Thomas Moore - Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship

Contents

T HE ONLY thing as challenging as getting tangled in the underbrush of relationship is trying to write about it. My own experiences with relationship, the good and the bad, weigh heavy as I try to write for others. And so I write in faith, focusing on the soul, without many judgments and without prescriptions for success. I present relationship here not as a psychological problem or issue, but as a mystery in the religious and theological sense, knowing that it is always a mistake to talk authoritatively about mysteries.

Im also aware that I write as a white, male, heterosexual American with a classical European education, and that many who will read these words do not share that background. While writing, Ive tried to maintain some consciousness of these potential differences, but to do so at every turn is to become so self-conscious and contorted as to lose touch with my own experience, which is an important source of my reflections. So I ask the reader to allow me to speak from my own context. I hope that what I say from my experience will apply, with reservations and sometimes with substantive changes, to various other arrangements and other cultural and educational backgrounds.

I might give a small warning at the start about my methods and purposes here. Its my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change. I will try very hard to offer some key shifts in ways of imagining relationship, but I wont give many concrete, direct suggestions of what to do, because of my conviction that deep changes in life follow movements in imagination. The very idea of soul underscores the importance of being individuals, and every relationship calls for a unique response. The point of this book is to free ourselves of longstanding and rigid ideas and images of what it means to love, to be married, to be a friend, or to live in community.

I also speak here about religion and spirituality. In case there is any doubt, I am not advocating any particular church, tradition, practice, or teaching. The Renaissance theologians, my primary teachers, advocated natural religionnot in the eighteenth-century sense of a rational religion, but as a sensitivity to the sacred in everyday life. Relationships, I believe, are truly sacred, not in the superficial meaning of simply being high in value, but in that they call upon infinite and mysterious depths in ourselves, in our communities, and in the very nature of things.

This book follows my previous book, Care of the Soul, and it develops ideas expressed many times in that book: The soul has a strong desire and need for intimacy, and it loves vernacular lifethe particular place, family, friends, and neighborhood that are part of our daily lives. The soul doesnt thrive on grand schemes of salvation or on smooth, uncluttered principles, nor does it thrive on theories and creeds, and so I dont offer a way out of the inevitable messes relationships bring, or present yet another theory about how relationships work or should work. Soul does love imagination, though, and so my emphasis throughout this book is on deepening and enriching our imagination.

Although the book is called Soul Mates, it takes that notion broadly, to include the soul in all kinds of relationships. A soulful connection can be found in families, on the job, in the neighborhood, with colleagues, and among friends, among longstanding acquaintances and in fleeting encounters, in socially sanctioned matings and in murky rendezvous. This book extends the idea of soul mate in order to suggest ways of being in any relationship soulfully, and it also celebrates those rare and profoundly satisfying bonds we feel with certain people who in the strictest sense are soul mates.

Id like to acknowledge the help of a few people who have taught me about relationship and soul, and have made special contributions to this book: in Dallas, Fat Toomay; in the Berkshires, Christopher Bamford and Laura Chester; in Florence, Carmelo Mezzasalma and his students; in Brussels, Lonard Appel and Marie Milis; in London, Noel Cobb and Eva Loewe; in Chicago, Ben Sells; in Michigan, the many aunts, uncles, and cousins of a warm and always supportive family, my brother Jim and his family, and my parents. I also want to acknowledge the extraordinary wisdom and generous friendship of my editor at HarperCollins, Hugh Van Dusen, as well as the friendly and effective support of William Shinker, the publisher of HarperCollins trade books. I have been gifted with an agent of exceptional intuition, insight, and capacity for mating souls and guiding books to the light of day, Michael Katz. I have also been graced to have a fine poet as an editor, Jane Hirshfield, who elicits potential poetry and elusive clarity from my occasionally rough thoughts. Finally, I ask a blessing on this book from my true soul mate, Joan Hanley, to whom, with Abraham and Siobhn, this book is dedicated.

Thomas Moore

Even though it is often overused or used imprecisely, soul is a beautiful word. It points to the very depth of our sense of self and the full range of our inner and outer experiences. A person with soul has vitality, a strong sense of identity, and the capacity to relate and connect. Not only persons, but animals and things have a soul. You could even say that our planet and the universe have a soul because they are alive, are potentially lovable, and have unique identities and personalities.

The piano in our house has become a member of the family and is a strong presence in the house. We know that it is more than one hundred years old and had a long history before us, and so its long experience and many relationships give it depth and endear it to us. We dont imagine ever parting with it. It radiates soulfulness.

I sign copies of my own books sometimes that are yellow with age and heavily marked. People present them as precious objects and tell stories about them and apparently want me to love them, too. Here, signs of loving attention over time give the book a presence that I would call soul.

Traditionally, love and the soul are imagined as cousins or even lovers. The ancient Greeks said that Eros, love in its deepest and broadest sense, makes the world. They pictured it as an egg out of which things are born. That is to say that love is not just the birthright of human beings. Animals and objects have their own kind of love and relationship. And so, when we start to talk about human intimacy, its good to have the big picture within which our own personal loves unfold. We can also see how closely connected are love and the soul. You know a thing has a soul because you can love it, and you can love things and animals and people because they have a soul.

It helps to appreciate the many ways soul is embodied in ordinary life, so that we can picture the soul of a relationship in concrete terms, not just as people interacting. When two people connect, worlds collide and intersect, not just persons. When you meet someone interesting, you may be introduced to a new world of activities and places and objects. As you get to know them better, you may meet their family and friends. The very idea of relationship is incomplete without honoring the world that each person brings along.

WE BECOME AWARE OF OUR SOUL WHEN WE FEEL A DEEP stirring inside, perhaps at the sight of a rosy dawn or when we fall in love with a person or a place. This awareness of soul is not just an emotion, because it affects our very being. Thats the point about the soulit reaches deep and can affect the way we make choices and find meaning.

The soul is not a thing. It represents more an area or region of experience, both inner and outer, that conveys essence, depth, substance, and mystery. You can become aware of that region in yourself when you realize how deeply some event stirs you. It goes further than emotion and can hardly be expressed in words. You can also sense that depth in a geographical place or in an object that is precious to you.