Soul Signal

I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one.

There’s a text that says that. Not a modern poet trying to sound deep. A voice, old as dirt, speaking straight out of a document that got buried in a jar in the Egyptian desert for about sixteen hundred years before a farmer dug it up in 1945. They call it Thunder, Perfect Mind, and it’s about as strange a piece of writing as you’ll ever run across. No story. No characters. Just a voice, and that voice claims to be everything at once. The first and the last. The mother and the daughter. War and peace. Sin and virtue.

The first time I read it all the way through, I had to stop and set the page down. Because I was taught, my whole life, to pick a side of myself.

Let me tell you what I mean by that.

I spent years, and I do mean years, in the diaconate formation program with the Roman Catholic Church. Studying, praying, learning the doctrine, trying to become the kind of man they’d hand a collar to. And there’s a shape you’re supposed to fit into when you’re doing that. You learn real quick which parts of yourself are acceptable and which parts you’d best keep in a box somewhere nobody can see them. The doubt. The anger. The questions that don’t have a clean answer. The parts of you that feel more like the desert than the church pew.

So you split. You build a version of yourself that can sit in the front row without making anybody nervous, and you take everything else, everything that don’t fit that picture, and you bury it like it’s a problem for later. I got real good at that. Real good at showing the acceptable half and keeping the rest quiet.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you. Burying a part of yourself don’t make it go away. It just makes it wait.

That’s what got me when I finally sat with Thunder, Perfect Mind. This voice, whoever or whatever it’s supposed to be, refuses to do what I’d spent my whole life doing. It won’t pick a side. It says right out, I am the one who has been hated everywhere and who has been loved everywhere. I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband. It holds the shame and the honor in the same hand and it don’t apologize for either one. It just keeps talking.

Now I want to slow down on that word shame for a second, because I think that’s the real key to this whole poem. Think about the parts of your own story you’d never put on a stage. The mistake you made that you still think about at two in the morning. The year you fell apart and nobody saw it. The thing you did, or the thing that was done to you, that you learned to keep folded up small and tucked way in the back. We’re taught that stuff is the shameful half. The half you hide so the acceptable half can keep standing up front looking respectable.

Thunder, Perfect Mind is looking straight at that shameful half and saying, that’s me too. Not in spite of the honored half. Right alongside it. Same voice. Same breath.

I think that’s exactly the kind of teaching the people running things back then couldn’t have sitting on the shelf next to the four gospels they were building a whole religion around. A voice like that don’t need a priest to explain it to you. It don’t need a building with a steeple, or a man in a robe standing between you and God, telling you which half of yourself is allowed through the door. It just tells you, straight out, you are already whole. You always were. Nobody split you. You did that to yourself, or somebody talked you into doing it, and it can be undone the same way it got started, one honest look at a time.

I think about the Gospel of Thomas alongside this one a lot, because they were found in that same jar, in that same desert, and they’re circling the same fire. Thomas has Jesus saying the Kingdom of God is inside you, and it’s outside you too. Not a place you die and go to. Not a prize you earn by keeping the acceptable half polished and the rest hidden. Already here. Already in you. Whole, not split.

Now here’s where I have to be honest with you, because that’s the only way I know how to do this. I didn’t come to that understanding sitting in a library somewhere feeling smart about it. I came to it the hard way, after I’d already spent years chasing a Kingdom I thought was somewhere else. Learn enough doctrine, say the right words, wear the right robe, and maybe, maybe, they’d finally let you in. I did all that. I got four years deep into it. And it was in year four that the questions I’d been keeping in that box got too big and too honest to keep hidden anymore. I started asking myself, out loud finally, whether the story I’d been handed was the whole truth, or just the acceptable half of it.

That’s when the door opened. And once it’s open, there ain’t no closing it back. That was the start of my own spiritual awakening, and it’s the reason I sit here now telling you about a poem from a jar in the desert instead of standing behind a pulpit somewhere reciting a script I no longer believed.

I want to say this plain, because I think it matters more than anything else in this whole piece. You are not required to pick a side of yourself to be loved. Not by God, not by the people in your life who are worth keeping, and for sure not by yourself. The parts of you that feel too messy, too shameful, too complicated to show anybody, those parts ain’t the enemy of the parts you’re proud of. They’re the same voice. First and last. Honored and scorned. Whole.

So here’s what I’m asking you to do. Sit somewhere quiet for a minute, and think about the part of yourself you learned to hide. Not to fix it right this second. Just to look at it honest, the way that old voice in the desert looked at itself honest, and see if you can say, without flinching, that’s me too.

If you’ve ever felt like you had to cut yourself in half to be loved, I’d like to hear about it. What part did they teach you to hide, and what happened the day you finally let it back in? Write to me, or find me over where I share the shorter version of these thoughts, and let’s talk about it. You’re not the only one carrying a buried jar.