If you’ve been wondering how to make sense out of the craziness and chaos of life, if you wonder what it’s all about or are agitated and exasperated, remember life comes with a cheat sheet. It’s called poetry. It’s the poets, mystics, and deep thinkers that show the shortcut to making sense out of the seemingly nonsensical. And in times of overload I reach for their words again and again.

Although I have an undergraduate degree in religious studies I focused on Eastern religion rather than Western and in doing so missed much of Christian mysticism. This week I picked up a copy of The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila, translated by Mirabai Starr, and had one of those double whammy experiences that shakes me up as well as soothes me.

Walk with me for a moment in words that ring true, that hold out a tentative hand of eternal hope, and that inspire the soul. Let the words reach out to you through time and space to find a home in you that they once inhabited in St. Teresa. Sometimes all we need is a word of love and encouragement to keep us steady on our own path muddled with hesitant steps and shattered illusions. Look more deeply, they are all our words and they come back to us when we are most in need of them.

So here’s a little cheat sheet for today, wherever it may find you from St. Teresa:

Always visualize your soul as vast, spacious, plentiful. The amplitude is impossible to exaggerate. The soul’s capacity far transcends our imagining. The sun at the center of this place radiates to every part…We would do ourselves a great disservice if we never endeavored to rise above the mud of our personalized misery. If we are perpetually stuck in our own arc of tribulation our stream will never flow free from the mire of fear and faintheartedness…These arise from not knowing ourselves. Fear distorts knowledge of the self…All spiritual rules are nothing but means toward the end of spiritual love. Let each of us look to (our) self.

Somehow at the bottom of all our deep loneliness and feelings of being lost lies the answer that’s always been, love.

kb