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The discerning voice can also show a darker side and turn in on itself to become a voice of self-criticism and make your heart into a place of torment. Harsh and unrelenting, it finds fault with everything. Even when unexpected acknowledgement or recognition comes your way, this voice will claw at you and make you feel you are unworthy. Nothing can ever be good enough. In some people’s lives this self-critical voice is highly developed and has managed to install itself permanently as the primary internal choreographer. This voice can assume complete control in determining how you see yourself and the world. It can make you blind to the beauty in you. Shakespeare captures this perfectly in Sonnet 1 (where ‘self-substantial’ means ‘self-consuming’):

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

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WHEN SUFFERING ARRIVES AT THE DOOR OF YOUR LIFE, YOU FEEL lost and isolated. Pain becomes more intimate than anything else. This is when the companionship and support of family and friends makes all the difference. Their presence beside you brings a grace of courage and hope. It is a wonderful moment, then, when a voice of kindness and care reaches towards you. Suffering brings you to a land where no-one can find you. Yet when the human voice focuses in empathetic tenderness, it can find its way across any distance to the desolate heart of another’s pain. The healing voice becomes the inner presence of the friend, watchful and kind at the source.

In the desolate and torn terrain of suffering, there is no beauty that reaches deeper than the beauty of the healing voice. In his classic reflection on Being and Time, Martin Heidegger discovered that at the heart of time dwelt ‘care’. The ability to care is the hallmark of the human, the touchstone of morality and the ground of holiness. Without the warmth of care, the world becomes a graveyard. In the kindness of care, the divine comes alive in us.

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We live in wordsheds.

NED CROSBY

THE VOICE OF COMPASSION IS NOT ABSORBED WITH ITSELF. IT IS not a voice intent on its own satisfaction or affirmation; rather it is a voice imbued with understanding, forgiveness and healing. This voice dwells somewhere in every human heart. Ultimately it is the voice of the soul. Part of the joy in developing a spiritual life is the discovery of this beautiful gift that you perhaps never even suspected you had. When you take the time to draw on your listening-imagination, you will begin to hear this gentle voice at the heart of your life. It is deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness. All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. It is always there and the more deeply you learn to listen, the greater the surprises and discoveries that will unfold. To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, experience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth. You gain a new respect for yourself and others and you learn to see how wonderfully precious this one life is. You begin to see through the enchanting veils of illusion that you had taken for reality. You no longer squander yourself on things and situations that deplete your essence. You know now that your true source is not outside you. Your soul is your true source and a new energy and passion awakens in you. The soul dwells where beauty lives. Hermann Broch says: ‘For the soul stands forever at her source, stands true to the grandeur of her awakening, and to her the end itself possesses the dignity of the beginning; no song becomes lost that has ever plucked the strings of her lyre, and exposed in ever-renewed readiness, she preserves herself through every single tone in which she ever resounded.’

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DANTE’S EPIC BEGINS FAMOUSLY WITH THE NARRATOR SAYING:

In the middle of the journey of our life

I came to myself within a dark wood

Where the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell

Of that wood, savage and harsh and dense,

The thought of which renews my fear!

So bitter is it that death is hardly more.

In a certain sense, the whole Divine Comedy is an exploration of the inner wilderness of the lost voice. This is, however, a voice that is magnificently lost. The rich kingdoms of medieval sensibility gather here in all their fascination and terror. As in the unfurling of individual destiny, times of loss can bring discovery. This is recognized trenchantly in the mystical tradition. The Dark Night of the Soul is the night in which all images die and all belonging is severed; the abyss where Nothingness dwells. When the voice speaks from the realm of such relentless Un-doing, it is a voice in which wilderness has come alive.