NURTURING THE WORLD'S SOUL

'Creation itself is now calling to us, sending us signs of balance, and the soul of the world, the anima mundi, which the ancients understood as the spiritual presence of the earth, is crying out.’ (Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Prayer of the Heart in Christian and Sufi Mysticism, p.71)

A culture which has ceased to realise the anima mundi, privatised the spiritual, encouraged the notion that any religion we devise is as good as others whilst scorning those practices and disciplines which the mystics have taught, will not restore what has been abused simply by addressing the external needs of nature. Instead of being slaves of consumerism we need to re-connect with the world's soul by acknowledging and tending our own, admitting (literally) that prayer is central to life as it connects us with our Divine Lover, and letting ourselves become a prayer: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me (on the world)'.

It seems that our culture has become bored with the effort required to nurture the soul, telling us that ‘I’ and my superficial wants are central and can be gratified by other gods. Advertisers have persuaded us of the importance of satisfying our superficial desires and so the world appeals to the eye (and the ego-‘I’), feeds our appetite for pleasure, and offers apparent satisfaction by its appeal to our senses. Yet only when we dive deeper into the heart and realise the indwelling soul can we begin to address that lost inner world which connects all creation.

Try holding the earth in your heart – and if that is too much, your small part of it: the flower you see, grass on which you walk or tree against which you rest. Hold them before God, realising they are held in the heart of their Creator.

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT (2)

Fifty-five years ago, or thereabouts, I found myself asking the question that I posed at the beginning of this book – “What’s it all about?” It’s a question that’s echoed throughout my life, one which was addressed early on when I joined the Franciscans in 1976 – ‘Why have you come?’  It’s a question, of course, that Jesus posed in different ways: of some young fishermen he asked ‘What do you seek?’ or to some women ‘Who are you looking for?’ Maybe it’s the kind of question that you find rolling around in your head at odd moments when you’ve nothing else to think about. And it can come in different ways. The poet, William Henry Davis (1871-1940), famously wrote:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

and declared, at the end, that -

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

But, so often, we don’t. Instead we spend our time working out how we can get what we think we want, or what we’re told we want – more of this, some of that, a holiday in a remote location where we can live for a while as if we were in Brighton but with sun.  Or we bury ourselves sin our latest electronic or computer gadget which will take us away from reality. Is that what life’s about? That can’t be why we’re here, can it? So I, probably like you, wonder what it’s all about and whether ife has any meaning or whether it’s just some vast inter-galactic joke. Then, a few years ago, a friend introduced me to Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.  After surviving Auschwitz Frankl wrote from his experience as a Holocaust survivor and pondered on the meaning of life. What he noticed, in particular, was that it was those who held onto a reason beyond themselves who managed to survive through the horrors on the Camps. Something bigger than themselves.  T. S. Eliot wrote, in The Four Quartets, that what we think we’re here for is always having to burst out of the shell that contains it; that the purpose of our life is always greater than what we think it to be and is altered as we encounter it.

            All that leads me to recall the old Catechism, something I was never introduced to when preparing for Conformation all those years ago but which I am drawn to. There are a number of different forms and St Ignatius Loyola adapts one for the opening of his Spiritual Exercises. He says that the meaning of life is:

Man is created to praise, reverence and serve our Lord God,
and by this means to save his soul.’

So what does he mean by that?