Pop 89: About That Soul You’ve Been Meaning to Restore…

By Madonna Hamel

I get up from my armchair and begin pulling my muses from the shelf. I know when I open the books, despite having been written years and years ago, their words are timeless. They tug and tame my heart and soul.

Soul. There’s that word. But what does it mean? And do we even use it anymore? Are we afraid to come across sounding like missionaries threatening punishment from God on high if the rest of the world doesn’t follow our particular righteous belief?
And while we’re at it, how about that word “Righteous”? I like how the monk Martin Laird defines “righteous” in his book “Into The Silent Land.”

To be righteous is not to be “a moral know-it-all” but to welcome a “flowering of personal integrity” that often means welcoming a struggle, temptation or trial. “Take these away,” he writes, “and you remove tremendous opportunity for growth, depth and wisdom.”

OK. That may well be. But how many of us have “growth, wisdom, and depth” at the top of our to-do list? These concepts seem so philosophical when confronted with the daily rituals of survival. Until we are faced with death or near-death experiences. Then, suddenly, we need deeper nourishment.

As I begin pulling from shelves, I am intrigued to see the juxtapositions, the relationships formed by unlikely bedfellows. The 17th-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen, writer, composer, painter, and inventor of beer, sits next to the 16th Century essayist Montaigne next, Buffalo Calf Woman, participant in Custer’s death, next to the mystic St. John of the Cross.

Some of my muses live and write today. Richard Powers sits next to Terry Tempest Williams sits next to Robin Wall Kimmerer. In fact, I’ve watched a talk given by all three, sitting, literally, beside each other. Kimmerer, fearing her passion for flowers might come off sounding like “religious zeal,” is assured by Powers she has nothing to worry about because the word “religion” comes from the Latin “religio” to re-link. In fact, you are honouring the true meaning of the word, he says. You are acknowledging that we are all related, connected, linked.

So what about that word “soul”? Is it the home of truth? So soft-spoken we can’t hear it over the hard words of windbags? Does it weather one storm after another? When nudged, jolted or threatened by the forces of economy, lifestyle, and standard of living, will we recognize the soul’s beseeching to check our hunger and compulsions?

Is it the essence fear stole and stuffed behind reputation? Is it that “inner flame” Jungian Maria Von Franz refers to when she says, “it’s easy to be a naïve idealist and it’s easy to be a cynical realist. But it’s quite another thing to have no illusions at all. To hold the inner flame.”

Is it the part of ourselves that gets wakened and shaken every time we walk at dusk and immerse ourselves in the sounds of nature: the singing robins, the winnowing snipes, the whooshing nighthawk, the hooting owls? Their extravaganza of calling and swooping and flitting in the last golden rays seems the highest form of soulfulness. And all for free. No strings attached.

Is it the soul that longs for the transcendent? For pure love, the kind that lets others voluntarily evolve in our presence? Is it what Thomas More calls the “eternal, unchanging undisturbed source”?

Joe Biden, when announcing his entry into the 2024 presidential race, reminds us that he’s on a mission to “restore the soul of America?” But what soul is that? Does it include the rested souls of those content to live simple lives, suspicious of fame and fortune, as well as the troubled souls of the poor? What does that soul look like, and how far afield will you go to find it to return it to its rightful home?

Is it the unmarketable soul? The soul for whom the latest technology serves no function? The soul that cannot be replaced by AI because the point of all creative projects is the soulful process of discovery and the spark of inspiration - like the kind that infuses Soul Music - and cannot be fudged or crunched, or configured by machines?

Is it the soul we once were? Before we referred to ourselves collectively as “consumers” and then “users”? The “poor soul” my grandmother prayed over when she saw a “hobo,” as she called the homeless folks in her day? She would never dream of judging him as worthless or lazy. She would not blame the economic forces of the depression bearing down on him as somehow his fault because she saw him as a soul. Not a bad consumer.

Is it the soul of our childhood Looney Tune cartoons? The transparent wispy dead Daffy Ducks or Wile E Coyotes, as they rose above their dead bodies flattened by anvils?

Is it the soul unswayed and unimpressed by how you dress or throw money at problems to make them go away, knowing they will come back to haunt you when you require a gentle touch, an intimate conversation, a late-night visit from another ordinary soul? Is it the soul looking out at the world from a place of deserved grace, or is it the self on the surface constantly looking back in at itself, checking for wrinkles and panty lines, taking its cues from a competitive and comparing world?

The Sufi mystic, sitting on the shelf next to the cloistered nun Julian of Norwich, wrote: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing/and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there./When the soul lies down in that grass/the world is too full to talk about.” Let’s go there. God knows we have plenty of magnificent fields around here. Then perhaps we can begin to feel Julian’s words: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”