Shaping the Soul

“When physical eyesight declines,” Plato said, “spiritual eyesight increases.”

Every major spiritual tradition knows as one of its core experiences a period of major divestment, of total renunciation of that which shaped a person before he or she began the great spiritual quest. In this period, the seeker considers the meaning of life and death, of the spiritual and material, of Earth and its beyond, of the soul in contact with the great soul within.

This is the period when we evaluate everything we have come to know about life and look for a dimension above the things of this world, for the sake of what is yet to come. The search means, then, that we strip ourselves of whatever it is we have accrued until this time in order to give ourselves wholly to the birthing of the person within. Into this part of life we travel light. When I look around the crowded room and wonder why I am keeping a large desk when a smaller one would do just as well, something inside of me is beginning to change.

When three sets of dishes are two sets too many, I have begun to need more than just things. When the house is too crowded and the car is too big and the perfect lawn is too much of a bother, I have begun a whole new adventure in life.

It is the shaping of the soul that occupies us now. Now, consciously or, more likely, not, we set out to find out for ourselves who we really are, what we know, what we care about, and how to be simply enough for ourselves in the world.

— from The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully by Joan Chittister