When Heaven Touches Earth
A Meditation

First Quarter 2007
Condensed from Soul Moments

What is the soul? It’s who I am—again—when I awake from the tangled web of confusing dreams that have swept me through a soulful night and on toward dawn. Still half-immersed in that shadow life that I assume each night “undercover,” I emerge, grasping a fleeting handful of images and scenes—but it is a losing battle. My body takes shape once again as the person I am in wakeful life; eyes start to focus in the available light, morning tasks appear like lists to be tackled ... and I am my conscious self.

But how and why do I truly believe that something soulful has occurred, quite beyond my control—or, now, even my full remembrance? Have I really had the experience of being taught truth in my inward being, wisdom in my “secret heart”?

Once, in what had begun as a fitful night, I was granted a dream. I was driving a car, alone, through some long, circuitous countryside route, but with an inner knowledge that I would safely arrive at my destination. The effort and the time spent on the road were part and parcel of the appreciation I would feel upon my arrival.

Once there, I entered into the most beautiful, idyllic park or retreat grounds. I can still taste the sweet assurance that the Management was not just waiting for me; I found that I truly belonged there and was expected. “It’s all true ... this is a foretaste ... ” was the thought of my heart, if not my actual verbal response. I had a consciousness, even while dreaming, of being given just the refreshment of spirit that I needed to go back to the frustrations of my work and decision-making and struggle to be good for the people around me.

Just wishful thinking? Fantasizing? In a dream, we have no such control.

I see it instead as pure gift. The aura of peace and fulfillment that I experienced, not just dreamed, has stayed with me for years. When I am tempted to doubt God’s goodness, my experience confirms the “life verse” bestowed on me (along with all of my college graduating class): “I know the plans that I am planning for you ... plans of welfare, and not of calamity, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer. 29:11, paraphrased).

My soul sometimes leads the way for the rest of me to follow. …

Soul moments occur when two hearts touch, or when a long-sought-after idea starts to gel in an exciting way, or when events fall into the right sequence to allow for an action or decision, or whenever we feel that there is more to this pause in time than appears on the surface of things. We stop ... or look up ... or soar. For one infinitesimal moment, we have “come to ourselves,” and we simply know: the soul may be slippery and invisible and indefinable, but we are it.

For me, soul implies a vast web of interrelatedness, finding oneself not as autonomous but as part of an intricate pattern. Some mystics have likened that larger picture to a great mansion, in which we are all component parts. Another biblical image is a body, of which we are members, each with a function and purpose. Or we could be stars, fragments of the mother of all constellations.

Come with me through a series of soul moments—not necessarily in any kind of order, but each having some quality of opening up to that deeper, richer world that part of us knows like the palm of our own hand.

… If these incidents help you to identify your own soul moments in the past, and recognize them as they come to you in the days ahead, I will be gratified.