechanical term: there are processed peas and beans. The tyranny of processing reveals a gaping absence of soul.

The only wisdom required nowadays consists of managing to get the right emotional components and complexes onto the appropriate assembly line so that they can go through the correct solidifiers and emerge in the correct packaging so that they can be “dealt with.” A “deal” is a business or contractual arrangement; it also happens to cards, especially in casinos. When you hear someone say “I am having to deal with this feeling right now,” you may wonder whether the emotion has been secretly absent for a while doing a crash course in Wall Street and is now forcing its “owner” into an unexpected corner. Such terminology is blasphemous; it belongs to the mechanical world. When you use it on your inner life, it “formats” your holy wildness. You become an inner developer, turning the penumbral meadows of the heart into a concrete grid. No wonder the tone of the modern soul sounds like the prison language of a ghetto. Such brittle cold language numbs your longing and unravels the nuance and texture of your presence; it can turn you into a ghost in your own life, a custodian of absence, a grey visitor of vacancy.

The obsession with such turgid analysis betrays how suspicious we have become of our own experience. We treat our experience, not as the sacramental theatre of our numinous lives, but rather as if it did not belong to us at all or as if it were merely public property. Unless you trust your experience and let it happen, you cannot be present for yourself or anything else in a natural way. When you lose this hospitality to yourself, there is no longer any welcome for the surprise and wonder of new things. Your experience becomes poor, and, ironically, the poorer it gets, the more obsessive is the desire to analyse it to bits. When your experience is rich and diverse, it has a beautifully intricate inner weaving. You know that no analysis can hold a candle to the natural majesty and depth of even the most ordinary moment in the universe. Every moment holds a gallery of sacred forms. Soul-searching is the activity of respectful and critical wonder at the drama of your biography. As with any worthy story, it has its own inner destiny and form independent of its author. When you keep scraping at your soul, you damage your very ability to experience anything. If you lose your sensibility, you have nothing to open the door to welcome the world.

Beyond Being an Observer—Becoming a Participant