Looking for the Soul's Home

"I came home to the Goddess" is a phrase often used to describe an awakening to the possibility of the divine feminine. It implies there was a time when you were away from home, wandering, homeless, and then you found the door and walked in and were home. That's how it feels sometimes. There are blissful moments when we truly do feel we've come home. It's like falling in love. You just know and suddenly you don't have that urge to wander anymore. But what happens when you open the door, and all you feel is emptiness? As a solitary, especially, this is bound to happen at times. There are days and nights when we yearn, reach, and search for meaning. In solitude, we light our candles. We quiet our minds and open our hearts. We look for that trail of breadcrumbs that leads us back to the place where we felt that warm Mother love. And sometimes we can't find it. The "ravens of unresting thought" have eaten them all, perhaps. Finding the road back home when you're the only one who lives there is often incredibly difficult. Whatever the reason, we feel only longing.

As a teacher and priestess, I work with a lot of solitaries. Being on a solitary spiritual path, whether by choice or because circumstances demand it, requires the seeker to face certain challenges that those who work in community can avoid. When you practice your faith in the company of others, there is support readily available when that faith wavers. If you lose your inspiration and you can't get back to a sense of the sacred, just having a community and a routine can sustain you until that faith returns. Those of us who love the Goddess and want to follow her ways spend a lot of time lamenting that there are no ways to follow, for the most part. There is no there there. We're making it up as we go along-and for the solitary especially, that may leave you with a feeling that your home of the spirit is built on shifting sands of uncertainty.

Now, if you've been a reader of my columns over the years, you might expect that this is the time when I tell you something reassuring and cozy. My comfort this time is rather a cold comfort, I'm afraid. Because I think there is a power in being a perpetual seeker. I know there is beauty and strength that comes from the longing for connection to the sacred. Indeed, I believe that's the reason, conscious or not, that many women choose to practice their spirituality in a solitary way. In solitary yearning toward the divine, mystics are born.

In her spiritual memoir, Reason for Hope, Jane Goodall writes of the path that eventually – inexorably – led her to a life of deep service and devotion. She says at one point, "What if I had known, at that time, that my efforts would keep me more or less permanently on the road?" She is speaking literally of travel, but the quote resonates with me metaphorically as well. To practice your faith in a solitary way can feel as if you are permanently on the road, never arriving home, or at least, never staying home for long. Rather than bemoan this, I propose that we embrace it. Having a solid spiritual home to come back to is a beautiful thing, but there is also beauty in being a pilgrim, a gypsy, a wanderer on the path of spirit. There is freshness and aliveness that comes from not being quite sure what to do next. There is opportunity to always be true to yourself, for there is no one else to hold you to dogma, tradition, or any other structure.

And even beyond this, there is the yearning itself. Perhaps that sense of perpetual seeking and yearning is actually a sign of the maturing of our young religion-in-progress. In other religions, theologians and poets have long known that the yearning to connect with the divine is a deeply personal, solitary thing. Some of the wisest followers of other traditions have known that there truly is no way to comprehend the divine fully, as long as we are human. To burn with a spiritual hunger is one of the most profound ways to experience the sacred. It is the drop of sorrow in the cup of joy, that yearning for the divine beloved that leads to ecstasy. It's like looking up at a restless night sky full of clouds moving over the face of the full moon. A glimmer, a luminous glow through the dark veil, and then suddenly, there! So brilliant, so magical and beautiful - and she's gone again. The heart aches with joy and longing. So here's where the reassurance comes. The yearning to connect is the sign that you are, in fact, connected. You know there is a source beyond what you can see or smell or touch. This longing for spiritual union and certainty is union and certainty. As the Sufi poet Rumi says:
Stars burn clear all night.
Do that yourself, and a spring
will rise in the dark with water
your deepest thirst is for.

If your solitary practice comes to a place of bewilderment, when you don't know what you believe anymore, or what to do with what you do believe, just burn with the desire for a while. Don't rush to fill the empty places. Leave some room for inspiration to come. Leave some silence in which the voice of the sacred can whisper. And please, stay open to what that whisper says. Let yourself evolve. This is the great gift given to the solitary: the freedom in which the authentic source of your own connection to the divine can be explored. There's no one there to tell you the "right" way to do a ritual. No one to judge you if you ask Isis for help instead of Jesus (or vice versa!). There is no one to tell you that you aren't far enough along in your training to invoke Cerridwen, or that only second degree mages are allowed to tend the holy flame of Whatsit. In your longing for the sacred, if you let it burn, you will come to a place where you'll know how to quench that thirst. The wellspring of your own source will bubble up. And in that green and fertile place, you can build your home.