Shining Light into Dark Souls

“ The soul is explosive and powerful. Through its medium of imagination, which is always a prerequisite for action and is the source of meaning, it can accomplish all things.  In the strength of its emotions, the soul is a gun, full of potential power and effect.  The pen, expressing the soul’s passion, is mightier than the sword because the imagination can change the life of a people at their very roots. “  Thomas Moore

My first-born daughter, Corina Teresa, a 27 year old law school senior recently got married to Sergio Flores, 28 year old retail store manager.  It was a wedding full of solemnity and ceremony but also non-stop dancing till midnight.  The three heads of the families, as my husband, Enrique made a public toast to them, the intermingling of three families: Abarquez, headed by my mother, Asuncion Castro Abarquez; the Flores and Chavez family headed by Abuelo Chavez and Nancy Chavez, and the Delacruz Family headed by Felisa Buado Delacruz, a blending of cultures, with Spanish and Malay roots at its core.  It was a joyous night with an exchange of marital vows but also a consecration of what love is about: presence, a thoughtful consideration to others, a giving.  Those words resonated with most of the folks who attended the celebration.

Contrast that joy of concelebrating three families’ union through this young couple with Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ fight for her life after a lone gunman, Jared Loughner shot her in her head, while a nation prays for her quick recovery and national civility. There have been many theories about why this gunman unleashed his madness.  Several commentators called for a dialing down of the rhetoric including Sarah Palin’s victimized narcissistic view: “ enough already of the blood libel of the media folks “ which prompted a blogger to write “ Poor, poor Sarah! “, she has been victimized again, except she drew the gunsights on the democratic districts and used gun metaphors, Yet, she is not the one laying in the hospital with fluid in her brain and will need three hours of rehabilitation therapy to do basic actions.   The national discourse changed the next day, and Sarah Palin’s gun sights were taken down from her website.  Could these be too much gun metaphors fueling national realities?

It called to mind what Thomas Moore wrote in his book, Care of the Soul: “ If we do not claim the soul’s power on our own behalf, we become its victims. We suffer our emotions rather than feel them working for us.  We hold our thoughts and passions inward, disconnecting them from life, and then they stir up trouble within, making us feel profoundly unsettled, or it seems, turning into illness.  We all know what it feels to hold anger in our hearts, as it builds and transmutes into corrosive resentment and rage. “

Over the years, I was labeled by my detractors with names that poison their hearts as well as deeply hurt mine.  I learned soul searching, reflections and conscious service to others to feel grounded, to feel God’s love for me, and to know that I am a beloved,  loving righteous Child of God. 

Lately, my faith-inspired articles have awakened dark souls to manifest around me.  But instead of focusing on their own life reviews, they have thrown darts at me.  I will not claim my soul is crystal clear or pure, for God is the judge as to who I served, but thanks to my workplace detractors and few relatives, for through them, I got my sagging spirit back and did the hard work to reclaim its vibrance and Nature’s joyful splendor. 

Life does not become joyful just like that. Joy and inner peace do not come with flooding oneself with alchohol, cigarettes or drugs.  It comes from embracing the Higher Universe’s bestowed blessings and using our talents for goodness of humanity. I looked at my past self who cried so much that up to a point, I felt my legacy would all be about tears.  Until I stood up and said, enough, God did not create me to be a reservoir of suffering and tears.  I intentionally claimed my God to be in my life, not that I turned my back on Him, but I stopped going to Mass.  I justified not going by focusing on the Church’s erroneous practices, like pedophilia, instead of the total spiritual richness of the entire congregation.   

Spiritual Journey.

I was personally attacked as naïve and ‘ unable to hang with the big boys ‘ in my workplace, as I stood for fairness, workplace democracy and my conscience.  I was hyperscrutinized and rumors flew like wild fire.  Friends shunned me.  Few allies who shared my values stood by me and protected me. 

It got me to look at my entire life, including my family who could not protect me at my workplace, and my teenagers who saw my unhappiness.  I experienced tragic losses of family members and good friends, their abrupt endings did not make sense to me.  Instead of questioning God, “ Why Me? “ I embraced God as my only ally.  I came upon Henri Nouwen’s book, “ Wounded Healer “ and his insights mirrored the anguish of my inner spirit. I experienced the emptiness of my life, and it got me into a journey of spiritual development. Until I did a life review.

I went through a rigorous life analysis.  The questions were developed with help from watching Dr. Phil, who some misidentify as ‘ the hack ‘, yet, from him, the questions were probing, difficult, in –depth, that I got to realize who were the folks that helped me reach the wondrous qualitative moments of change, who gave me love, who sheltered me from harm, who protected me, who gave their wholehearted hearts to love me unconditionally.  When I finally realized who they were, my passion and dedication to serve them intensified. I did not leave any stone unturned for their needs.  And I said a prayer to my detractors, for from them, I learned to say grace and gratitude.

When someone calls me names, and with the most despicable profiling I have heard, I regard it as the mirror of a very dark soul, a ‘black heart’ that forgot to reflect and soaked up the sufferings of others,  without doing their own hard work of what are the blessings they have in their lives. Instead, they measure themselves now with failed dreams, failed goals, when the rest of their lives are up for the taking, where fruits of Nature are ready to be picked, if they had planted some good seeds themselves.

It is easy to spot folks with dark souls, who are suffering and with deep-seated negative energies. They survive without self-love, they call themselves self-defeating labels of idiots and stupid, they criticize their parents who gave them their life, they sow intrigues, they manufacture falsehoods to suit their cutthroat competitive behaviors, they thrive on making “ pulutan “ or sprinkle toxic criticisms about others, believing in fact that they re-generate their own spirits, and who for lack of alignment to their own spirits, suck dry the positive energies in the room and transform them into their opposites by their one singular statement, illustrating and expressing their deeply held anger towards their own past.

Many dark souls abound today and the cure for them is not violence, it is to push them to care for their soul’s power.  Sometimes, it takes the form of awakening them to make a choice: to persist to nurture their past and to live in darkness or to choose light and  the vibrance of their human spirits.  Imagine a single act of a gunman with depraved heart, coming from a dark soul, and now he has become the focus of a national rift and soon I hope a national healing and reconciliation?  Thomas Moore said it eloquently “…If there is crime in our streets, it is due, from the viewpoint of our soul, not just to poverty and difficult living conditions, but to the failure of the soul and its spirit to unveil themselves. “

Civility is not achieved through prayers. Civility is personal action.  Civility is taking care of your own soul and excavating the past to be viewed in a new light of being born a precious Child of the Beloved Higher One.   Without self-love and recognizing you are Beloved, you take on the sufferings of Others, preferring to be the suffering Jesus Christ, forgetting that Christ died on the Cross, but the enduring legacy of his life is Christ resurrected to give us all LIFE blessed on earth with joy and happiness.  When I fully realized that wonderful life-giving lesson, I was freer to enjoy the most loving mar