The Ladder of Souls

"We are climbing Jacob's ladder... every round goes higher, higher..."

These words from the old gospel song reflect the biblical myth of Jacob dreaming of a stairway into heaven, with angels going up and down.  A 12th c French Catholic Christian monk, Guigo II, picked up on this image in describing the spiritual life as climbing a ladder.  The steps were lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio – reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation.  Other Christian mystics expressed the soul's journey with similar metaphors.  St John of the Cross drew an image of the spiritual ascent of a metaphorical Mount Carmel, climbing by the "via negativa": one step at a time marked "not this - not this - not this", dropping away all that is not God in order to get to God.  "To arrive at being all, desire to be nothing."

To this rich Christian lore of the ladder, I add my own interpretation:

Awe is the first rung of the ladder of souls.  Our attention is captivated by that which is beyond our comprehension. 

The second rung is to learn and practice spiritual disciplines that nurture awe, and gain a language for it through religion, art, music, and literature.

The third rung is to release judgments, opinions, categorizations, and definitions of that which induces awe in our souls.  What we learned on the second rung prepared us for this step, but now we must let it all go so that we can take the next.

The fourth rung on the ladder of souls is ahhhh....  where we are fully immersed and absorbed into divine love.

We climb up the ladder into union with this Ultimate Reality.

We climb down the ladder to serve people and the planet - and to invite others to climb the ladder with us.

Dr Paul Laughlin, former head of the religion department at Otterbein College in Ohio, once noted that perhaps it is no accident that virtually all the major figures in world religions have names including the sound of "ahhhh":  Yahweh - Yeshua - (Jesus, in Hebrew) - Buddha - Krishna - Rama - Brahman - Atman - Allah - Muhammad - Wakan Tanka (Lakota name for the divine) - to name a few.  The experience of awe is the universal phenomenology of religion.  But of course one need not be religious to know it.  I've written recently about the emerging research illuminating the neural correlates of the sense of transcendence.  We now have robust scientific evidence suggesting that nurturing awe and wonder in young people results in measurably improved life-outcomes.  Awe is our birthright, and attending to it and encouraging it makes us more fully human.  And more fully divine.

My dad, Don Burklo, had nothing to do with religion until he married my mom.  Going to church was part of her package.  He never complained about it, and was very active in supporting the church.  But he perfected the art of sleeping while sitting upright in a pew.  (My goal as a pastor was to keep him awake whenever he was in a congregation where I preached.)  Once I asked him about his theology.  "Well," he said, rubbing his jaw, "you'll have to ask me that question outdoors on a starry night."  That is still his theology, at the age of 93.  I'm grateful to my mom, Barbara Burklo, for introducing me to the Christian tradition - though it required me to go to seminary in order to recover from the version of it that I received!  From my dad, I received powerful nurture for my natural spirituality of awe.  He encouraged us to be in wonderment of nature, but most of all he imparted us with his wonderment at us.  Every night he'd come into our bedrooms and, not saying a word, just stare at us for a while... pure love that we'll never forget.

Ideally, these two aspects of spiritual education would be fully integrated.  We would carefully observe and encourage the natural spirituality of our children, and help them make the connection between their experience of awe and ahhhh and the myths and rituals of our faith traditions - giving them a rich language to express their innate relationship with the transcendent.

"Every round goes higher, higher..."  I invite you to climb the ladder with me!