Sewing the Torn Soul Back Together

Living in the Dark Ages

As I’ve written before, I see vanity (i.e. unnecessary) adoptions as symptomatic of a far deeper and more insidious pathology that runs through Western (particularly American) society.

For me, vanity adoption is part of the evidence that the Dark Ages never went away.

Some medieval laws and attitudes are withering away, as well they should. The number of states that have legalized same-sex marriage, for example, are on the rise and soon those states that still enact laws that prohibit it will feel enormous pressure to join the rest of us in the 21st century.

Why, then, do medieval institutions (institutions because they’ve been embedded in the national psyche from day one) such as war, genocide, torture, racism, sexism, animal and child abuse, wrongful imprisonment, economic injustice, the death penalty, entitlement, sweatshop labor, competition, exclusion, and vanity adoptions (i.e. slavery) still grip America in their stranglehold?

Seriously, I have to ask if there’s a correlation between the fact that over three-quarters of Americans still identify as Christians and the harmful, prevailing attitudes and practices that step on our collective necks and rub our faces in the hell that rules the minds of psychopaths in power. By psychopaths in power I mean authoritarians in political office, religious leaders, military hierarchies, and so on. These psychopaths ensure for their benefit that fear and ignorance prevail. Meaning, they force the rest of us to suffer the torturous agonies that they themselves are going through.

I also have to ask if that Christian stranglehold on the nation works in tandem with the fact that bankers own Congress so that America now looks more and more like an impoverished police state brought to its knees by fundamentalist principles in all sectors.

It’s so past time that these dominant American Christians put away their childish things (like blind obedience to patriarchal authority, bullying, ideology, insistence on being right, and fear and loathing of sharing and cooperation) or we’re totally doomed as a species. I mean, their own bible says

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

But then they haven ‘t proved that they take their bible seriously have they? except for when it’s convenient for them to do so.

But we’re not helpless victims even though most of us are reduced to sniveling puddles who gripe among ourselves and hide away in our safe hovels.

If we’re ever going to get through this, we have to stop listening to and obeying all the babies in power. We have to begin thinking and risking for ourselves.

The Torn Soul

Relevant to my usual rant, unnecessary adoption is, in my opinion, a form of kidnapping, and should therefore be construed as a felony. America has always trumpeted itself as being a nation of laws. But the status quo that legislates justice does so only when that legislation favors the status quo. Otherwise it turns a deaf ear and a blind eye to critical and intelligent appeals for justice. Make no mistake. Adoption is an extremely political issue.

The other day I heard an interview with an actual adult, Michael Meade and decided to share some of the notes I took away from that interview. I think much of what he has to say offers insights that adoptees can take home with them.

Meade suggested that there’s always a deeper voice behind politics because the soul requires an outer drama to release its inner mythos. Mythology (stories that explain origins, causes, identities, adventures, etc.) has been obscured and occupied by rationality. Over the past 300 years the word “myth” has been bastardized to mean “untruth,” but myth has always been about finding the truth; stories are the way we find and reveal the truth.

We feel anxiety because we don’t have enough shared stories; we get caught up in the dominant surface battles of rational facts and figures that never tell the whole story. The bombardment of facts and figures produces fear. We shrivel under the rule of facts and fundamentalism in all areas of our lives.

The politics of fear shuts things down to more easily control a population. The original meaning of fear was “to try, risk, come over, go through.” If fear means “to go through,” then it can guide us through danger.

Nature has provided us with a choice when we face danger: fight or flight. Patriarchy has beaten us down and taught us to obey for so long that we end up doing neither, so we get stuck in the fear which turns to panic and paralysis.

[My thoughts on this: The panic and paralysis result in a stasis that turns in on itself rather than finds a way out of our challenges. So we flail around in our neurosis rather than act in our own best interests...Dude. I'm a poster child for this stasis.]

If we (including those of us struggling to mature into real adults as adoptees forced to remain children all our lives) don’t descend with the darkness it will come back to haunt us in another form. We’re suspended in a kind of delayed tragedy.

But here’s the good news, according to Meade.

The mind always wants to ascend, to be in the high places;  but soul is a matter of descent. Right now, in these times, it’s better to travel with soul, to learn to trust our ability to move from ideas down into the realm of soul. We’re currently going through a soul initiation as it descends; it knows how to move in darkness. We’re slowly catching on that danger and tragedy are opportunities for healing, meaningful change, and imagination.

You can feel it in your bones. Something is trying to be expressed. For example, currently the subject of torture is all over the news. It’s  imperative that we open the discussion up to see that torture has long existed inside the American soul, and now torture is trying to find its voice. Any torturer is always himself tortured.

Fundamentalists  refer to their ideology as the only ideology. Ideology means an inability to hold two thoughts at one time. It produces single vision. On the other hand, stories have many views. Stories are deeper, richer, and more resourceful than the monolithic belief of an ideology.

Stories can bring shattered people back together using hidden resources we can find within ourselves  to heal our own brokenness. We are all wounded warriors with the ability to gain soulful intelligence from our wounding through our underworld journey. If we don’t bring back soulful intelligence, our wound will be passed down to generations that succeed us.

The courage we bring into our battles can be expressed in the truth of our own stories, not by reciting lifeless ideologies. We walk between love and battle which tear our souls apart; our stories can sew the torn soul back together.

Further reading: the poetry of Hafez and Rumi.

…

As inspiring as Meade’s philosophy is, I’m skeptical that stories or anything else could ever sew the pieces of my subjugated soul together, but I’m going to keep on writing my truth as if they could. If nothing else his philosophy gives me courage and perspective when I witness the horrors taking place everywhere on the planet.