Housing a Soul: The Spiritual Task of Parenting, Part I

Protecting the Jewel

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my role as a parent, or caregiver, to my 6 year-old son and 2 year-old daughter in a more meaningful way.  But when I stop to actually think about the task of parenting, I am both awestruck and scared to death at what’s at stake.  I think most parents feel the same way.

Tara Brach, Psychologist, author and Buddhist teacher, speaks in her book True Refuge about the importance of early parenting. 

     "Even after we've left the refuge of the womb, our development depends on a profoundly intimate relationship with our earliest caregivers. We immediately enter a dance of attunement...This dance of attunement is our birthright. The degree to which our feelings of connectedness are damaged, sustained, or deepened is the most central predictor of our health and happiness throughout life."

The grandness of this task has led me to spend time contemplating the Spiritual aspects of this assignment god has set before me in which I am trusted to house these two souls until the time comes for them to become real, as said in The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

Becoming Real…What does that mean though?  In the spiritual development of a child, many could argue, it has to do with the soul or the True Self.

Franciscan priest and author Richard Rorh wrote a book called Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self.  In the book, Fr. Rorh defined true self as synonymous with soul and false self as all the definitions and labels we take on to describe ourselves. For example, for me it might be: white, female, social worker, mother, etc.

In Fr. Rorh’s description, it does not seem that one is right and the other wrong. Nor one good and the other bad. True self and false self do not seem to be defined in duality, they are, rather, merely different realities of what composes the developmental stages of the human soul.

Since hearing about this book, I've been going back in my mind again and again to this central idea of true self or soul as akin to a jewel inside of us. To me, this is a beautiful analogy that has the essence of faithfuls who have said for millennia that every human being has a divine spark inside. And when applied to parenting, the job assignment of “caregiver” seems to take on a whole new and powerful meaning for me.

The construction of Self (capital "S") has always been quite intriguing to me.  I have long been interested in how this process unfolds over the course of development, and particularly watchful for the juxtaposition of the psychological and the spiritual. I contemplate my own development, my children's development, my parents’ and grandparents’ development, and that of my patients in my work as a psychotherapist. I consider this construction of Self, and wonder how it reveals itself over the course of the lifespan from birth to death.

In my education as a clinical social worker, I was first educated in psychodynamic therapy.  During this training, I was introduced to the complex and diverse theories of development from a psychological perspective.  But since that time, I have moved in the direction of wanting to understand not only how the psychological development of an individual unfolds, but also his or her spiritual development, and where the two overlap.  This area of interest seems to be perfectly illustrated in the development of Self.

 Let me first, however, define some terms, and how I will be using them in this piece. 

C

In Fr. Rorh's interviews about his book Immortal Diamond he uses the term "false self" in the same way I have understood the term “ego” as stemmingv from my background in psychodynamic theory. Which to me, put very simply and succinctly, includes all the definitions, labels and roles of myself that I have determined, and other people have told me, make me, Me (capital “M.”). 

Please note here, this definition of “false self” by Fr. Rorh is quite different than how the famous psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s used the term “false self” as more like a façade or masking of the more authentic true self. 

Fr. Rorh also uses the term "true self." And his contextual use of “true self” is how I have begun to apply the word "soul." I don’t know that the use of “true self” by Fr. Rorh is as far away from D.W. Winnicott’s use of the term “true self” which he defined as a spontaneous sense of self derived from a sense of authentic being. 

To me, “soul” is quite, if not exactly, similar. It is that part of me that I begin to feel after long periods of meditative silence that has nothing to do with my body, my job, my roles, or even my human existence. It is an experience of myself and others that is outside birth and death. An entity that is a gorgeous, completely unique energy that is un-replicable; an energy that has always been and will always be.

Having said that, I will now use the terms “false self” and “ego” interchangeably and I will use the terms “true self” and “soul” interchangeably.

It seems to me, in development, if the true self or soul is a jewel which has come into this earthly world in the form of an infant, then it would be absolutely essential that, as caregivers and caretakers of this precious gem, we hit the ground running immediately after birth to build a house around this jewel to keep it safe and protected until it grows powerful enough and savvy enough in the earthly realm to exist with no protection. The soul must learn how to exist in this earthly body.

In this way, the construction of a house becomes a metaphor for the construction of an ego or false self. An enclosure to safely house the jewel, true self or soul.

This blog entry is the 1st in a 6 Part Series.

More to come…