Journey in search of a soul

[John the Baptist] proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ (Mark 1:7-8)

Tradition sometimes pictures John, the Baptist, as an angry, brazen fellow bellowing out in the desert wastes about sin and righteousness and the need to change … or run, because someone was coming who would burn the chaff in the fires of divine wrath.

There must have been a great hunger for personal reformation and a society more just and decent than their daily scramble to get by; otherwise, it is hard to imagine why John attracted any following at all, let alone the crowds that braved the desert heat and rugged journey to go see what all the commotion was about.

He was a curiosity, with his itchy camel hair tunic, gobbling locusts for nutrition and robbing bees of their honey to choke it all down. Perhaps, he reminded people of wild-eyed prophets of old, afire with a word of God burning in their bones they had to speak lest they risk losing their souls.

And it was likely the concern for their own souls that drew more than a few.

There’s something about our souls. They are ours, and yet not, a gift, an expression, even, yes, an incarnation of the Great Soul who is Love. We can lose track of our souls amid myriad voices shouting from one media or another, telling us what we should say, do, wear, watch, buy and care about, lest we miss the moment.

But that core, the apex of the soul, as medieval mystics called it, belongs only to God, for it is the life of God within our lives, hungry for home, crying to connect, for union with the Love who gives life to all that lives.

We can lose track of our souls and often do. They can get beaten down, shouted out and forgotten, but they do not die. The life of the soul is always there, reminding and even cajoling the heart, irritating our ease with the intuitive awareness that we are more … and are made for more … and will never feel at home in this world until our hearts are one, at rest in the Love for whom the soul within us longs.

I have no idea what I would have heard had I taken my journalist’s notebook and interviewed the pilgrims going out to John, trying to learn what on earth stirred them from comfortable homes to listen to a ragged voice telling them to repent of their misdirected lives.

I suspect most of them would have fumbled about unable to tell me. The real motivations that move the deepest things in us are necessarily deeper than our stumbling tongues can tell. Always were, always will be.

But at root, the reason is surely love, for love is the substance of the soul we lose and one hopes find again in this life. They went into the wild country hoping to find their souls to feel truly alive again, knowing the Great Soul who wouldn’t leave them satisfied with the lives they had.

They were intended for something more, something wild and free, wonderful and joyous, and the voice of soul within them, the Love who does not die, was still, blessedly audible in their restlessness. We should all be so blessed.

I understand these pilgrims. We all can. That restlessness for more, for the More that satisfies the heart, so common and real, is the breath of God’s being within our own.

I understand something about John, too. ‘I am not worthy to untie his sandals,’ he said, speaking of Jesus. But I suspect he would have been glad to do it, honored actually, to which, I say, ‘You take the left foot, John. I got the right.’

It seems a good place to find one’s soul.

David L. Miller