When I seek you, my God, I seek a blessed life.

I shall seek you so that my soul shall live.

Saint Augustine

I am an ordinary woman living an ordinary life in a big city. I have my blissful days when joy fills me up and I walk lightly and the sounds of life bursting and blooming is music to my ears. Mainly, though, I live the ordinary days of work and family, of hope and duty in equal measure, and the balancing act that keeps me true to my different callings; mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, teacher, colleague, neighbour and busy lady in the supermarket queue with lots of things on her mind. 

But in the midst of the daily demand of expectation and obligation, I have a faith that lifts me to see above and beyond the fence line of the ordinary to the horizon of the extraordinary.

I am not a holier-than-thou woman and perhaps I’m more sinner than saint in my faults and failings, but I do recognise that there is a part of me that is essentially in thrall to the transcendent. This is not the transcendent that is nameless or nebulous or new-agey, but the transcendent in God. This is where the light comes in, that mystical illumination fed by the energy of the Spirit, holy with light everlasting, making good my soul. 

The Irish poet John O’Donoghue wrote, There is something special that each of us has to do in the world. As a teacher, I have much to do with the young people who arrive in my class and look to me as a responsible adult who has something to share with them. I share my faith, not in an embarrassingly confessional way but with trust and humour. I hope that some of what I say and do takes seed. Sometimes I am serious and sometimes frothily anecdotal and it’s somewhere in the middle that I hope I make sense to my students. 

As young people ready to leave school and step out into the world they need good counsel. They need faith in God, in themselves, in each other, in the world beyond the safe and known. They need good news and the Good News, ways to think and believe that there is more to life than the here and now; that life everlasting is a promise.  

Our young people are the Church of the future and they need to be in touch with their own souls. We can help them. I am reminded of Michael McGirr’s recent comment that the who you are teaching comes before the what you are teaching. Marie Madeleine d’Houët, the foundress of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, reminded her young teaching proteges to see the face of Jesus in each child they taught. We have bodies and souls in front of us – a trust and privilege and sometimes a tightrope walk between miracle and mayhem. 

C.S. Lewis wrote, What can you really know of other people’s souls – of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. As well as literacy and numeracy, we teachers at Catholic schools are helping to do some soul-work, trying to build an individual and collective soul in our students. We write on the souls of those in our care leaving little traces of faith, hope and love, to come to fruition when the time is ripe. This is one of those hidden-curriculum, non-measurable, non-reportable outcomes which may only become apparent years after the initial lesson takes seed. 

The soul is like a secret garden – rare and beautiful and unseen. It cannot flourish without a constant gardener responding to its rhythms and seasons, its teeming life and cornucopian abundance, its gentle growth and untrammelled wilderness, its rare orchids and common daisies, its occasional barrenness and aridity. It needs to be protected from the bruising and brutalising that puts profits ahead of prophets, greed ahead of good, commerce over communion. 

This is where parents and teachers do their most holy work. They help to weed and water this secret garden of the soul, hoping to make it tender and fruitful, buds that will bloom between the generations.

We don’t often talk about our souls and we should. We are not simply bodies as Teilhard de Chardin reminded us, although it would seem sometimes that it is only our physical being that matters to the world. Many worship at the altar of celebrity influencers and their vapid dictates. We are so, so much more than our mere packaging.

If we could gaze into our souls, I wonder what we would see. 

We know that God sees all and that we cannot hide, pretend or justify when we let our souls, essentially ourselves, down. The Gospel of Matthew clearly reminds us: For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?

Tis true my form is something odd,
But blaming me is blaming God.
Could I create myself anew,
I would not fail in pleasing you.
If I could reach from pole to pole,
Or grasp the ocean with a span,
I would be measured by the soul,
The mind’s the standard of the man.

The above excerpt from the poem “False Greatness” by Isaac Watts was routinely used by Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, at the end of his shows. Merrick wanted his audiences to see beyond his physical deformities to the inner man of character and conviction. He would rather be measured by his soul than by the small-minded and harsh attitudes of those who saw him as a freak of nature in a Victorian side-show.

I wonder if any of us are brave enough – or good enough – to be measured by our souls?  

As we make our way through March and head towards the highpoint of our Christian calendar, the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus, perhaps we can do some long overdue soul-searching – and finding – during the season of Lent. 

By Ann Rennie

Published: 1 March 2024