In our work of tending our hearts and growing our souls, we experience transformation. We notice a greater capacity to tolerate our own discomfort. We become more familiar with our inner landscape. We find ourselves meeting our experiences with greater presence, and others with more compassion.
And then a moment occurs, often seeming to come “out of the blue”, as they say, when a reaction happens swifter than lightning. We lash out, or shut down, or get caught in an emotional quagmire, or whatever our “old habit” would have us do.
We reach a place of forgiveness toward someone who has wounded us, and then something reactivates the hurt, and we wonder if we ever forgave at all.
It can feel like we’ve made no “progress”, like all of our “growth” was an illusion.
In the work of the soul, however, growth is not linear. We don’t take steps always forward, always upward, eventually reaching a static state of perfection.
I like to think of soul-work as a spiral. We learn certain lessons. We develop certain emotional and soul skills. As we continue to live and be affected by that living, we encounter those lessons again. We are presented with new opportunities to practice familiar or temporarily forgotten skills. Each encounter, each opportunity helps us meet our inner work at a deeper level, gives our soul work deeper roots.
Granted, these spiral encounters rarely feel like progress or growth. In these places, we’re often meeting deeper woundings, more ingrained patterns. They hit us in increasingly vulnerable places, and we can feel like we’re “falling apart” rather than “getting it together”.
This is when it is so very helpful to have a trusted companion to whom we can reach out, and who can remind us that the more inner work we do, the more messy it feels. It’s a conversation I encounter frequently in spiritual direction encounters.
Part of this sense of “not making progress” has grown out of traditional church teachings on “holiness” and “perfection”. Jesus did say, “Be perfect, therefore, even as God is perfect.” Because we know the Divine One to be without flaw, and because our earthly concept of perfection has to do with an ideal, we assume Jesus is ordering us to achieve some state of inner (and outer) flawlessness.
The truth is that in the language Jesus spoke during his years here on earth, the word perfection actually had to do with being the appropriate item for a particular function. In other words, He was inviting us to connect with our authenticity. Who am I, at a soul-level? What work in the world am I well-suited for? How am I the most appropriate expression of Divine Love in this circumstance? This is not a static state or an arbitrary condition. It grows out of who I am in this moment, including my energetic and emotional resources.
The other word that trips us up is “holiness”, which has been taught as a kind of synonym for perfection but with more spiritual aspiration attached. A more accurate translation of this Biblical word would be “wholeness”. Jesus demonstrated this kind of wholeness during his earthly life, time and again drawing the outcast into the circle of welcome, and reserving his harshest judgement for those who would exclude others because of religion, health status, or gender.
These words of Jesus are an invitation, rather than a commandment. We are being invited into an ever increasing acceptance of all of who we are, including past versions of ourselves who made choices we might wish we could undo, and uncomfortable feelings that we wish we could hide from ourselves.
This growth into wholeness takes us around the spiral again and again. Always at the centre of this spiral is Divine Love which wants to express itself through our individual and authentic ways of being human in this world.
The quote above is from one of my favourite novels, and expresses this principle so well. I love the image of “loving our way to the root” of our tenderest wounds, our biggest struggles and our truest selves. It takes gentle and repeated care for whatever surfaces for our attention. We surrender to the spiralling work of Divine Love, and so doing, discover the treasure of our own being.
Leave a Reply