Pete Gall's Pulp Theology

In the first core question, Why Am I Here, I said that we exist because the triune God thought it would be awesome to have us around to love. What came next was that there are no strings attached to this deal.

That’s the hard part for those of us who’ve grown up in church, where the primary obsessions have to do with sin, change, and reaching out to sinners to change them.

I think the important question for us to consider is what our souls are like. Are they bent steel that needs to be heated and straightened? Are our souls a mingled recipe of truth and lies, a knot we must sort out so we can choose the right way? Are our souls the places where we remember our hurts and our homesickness, where we groom our resentments or practice being our false selves? Are our souls good things, or bad? Broken things, or the most durable parts of who we are?

It’s an important question because our answers shape how we interact with our own souls, with the souls of others, and the God who formed us all.

Here’s what I think. I think our souls are a lot like wild animals. And like wild animals, our souls are timid. I don’t mean weak – a bear is timid, and that’s why the best way to stay safe in bear country is to make a lot of noise as you travel. A bear will stay away from noise it doesn’t recognize.

What kind of personality does your soul have? Are you bear-like? Or are you more like a deer? I tend to see myself more as the deer, so that’s the picture I have in my head as I talk about what follows.

If you want to encounter a wild animal in the wild, the last thing you want to do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it. Instead, the way to encounter a wild animal on its turf is to enter the woods quietly, reverently, and look for a likely place of intersection. Then sit down and wait, quietly.

If the animal should appear, sudden movements are a bad idea. You’ll either scare the animal away, or cause it to attack. A far better option is to remain still, move quietly, speak gently, and let the animal come to you.

It’s not hard to picture, is it? The tension and delicacy of a moment when a deer wanders into a clearing and has a choice to make about your presence there. The deer could take flight and be gone before you have a chance to even begin to interact with it, so you hold very still. You let it investigate you. You demonstrate your intention to hold a safe space for the animal, and you wait.

In my life, though, especially as a good Christian, I’ve tended to pounce upon my soul, wrestle it to the ground by its neck, pin it there, and demand change. And for a while, that works. But only until my grip slackens a bit or my focus gets diverted – at which time the deer/my soul bolts, traumatized, into the woods…to be anywhere but with me.

Souls are like deer.

I’m glad deer are made that way. And I’m glad my soul is, too. There is a rightness to wildness, to an insistence upon being treated reverently for relationship to exist. I like that my soul is more durable, and more persistent, than my will – my will has never been a safe place for my soul. My will has never loved my soul, and I’m glad that my soul didn’t give up.

The rub, of course, is that my soul is meant to experience love. I’m wired to know safety, and to long for it. And I will seek it out where it is offered. More than that, really, is the fact that there are other hunters in these woods besides me. I’ve wanted to domesticate and train my soul, and I’ve wanted this badly enough to force the issue, but there are other hunters that would lead me away to butcher my soul. A lot of them. And they are very, very patient.

My soul knows that it is constantly being hunted, and it longs to be safe. It is weary, and the more times it encounters hunters – especially hunters that bear the image of the God my soul still remembers in vague and primal ways – the more traumatic life becomes for my soul, and the more difficulty my soul has in risking with people it encounters in clearings.

And the more traumatized my soul becomes, the more desperately it searches for the God imprinted deep within, and the more temptation towards despair it experiences when it doesn’t find sanctuary.

There’s a great deal more to explore about sanctuary, and I’ll be doing that here. For now, though, let’s say that sanctuary is the safe place where safety is maintained by someone with the ability to offer protection in that space.

I want to be someone who holds a safe place for my soul. I want to sit quietly, reverently, extending sanctuary for my soul to emerge.

I believe that when I do so, I sit with God, who wants the very same thing. And when my timid soul enters the clearing, the moment is as electric, as wondrous, as delicate and precious as when a deer (or a bear), sniffs its way into the sanctuary. Our souls are glorious! They are durable, and they ache for home.

Does this sound like you to you? Does it sound like a familiar struggle?

If you like the ideas of your soul being like a timid animal, approaching it, and holding space for it, you may enjoy Parker Palmer‘s book, A Hidden Wholeness, where I first saw a thorough exploration of these ideas.