Trackless Solitude

Deep in the soul the acres lie
of virgin lands of sacred wood
where waits the Spirit.
Each soul bears this
trackless solitude.


The Voice invites, implores in vain
the fearful and the unaware;
but she who heeds and enters in
finds ultimate wisdom there.

How familiar are we with the depths of our soul? I know that I have only re-discovered my own over the last decade or so. I have finally grown secure enough to admit the exterior topography of my life that I had run roughshod over since I had entered high school, was only a part of who I was. Unbeknownst to me I had abandoned whole sectors of my personhood behind, my conscience, my feminine sensitivity, mystical spirituality, because in the social drama that became my life you couldn't attend to all of that and be "cool", successful and popular, at least not in the social circles I wanted to be part of.  The further I went from my interior self, the less I was able to hear the Spirit.

For years of my life, I lived only on the epidermis of who I was.  During my adolescence, I experienced a great deal of rejection, confusion and frustration in my relationships. I began to feel uncertain about who I could trust. People that I thought I could count on disappointed me, my peers were opportunistic and time and again betrayed or took advantage of my naivete. The disillusionment and anxiety that I experienced came to mar and scar the depths of my soul. In an effort to feel better, I abandoned the locale of my deepest hurts. I moved outward to engineer new stronger exterior life where I believed that I would be safer and felt less vulnerable.

  When I was a young adult, I changed environments and structured a world where I was popular and comfortable. I built on the foundations of the faith that I had grown up with:  I studied Scripture, was fully engaged in the activity of my local church, and made time with fellow believers a priority. At the same time though,  I resented its fundamentalist tenets. I felt that life was codified with rules that made unrealistic demands of me and placed limitations on my lifestyle that were "extra-biblical" at best. I chafed at the rules, certain that my baptist"individual soul liberty" entitled me to define my own understanding of how to live my faith. Soon, the surface of my life was also as marred and scarred as the interior life of my youth. This time, however it was not due to circumstances associated with childhood. Now, my by my own inconsistencies, I was actively harming myself, and I adamantly denied how deeply entrenched I was in hypocrisy and pride. Sadly, I was unaware that under the guise of living a libertarian approach to a "good enough Christian life" I was being decimating my spiritual,physical and emotional well-being. In my freedom I lived  deluded by mismanaged relationships, materialism, lust and avoidance of the truth about myself: that I had developed a spirituality based on a false confidence in biblical knowledge and unfortunately,an unfounded self-reliance.  

It took me years before I was able to hear the Spirit calling my name. I assumed that I ought to be able to hear him, because I had been to all of the places that I imagined he was.  I had never quit going to church, never stopped studying the Bible and the people I spent the greatest amount of time with were Christians. His voice may also have been drowned out by a cacophony of 'good things," I suppose. Add to it the clatter of the busy-ness of my life in the foreground, joined by intermittent thunder in the background which accompanied the storm of my hypocrisy,and frequent poor choices. You can add to all of that the painful sound of incredible feedback whenever I would slip into meaningless physical relationships that had become a recurring pattern that I seemed unable to avoid. There was not much chance that I would hear anyone's voice over all of the noise.

As unbelievable as it may sound, I was unaware of just how far away from my own soul and His Spirit I had wandered. I really had convinced myself that I was going to be fine. I imagined that amidst the clamor, if He called, I would hear Him. I didn't want to go to Him, I thought it would all be fine, right where I was, but I couldn't have been more wrong. My personal life would crescendo chaotically and end in a deafening silence when I betrayed a man of integrity, and grace who loved me. In the finale,I found myself falling through an unnoticed fissure in the outer crust of my life. It was a long, hard fall inward.


It was then, desperate, ashamed and alone, in the depths of despair face to face with what little was left of my shredded soul, that I heard in the dark silence, the Spirit's voice whisper my name.