To Stir a Soul
Thoughts Found at My Kitchen Stove
I stood at my stove the other day stirring a pan of soon-to-be-scrambled eggs, and found myself wondering why they were taking too long to fluff up just the way I like them. Of course, there were many reasons for this from a purely physical point of view; the pan wasn’t hot enough when I dumped them in, the temperature of the burner might have been a bit too low, etc. Also, I knew that they would scramble eventually, and I certainly wasn’t in a rush at the time. So, why was I so annoyed? In the end, I put the annoyance aside and just kept stirring. Then, as one does, I got thinking about life, the universe and everything while my fork moved around and around, waiting for the wet whites and pulverized yolks to perform their magical transformation into something I have loved from my earliest childhood, the simple joy that is a pile of scrambled eggs.
What is it to stir a soul? What is it to propel a life into a new course? Can it happen all at once? These were the questions I had while the culinary alchemy of heat, time and movement was doing its thing. I think everyone has thoughts of making changes in the new year, whether they call them resolutions or not. I know that I always have these thoughts, and I realized that day among the eggs that this year’s thoughts were different from those of the past. In previous years, I wanted to improve myself, to be better, to do better, to stop being the useless ball of mud I always convinced myself that I had been the year before. This year. I noticed that my thoughts of change were running along the lines of embracing myself as a whole person, learning to let myself be me, letting parts of myself loose from their cages where I had long hidden them out of some misguided sense of “trying to be normal” or “fitting in.” While it’s true that my personality isn’t that wild and crazy, it is also true that for many years now, without even knowing it, I have locked a lot of myself away as things that are not wanted on the voyage, things that don’t “make sense” in a Christian life.
In Orthodox prayer and hymnody, we always talk about our soul being weighed down with sleep and we command it to arise, to wake up, to get up before it’s too late. The main thrust of this idea is toward repentance, toward embracing the new life of Christ rather than the old life of Adam, which is really death. The trouble is that we all think we know what that new life means, and I think our tendency, or my tendency at any rate, is to narrow the definition of that new life into something really restrictive. Hem in the imagination! Don’t let your thoughts stray too far! Chain your desires! Tame the flesh! Then we get accused of being puritans, which I have never had any desire to be! Do I keep all of the commandments all the time? No! Must I try harder to do it? Yes, especially when those commandments are transmuted into the realms of thought and intention as Christ does in the Sermon on the Mount. We do have to be vigilant, but is there not room to swim in God? To bathe in the wonders of this world and the one to come? Is there not room to take the fire we are given and use it to warm others’ hearts as well as our own?
Stirring a soul, like stirring eggs, takes time and constant vigilance. We must be wary of letting the movement be stilled, and we must always remember to watch for parts of the soul that are being burned by remembered wrongs or by resentment and envy. Yet, the heat of love and longing has to be there in order for the soul to become what it must, to fulfill itself. And when I say “soul,” I don’t mean a little immaterial homunculus that lives in your chest or something. I mean the entirety of a life, the you-ness of you or the me-ness of me. The soul is not the ego. The soul is not the fume and fret of emotions. It is an undeniable core, a thing that you have always been and that you must allow to be shaped.
Orthodox tradition calls the fallen human soul irrational, because it keeps flitting after strange things and not letting itself find its only object of love and longing, which is God. But how do we find God? Do we declare all earthly joys as nothing? I would argue that this is not the first step, even if it is a step, which it may be for some people at some point. I would say that earthly joys can be a doorway to God, a ladder if you will, provided we see them for what they are: joys of the moment, joys which will not last but are joys nonetheless. The danger seems to come when we cling too much to those joys as though they should last forever. Then, when they do not, comes despair and sadness and the ultimate assertion that everything is meaningless. If you live in a joyless world without faith, you will come to nihilism in the end I think. However, if you live in a joyless world with faith, the danger may be even greater, as you will shape your god into as joyless a being as yourself. He will be a hard God, a God of retribution and thunder, rather than a God of mercy and love.
but what about this God of mercy and love? Is He a divine marshmallow? A soft and fluffy God who never wants to interfere with His creatures? God forbid! Our God is a wild God, a God without bounds and without boundaries. If once invited in, He will interfere, tearing down what you thought were impregnable walls, breaking things only to build them anew in greater splendour! He is not a tame lion, as the Narnians say of Aslan. And though He requires obedience, He is not a task-master! He just has a few rules that He’d like us to follow, and as long as we try to follow them and repent when we do not, then we’re doing pretty well. The key is to keep running the race that is set before us.
When a soul is stirred it can feel very uncomfortable. All the settled sediment of years is sifted and shifted, moved around and in some cases broken up, and sometimes the process feels none-too-gentle. But if the whole soul, and again I mean the whole life, is to be infused with Divinity, room has to be made, and unnecessary things have to be moved or chucked out completely. However, that process will happen as long as we keep watch. That is really what we have to do is to keep watch and keep that fork moving around and around, and don’t forget the joy! Never forget the joy! If once you do, then your soul is in very grave danger! And so, when my eggs were finally ready, I ate them in joy, trying to think of them as something singular that would, in its own unique time and place, never come again.
May God bless this new year, with all its joys and sorrows!