“The purpose of life is not to rival paradise but to be a vale of soul-making.”
Global religion scholar Huston Smith
I wrote these words in my journal over a decade ago while on retreat with Huston Smith. At the time, I wasn’t certain what this quote meant. I decided to explore it this week.
“The purpose of life is not to rival paradise…”
I thought about the earliest years of my spiritual journey. After a transformative mystical experience in my early twenties, I saw the world as something more than just physical matter — it was infused with divine presence. I found a spiritual community where people were truly caring for each other and seeking to align themselves with a higher purpose. I discovered sacred texts that can possess the power to reveal hidden thoughts and fascinating possibilities. I learned hymns and songs that filled me with joy. I went off to seminary keeping much of this early enthusiasm. Three years later I was ordained and began serving congregations. It felt like the world had become a “paradise.”
As my life and work unfolded, I encountered events that challenged this belief: a mother, standing on the porch of the family’s vacation cabin, watched the private plane carrying her husband and two teenage children crash and burn; a young mom was on her way to work at the local hospital when a semi-truck crossed over the center divider and killed her instantly; parents struggling every day with adult children living with mental illnesses or addiction issues. Life was no longer a “rival to paradise.”
“The purpose of life is not to rival paradise but to be a vale of soul-making.”
Since I first heard these words rather than saw them, I wondered if he meant “veil,” like a fabric that partially hides something. But this week, I realized he meant “vale” rather than “veil:”
Vale: river-land between two ranges of hills, early 14c., from Old French val “valley, vale” (12c.), from Latin vallem…”valley”… Now “little used except in poetry” [Century Dictionary].
So “vale of soul-making” means a “valley of soul-making.”
If you are making your way through a “vale” or valley, your path is bounded on both sides by mountains or hills. If the land formations are steep, you can’t go up or around…you must find a path through, bound by those limits. It’s hard, patient work.
How is navigating life like traveling through a “vale (or valley) of soul-making?”
There is a sense in which our “soul” can evolve as we go through life. We see the suffering of others, and instead of turning away, we grow in empathy. We discover there are situations we cannot fix, but that doesn’t mean we can’t care for the people involved. There is more ambiguity in life, less black-and-white.
As a pastor, I was sometimes asked, “Who are your favorite theologians?” In my early years, I would cite scholars who seemed to have everything figured out – as if they held maps to paradise. But in time I found myself offering a different answer; I would say “Rembrandt, Bach, Wendell Berry, and the older people I’ve known in my congregations.”
Rembrandt chose to paint portraits not of flawlessly attractive people (the kind displayed these days in fashion shows, on red carpets, and at Met Galas). He preferred ordinary people in whom he recognized a quiet integrity deep within; they had a beauty that transcended age, social status, and physical appearance.
“Johann Sebastian Bach lost both of his parents when he was nine and watched ten of his children die young. He was, in other words, well acquainted with death, and may have been uncommonly sensitive to the emotional chaos that it engenders. …Bach possessed a “consciousness of catastrophe”—a feeling for the suddenness and arbitrariness with which suffering descends on unsuspecting souls.”[i] But he took his grief and somehow transformed it into hundreds of pieces of music that miraculously express both the pain of shattered hearts and the joy of sacred knowing.
Wendell Berry left a high-status academic position in New York to return to his family farm in Kentucky. In his novels, poems, and essays, he brings to light the endless miracles hidden in the earth and the rugged dignity of people who work the land and revere it.
And the many older people in my congregations. As I got to know them, I gained great respect for all they had gone through — wars and hard times, hardships and heartaches, sacrifices and disappointments. They had given up on naïve illusions or easy answers. They didn’t have life figured out. Yet they seemed always ready to serve and care for others. These people spent decades finding their way through the “vale of soul-making,” their own possibilities bounded by the steep terrain they traveled through. But they endured. In the process, their souls somehow expanded to silently embrace life with all its tragedies and moments of wonder – moments that can feel like glimpses of paradise.
[i] “The Book of Bach,” Alex Ross, The New Yorker, April 4, 2011
Steve Jacobsen, Ed.D 