Soul Song

Week Three: Friday

Ancient guides, ancient paths, ancient stories.  Winter seasons throughout the beginning of time have drawn humanity to seek solace in these places, to discern wisdom in the darkness of shadows.  I have always found it to be Truth that when I am on a journey through the shadows, the Spirit somehow knows what I need and provides it.  Such is the case of a new guide that found me, musician and songwriter Peter Mayer.  Apparently Mayer has been around a long time, but he did me the courtesy of showing up in a friend’s comment to check out one of his songs.  (I credited his song “Everything is Holy Now” in an earlier blog.) Now, I am a grateful follower.  What he sings leads me to the deepest part of me where I meet with God whose voice is revealed in music, words, Nature, and often in the silence of our hearts.

This morning I was led to Mayer’s song “My Soul.” His lyrics spoke to so much of what I have been trying to express in this series “Light in a Season of Darkness.” In this winter season, this Advent time of waiting, we are called to look for wonder, mystery, beauty, and light.  That kind of seeking takes intention–it doesn’t just happen–and Mayer opens his eyes to all of these.

Consider just a few verses with me.  Mayer sings, “Out of all the lovely places where my body cannot go/ I touch the beauty and embrace it in the bosom of my soul.”  Oh, I think of all those lovely places where this body cannot go right now because of the pandemic, and I remember them, and their beauty feeds my soul in the darkness.  Mayer sings that “my soul is so much bigger than the very tiny me,” and I can’t help consider the human ego, especially as it has been displayed in 2020—all the “me’s” and “I’s” shouting and clamoring with little mention of “you” and “other.” Yet, our souls are made to be much more expansive than just ourselves, reaching, as Mayer writes, “like a net into the sea.”

Perhaps the line that most touches me in our journey toward the Light is this one, where Mayer defines his soul as “a spark that was begotten of the darkness long ago/ What my body has forgotten, I remember in my soul.”  What have we forgotten, what truths have we neglected, as we have let the noise of this world speak falsehood to us? Each one of us has that divine spark of Light within us, begotten when the Creator dreamed us out of desire.  How can we treat each other so shabbily because we disagree politically, our faiths are different, we look different, our backgrounds aren’t the same when we are all embraced by the same one Great Light?  In the quiet of the winter, we are called, invited, to go back to our souls, to listen to the wisdom that dwells there, with intention, that goes back to ancient days and holds the sacred stories that dwell within us, that whisper how vast, how connected, how precious and wise are our souls, if we tend to them. All credit for this post goes to Peter Mayer. Blessings to you.

“My Soul,” by Peter Mayer:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUsl5iWeSE