Soul Notes
Before the 20th century, religion claimed special skill at understanding the soul. You could consult priests, the Bible or just straight up pray. By the 20th century we were turning to psychology to understand our spiritual selves. That approach favored emotions and later neurological process, ending up with an aura of materiality that seemed to undercut the numinous aspects of the quest for soul. In the 21st century, aesthetics opens a primary portal for many to experience soul.
Even while poetry and art lag in explanation, their embrace of the mysterious and the unknowable offer vast resources for comprehending what exceeds the obvious and the explicable. Modernity’s infatuation with lucidity — that clarity that big data purportedly delivers — actually lands us in a place where things are less knowable than ever before. So the soul’s impulses grow ever more urgent as our access to interior, sacred experience lessens. In our perplexity, we may have been retracing spiral paths through the terrain of soul.
Surely the enchanted world of the medieval embraced the soul quest, as a holy grail that beckoned the faithful to risk all in the scary spirit world that was at least as much in thrall to pagan nature as to the Blessed Virgin. Today’s nature worship, albeit shot with eco-doom and darkness, has become an essential refuge against the white noise of daily life saturated with virtuality. Even as internet self-care nostrums fail to bandage our wounds, we may discover inner resources that harmonize with the world. Open the heart to the sound of the moment unfolding its wings. Listen to the stillness of the ocean, faintly echoing with jazz chords from the deep. Lose your fretful daily thoughts in the ravishing colors of the world. Art is the nourishment we crave.