Altitude

Psychotherapist and author, Francis Weller describes himself as a soul activist. 

I thought this was a strange claim at first, but then, as always, his models around grief opened up a whole world of wisdom. While we may often use the words spirit and soul interchangeably, he contends they are not the same thing at all, and, in fact, we have a soul deficit in our culture. 

So, what does that mean? 

Spirit and spirituality, he writes, are about looking up. Ascension. Elevation. About rising up from our present circumstances and getting outside of the boundaries of the physical experience. It is an individual quest - removing oneself from the here and now and reaching up to THERE. And sometimes you actually touch it, and it is bliss. 

But soul and soulfulness are about descending. The sinking down into the depth of feeling and humanness, bound up in this body. Allowing the elemental forces to carve you into new shapes. It hurts. It aches. And it cannot be done alone. Soulfulness happens in community. Think about it - a soulful conversation, soulful music, a soulful gathering. It requires vulnerability and interdependence with other people. There are no individual bootstraps in this way of being. You cannot figure it out on your own, or muscle through it. 

As western individualists, we don’t often prioritize soul work. Moreover, in Christian communities, we tend to search for spiritual answers to earthy questions. 

So, in essence, it is about altitude.

Not long after Jonah died, I craved escape from the world I found myself in. I reached up to God, like a tearful child, begging to be held. I leaned into spirituality. But not the prayer practices and spiritual wells I had drawn from my whole life. I tried, but they felt inadequate compared to this overwhelming, suffocating loss. Instead, God called me to creation. I would wake up early in the morning, mind still hovering close to dream, and then the urging would come: go out into the garden. I would sit under the gazebo, headphones on, and just reach for God. 

Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. It became my mantra. 

Eyes closed, tonal music in my ear, the name of God cycling through my mind, I gradually began to perceive the Holy Spirit drawing close. Words of peace whispered into my heart. A presence I was sure was Jonah drawing close to my left side. Light and love and peace and lifting filling me, replacing the heaviness of grief with effervescent relief. Visions would comfort me. Wordless prayer became as life-giving as water, and on days when I didn’t drink, I sank like a stone. 

For a time, this was my daily bread. The only lasting solace in the sea of rending loss. 

And then I got sick. Really sick. Even with all the antibiotics, my body just couldn’t fight it, and when you feel physically low, emotions follow. For the first time, I had no defenses to protect against the full onslaught of my grief. During the worst of it, I found myself literally on the floor, sobbing for hours. I couldn’t move. I had no care whatsoever for my physical body. I understood fully for the first time the image of the woman sitting outside the city walls, in torn clothing, weeping in the ashes. I was her. 

And it felt so honest. And somehow, good?

Here in the dark, I couldn’t avoid anything. Couldn’t pretend or hide it. I just had to surrender and let the inevitable wave crash. My voice, an animal expression of anguish. My body, broken, vulnerable, and unlovely. I wasn't grieving. I was grief. Christian bore witness. My closest friends carried my pain. My family grieved with me. God stayed inseparably close. As a human being, I had to pour it out, but someone human also needed to receive it.   

Basking, face lifted to light, was true. Keening, face etched with dust, was honest. The weft and warp of loomed beauty. Neither spirituality, nor soulfulness, is more necessary than the other. We need both. God meets us in both.

One cannot stay in soulfulness. We risk becoming morose, dark, mired in weighty sorrow. We need also to rise up, find joy, relief, and peace. We need to feel the unexpected bubble of laughter escaping our lips, even in the midst of pain. But we cannot be purely spiritual either, seeking only to escape the world. Without the honesty of soul, we can become brittle, trite, and toxic in our unrelenting positivity. Eventually what started as holy relief becomes a way to live in denial. Worse yet, it makes us afraid to touch other people’s pain because it might unleash in us what we seek to avoid. We are left offering up platitudes and all too easy answers that are hollow at best and harmful at worst. This way of living cannot be whole or holy. 

Living hurts. It just does. And we MUST feel it. But we are also not stuck in it. We must straddle the difficult reality of being both spiritual beings and human beings. We must rise, and descend, in order to honor who we really are. Denial of one for the other leaves us with half-lives. 

I think this is why grief is so particularly exhausting. It’s the altitude sickness. Before, I can honestly say I think I was able to embrace both the individual, spiritual aspect and the communal, soulful part of myself regularly. Rising and descending within a certain range. But now? Now the height I need to feel relief is so much higher, and the depth I have to sound, so very much lower. And when the drop happens unexpectedly, it knocks the breath out of my lungs. 

But you see, I must. I must travel the entire distance regularly. This is how I honor both the bottomless depth of my love for Jonah and my utter reliance on the Lord, my God, to sustain me. This is the only way I can actually walk through the valley of the shadow of death and come out the other side, singing, laughing, and walking with Jonah’s spirit right beside me, while remembering the ashes, too. 

Spirit and soul, entwined.

Joy and longing and sorrow and love mingled together, for the rest of my human life. 

Credit: Emily Page