As the Soul Looks Into Its Own Loneliness

TEARS streamed down and tears knew not why.  There was a soulish disconnect.  Not soul between soul, but soul within the soul.  The soul cries out to God as a condition of its nakedness.  And naked is the soul that has been stripped bare.  But the soul is on a very good course when it: 1. Is ripped from the grip of the world and from its reliance on its own power and hope, and 2. Comes to rest lowly and in loneliness with God repetitively enough.

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A Poem: Quintessential Questions

Oh lowly and lonely soul,

How would you release your grip?

Over life when it takes its toll,

When life would decide to strip.

Oh lowly and lonely soul,

God, to what would you have me cling?

What now is to be my role?

Do I have any hope within to sing?

***

Only to the person who has been to such soulish depths can a person understand.

This is no soulish snobbery, for what souls wants that distinction.  Even less does a soul who has been through a seriously dark night want that.

Soul confusion attending to the ascension of confounding and perplexing realities; these leave us with these quintessential questions.  And there can verily be no answer that can mute our travail.

***

Prayer:

O Lord

When words fail me and when sorrow overwhelms sorrow,

When I cannot rise from the depths of these sheets.

When I can do nothing at all.

Help, when chaos threatens to cause madness.

Help, when the hope of tomorrow is thwarted on waking.

Help, when I have given up hoping and praying and waiting on Your help.

Give me Your grace to sustain my wasted vessel.

Shower me with Your mercy.

Come now.

And help me understand, even as I don’t understand.

Bring me a sense for peace for this situation that can come only from You.

Highlight any way in me that hides or hides me from Your Presence and Your will.

By the Lord Jesus Christ,

My Saviour, My Rock, My Redeemer,

I pray.

AMEN.

Postscript: this article is written from memory — of a dark and ghastly time — but a time, all the same, as I look back now, that was the saving of me.  I have learned not to despise the dark night, but to appreciate the pain and loneliness for what it is.  May the reader be inspired, likewise.  The end of the selfish self is the beginning of the soulish soul.