“This is the hour, O Soul”

Silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best

Marc Chagall “Jacob’s Dream”

One way of thinking about the upheaval we’re experiencing in society and culture today is to recognize that we are paying a heavy price for not tending our inner life. Something inside is wrong, and because we have been focused almost exclusively on distractions in the outer world, this something inside is now rebelling. Our vast, ignored, and neglected interior life is now getting our attention the hard way. Medical professionals and social scientists have been saying for years that loneliness, depression, and anxiety are at dangerously high levels, and it’s only getting worse.

One way many of us deal with our spiritual dis-ease (I say this from personal experience) is by staying immersed in activity and distractions. Telling friends or family that we are “crazy busy” is a pseudo-lament that is also, strangely, a kind of boasting. We know there’s something wrong, something soul-draining about being overly active and busy, but we also know that in a way, it’s a sign of our worth. It’s a badge of honor, a sign that we’re needed, a sign that we’re getting stuff done!

And, of course, opportunities for distraction are legion – digital life keeps us hyper-connected to the exterior world of news and scandals, while we remain infrequent visitors or complete strangers to our inner world.

But another more destructive way we tend to deal with our inner turmoil is by projecting the source of our dis-ease onto people and situations in the external world. We seem to feel a better if we sense that the real culprit is something or someone outside ourselves, not something or someone inside ourselves.

The brilliant Jungian analyst and humanities scholar, Jim Hollis, introduced me to a poem written in 1904 by Constantine Cavafy entitled, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” that illuminates this destructive tendency memorably. It is applicable to our time:

“Waiting for the Barbarians,” by C.P. Cavafy
    (Translated by Edmund Keeley)


What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

      The barbarians are due here today.


Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

      Because the barbarians are coming today.
      What’s the point of senators making laws now?
      Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.


Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

      Because the barbarians are coming today
      and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
      He’s even got a scroll to give him,
      loaded with titles, with imposing names.


Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

      Because the barbarians are coming today
      and things like that dazzle the barbarians.


Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

      Because the barbarians are coming today
      and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.


Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

      Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
      And some of our men just in from the border say
      there are no barbarians any longer.


Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

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“Those people were a kind of solution.” We needed those barbarians. What’s going to happen to us now?  The answer, of course, is that if we can stop blaming others, the true source of our anxieties might begin to emerge from our own inner life. Or, we can look for another “solution” in our exterior world and insist that they are the problem.

As Jesus says in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”  And a core insight of the spiritual life is the warning not to judge others.  “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own?” (Mt 7:3)

We are all much larger than we can imagine, and this task of tending our own inner life can feel overwhelming and risky. At times, it will feel threatening to cherished ways of coping that we’ve cultivated for a lifetime.

I think that’s why Jesus was driven to the wilderness, to confront and engage the immensity of his soul, his sense of meaning and purpose. That’s what the season of Lent is about for many of us, a determination to turn from our distractions and recognize our projections, so that we can welcome the immensity of our own inner life and journey.  And the ritual smudge of ashes on Ash Wednesday is a way of accentuating the seriousness and urgency of this most personal task of all.

“We live amid politicians and theologians who infantilize us by fear-mongering, and scientists and psychologists who trivialize life by addressing only what can be empirically verified,” writes James Hollis. He continues:

We are so much larger than that. Just as much theology has forgotten the psyche, so much psychology has retreated from the soul—in both cases they are intimidated by the truly large. You may expect little help from your contemporary culture, from your peers, and from your family in this task of reconnecting with the soul. Yet you are not alone, for there are many other persons out there who feel as you do, who yearn as you do for a second, deeper life. In fact, there is a hidden community of individuals who are on their own path. At times they will feel quite alone, estranged from all that once gave comfort, but their very solitude is the surest sign that they have been launched upon the journey that, amid suffering and joy, brings richness of life.^[1]

Just as “our true life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3), so our true community often seems hidden, as well. Philo of Alexandria is reported to have said, “Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a big problem.” But we are also carrying an immense inner life, a soul, and a Self that seeks not only our attention but our well-being. Waking to that realization can reconnect us to our primary task. Walt Whitman put it this way:

This is the hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Whitman, "A Clear Midnight," Leaves of Grass

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As we continue our extraordinary, solitary journeys in a sometimes hidden, spiritual community, the poignant words of Henri-Frederic Amiel, for me, convey a gentler side of Ash Wednesday’s profound wisdom:

Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who are traveling the journey with us. So, be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.

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^[1] Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, pp. 257-258