Please be gentle with the stuff of my soul

By Mary Regina Morrell
©Catholic Online 2005

"Those live whom the Lord protects. You have revived my soul." Isaiah 38:16

On a clear fall day in October, when I was about 10 years old, my father came home with a very special gift - a small wooden box hand painted on the outside with beautiful flowers. This was no ordinary box, mind you. The only way it could be opened was to slide small hidden panels from one position to another in the proper order. Without knowing the secret the box couldn't be opened.

What a treasure! In it I placed the most important pieces of my young life - my poems. Even at that young age I understood that the words written there revealed the deepest part of who I was -- my hopes, my fears, my dreams, my loves. They were mine alone, something to be cherished and protected from others who might not appreciate their value.

A few months later my teacher gave the class an assignment to write a poem. Amid the very vocal protestations of my classmates was the conspicuous silence and hidden smile of a young boy named Bobby. Later, as we each stood in front of the class to read our creations, it became obvious to us both that we shared the same gift and the same passion. Our friendship began to grow as we talked during lunch and walked the quarter mile to the neighborhood candy store before school in the morning.

Bobby shared some of the poetry books he had brought from home and even let me read his journal, filled as it was with his own dreams and fears. And so, one day during the spring, I brought my secret box to school. Sitting in the nearby fields that morning I showed Bobby how to open the hidden panels. He took out the poems and, reading them one by one, smiled a smile that warmed my heart.

Bobby kept the box in his desk for the rest of the school year. I would catch him silently sliding the panels open when the teacher wasn't looking and reading one of the poems. He would look at me out of the corner of his eye and we would both smile at our secret. Bobby was the first soul-keeper I ever met.

Years later, when I read the following words of William Butler Yeats I thought of Bobby: "I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams." Even at such a tender age Bobby knew the importance of dreams, the importance of the "stuff" of our souls. I treasured our friendship because I had shared with him the secret that would reveal my soul and he cherished what was inside as did I.

It is a grace to recognize a soul-keeper in your life, a person with whom you can share the stuff of your soul and know it is safe; know it is treasured. Soul-keepers are those rare gems who come into your world for a day, a year or a lifetime, and with fearless self-giving offer a love and trust that gives life. They seem to instinctively know of our deep need to be listened to, understood, loved.

The generous love of my soul-keepers has enabled me to accept my own belief that acknowledging our human desire to love and be loved is not simply a surrender to self-indulgence.

To search for a love that brings deep and abiding gladness to the heart is to search for God. To experience such a love is to experience God. To accept such a love is to accept God's greatest gift - divine self-disclosure.

And the truth remains that we can all be soul-keepers when we are able to let go of ourselves long enough to receive another with open heart and hands.

Contact

Diocese of Metuchen
http://diometuchen.org NJ, US
Mary Regina Morrell - Associate Director, Office of Religious Education, 732 562.1990

Email

mmorrell@diometuchen.org

Keywords

soul, gentle, trust, love

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