The Spirit Moves; The Soul Persists

Have you ever wondered if the spirit and soul are the same, or if they're different? 

What do you think? There are many possible answers, depending on what we've been taught and what our experiences and personal beliefs affirm as plausible. If pressed for my own answer in discussion with another, I offer this: the spirit moves like the leaves of the tree, the soul persists in its trunk, and it's all rooted in the Great Unknown, the ground of every being.

                                                                                        ~~~

At the age of fourteen, I experienced a level of pain and loneliness that led me to comprehend, for the first time, why anyone would consider self-harm or self-annihilation. The possibility crossed my own young mind.

I was sitting on my bed, bedroom door closed, with my baby sister toddling about. I was crying about my family and all our lives had become. I wept over the promise of everything that had been lost through the years, and the lack of basic resources available to my siblings, all younger than I was. The innocent faith of my earlier years had been squeezed out of me. My grandmother, my lifeline, lived far away, and my father now refused to drive me to see her anymore, or to bring her to us. His own father had died the year prior, the only person able to keep my father in any sort of line. My mother spent her days drinking. As the oldest, I'd become the de facto parent of five other children, and I was doing a lousy job of it.

Looking down at the baby, I knew I wouldn't hurt myself, but I stayed in despair awhile. Eventually I derived a little comfort within the space of the gasping breaths emerging between wracking sobs. The misery had descended like a whirlwind, shaking me to the core. As my breathing persisted, becoming deeper and more rhythmic, a semblance of peace emerged, covering me like a mantle. Faith would deepen through time; the early steps through that period were hard, though. Nothing would be easy or perfect. As the Zen tradition has it, staying close to, and conscious of, the breath helps.

To take one breath, one step at a time, is a spiritual practice.

Breath. Many years later I'd learn the word for it in Hebrew is Ruach, (pronounced roo-akh), literally meaning spirit, breath, or wind. The word itself engages breath and lungs to speak it. Ruach is the connection, or conduit to life and consciousness. If the sorrow I described above threatened to pull me into the undertow, ruach revealed itself as a wild energy intent upon my continuing.

This is how I came to understand in my own reckoning that spirit is energy to be used somehow. In hope, it supports the soul. In abject grief and despair, it threatens human life perhaps, or feels like a weapon against it; the soul awaits the result and the lessons in either case. Weapons "against" can become weapons "of" the spirit. It's the reason I encourage others to think of their own spirituality, and follow where it takes them.

C.S. Lewis wrote that life experience is a brutal teacher, but added that "you learn, my God, do you learn." That resonates deeply with me, especially after having worked with Holocaust survivors and camp liberators both, the ultimate living examples of such principles I've known.

In a world of perpetual desolation with so much at risk, it helps to understand how powerfully good "weapons of the spirit" really are; how they might preserve us, one by one by one, as long as we live.