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Spiritual Calcification

4 min readMay 15, 2025

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Men and women who are said to be wise express the opinion that our souls are the immaterial essence that animates our human self. These same people say that this animating principle or soul is associated with our conscious self, with the emotional and rational aspects of our personalities. It is supposed that there is a difference between our souls and our spiritual selves, that more profound part of us that is connected with some sort of Spirit, God or Higher Power.

These wise men and women are missing the point. Perhaps they are either unaware of or else they are ignoring the joys of our lives in being a part of the whole that comprises the Spirit. It is our privilege to exist within the Shekinah glory of God, to be held in the temple of the Spirit by the One beyond imagining. The One who is neither male, female nor neuter. The One who, from what I have seen and experienced of It, is beyond any of the boundaries we place upon ourselves and everything within the worlds inside our minds.

The joys of spirituality are found in the quest, the seeking, not the attaining any prescribed destination. While our hearts and minds, our spirited souls, are engaged in their search for knowledge of the Spirit we are alive. We are pursuing that penultimate truth. We are looking for the One we think we do not know because, frankly, we fail to see that our God is already within us while we are engrossed in our never ending search for It.

Our engagement in the spiritual search is what gives us the opportunity to belong to humanity rather than being separated from each other. Our souls are fluid when they are in action. Our spirits remain, and in many cases become, malleable when we are on our quest to find that which is. Adults too often play in intellectual and spiritual mud. They prefer to sit in the rain puddles of life rather than standing up, cleaning themselves off and continuing on with the search for the hidden that is not really all that hidden.

If we choose to freeze our souls in what we presume to be a comfortable time and space in our lives, if all we do with ourselves is choose to become spiritually calcified, we lose out. Our inner lives become like a marble statue. Some are quite beautiful and others are unspeakably ugly. They all become frozen in time and space. They are hardened. Like marble our spirits become rigid and brittle. When we lack spiritual fluidity our beings, physical, emotional and spiritual, can break altogether too easily.

We stand to lose everything we might have gained whether it is from fear of being spiritually alive or not wanting to lose the supposed comforts of spiritual stasis. We may feel that we are best off alone. To be part of that ever-changing, always surprising mix called humanity is frightening. We think we are fine if we are alone. Add people and everything in our lives becomes confused. It’s easier to pretend to be interested in others than to actually swim in the middle of the river of life.

It can be terrifically painful to be connected with other people regardless of who they are. Family, friends, the men and women we pass on the streets or who live in our neighborhoods are easiest to deal with on a superficial level. Actually being engaged in the stuff of life is a bold, daring, spiritually vibrant exercise in getting to the very core of our interior lives. The security we suppose we have is threatened. We risk blowing it all up by living in that Shekinah glory.

It’s very often easier to sit outside on the curb and say no one will answer the doors of life to let us in and truly live than it is to stand up and knock until someone opens the door. So many times when we venture to knock we find that whoever opens the door asks what took us so long.

Life has been waiting for us.

Life is waiting for us.

The other day I stood in a place I’ve often visited over the last few months. I keep going back for one very simple reason: the people. The people are very positive. They have wonderfully uplifting, joyful outlooks on life. Even in the face of life’s many hardships these ordinary saints go about their extraordinarily ordinary lives.

What I found since the first time going to that place, however, was that there was a heaviness in the area. It stretched out for a mile or more in every direction. It reached hundreds of feet and thousands of years below the depths of the soil. The souls of tens of thousands of humans who had lived in that area over the preceding millennia had not gone Home. They were stuck in place either by choice or happenstance.

Whatever the case, I found them depressing. They wanted to go Home. They didn’t know how to get there. It was time to help them.

So I did.

I stood in place, opened a gate to Home and watched as the angels took them to the place they ought to have been. When that was completed I brought in angels for the simple fact that nothing loves filling a spiritual vacuum better than evil. All sorts of angels came. Guards to protect the huge area from which the souls had just left. Teachers, healers and unemployed angels of every sort came to fill the void.

Yesterday I returned to meet with someone in that place. I described what I had done a few days earlier. The man’s face brightened. He had been gone a few days, but upon his return before our meeting he could feel a difference. The place felt much lighter to him.

Those souls are gone. They were spiritually stuck for hundreds and thousands of years. Whatever might have spiritually calcified their souls is undone.

In order to live our spirits must grow.

We must have the interior freedom to stand within the Shekinah glory of the Spirit.

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Mark J. Janssen
Mark J. Janssen

Written by Mark J. Janssen

Mark Janssen is a Catholic Druid, mystic visionary and author who writes a weekly blog. His memoir “Reach for the Stars” is available online.

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