[Based on: 13 Repentances of Sophia]
Part One
Of the House Built Upon Shadows
The First Repentance
I have dwelt long in the house of my own making, and I called it home, O Sophia, though thou wert not in it. I laid its stones with the weight of my ambitions, and mortared them with the praise of men, and verily I believed it would stand.
I counted my days as a merchant counts his coin — each one weighed, each one spent, each one lost to the river of hours that answers to no name. I called this industry. I called this a life. But the river did not call it anything at all.
I mistook the lantern for the sun. I mistook the map for the country. I walked the painted corridors of my certainty and did not notice that there were no windows, that no light came in which I had not myself kindled.
Forgive me, O Deep Wisdom, that I built so long in the dark and called the darkness sufficient. Forgive me that I did not hunger for what I could not name — for thee, whom I had forgotten how to name.
I repent of my sufficiency. I repent of the closed room. Receive thou this first, broken word from one who did not know, until now, that he was lost.
The Second Repentance
Of the Stopped Ear and the Crowded House
I filled my life as a man fills a vessel with stones, that it might not rattle or ring hollow in the night when the world grew quiet and I grew afraid.
For verily the quiet was thy voice, O Sophia, and I could not bear it. I set music against it, and laughter against it, and the endless counsel of other men’s opinions — anything, O Wisdom, anything but the sound of thee.
I did not know I was afraid. I called it productivity. I said: a man must be present in the world. And so I was present everywhere except in the one room where thou wert waiting.
How long didst thou wait in that room? How many times didst thou set the table and hear my footsteps pass the door and go elsewhere, always elsewhere, toward the noise that felt like living?
I repent of the full calendar and the empty chest, and of every silence I murdered in its cradle. I repent that I made of my own soul a stranger, someone I would not have recognized had he passed me in the street.
Receive thou this silence now, O Sophia — imperfect, late, and trembling — the first quiet I have offered thee in years. I do not yet know how to be still. But I am trying.
The Third Repentance
Of the Light That Fell Upon the Wall
O Sophia, It was not an angel with a sword, nor a voice from the whirlwind. Only a momentary crack of light through a door I had not noticed, falling upon a wall I had always believed was sky.
And in that light I saw the grain of the stone. I saw the seam where the mortar had been laid, and that what I had taken for horizon was a wall built close, by my own two hands in the years of my sleep.
I did not weep at once. A short, bewildered laugh of a man sprang first. From someone who has walked into a post in broad daylight. The laugh then curdled. And then I sat down upon the floor.
For verily the cage was not ugly, O Wisdom. I had furnished it well, and in it I had hung pictures. I had told myself the ceiling was the heavens and I had almost believed it.
How does a man grieve a prison he decorated himself? How does he rage against walls he laid with such care? I repent of the pictures on the walls, and of the comfortable chair. I repent that I made captivity livable, and that I forgot to want thee.
Receive thou this cracked and tilting moment, O Sophia. It is a small glimpse. But the glimpse has undone me, and I do not think I can go back to sleep.
Part Two
The Fourth Repentance
Of the God I Made From My Own Reflection
I was in love with my own thinking, O Sophia. Let me not dress it in softer words than that. I polished my arguments as other men polish silver, and set them on the shelf where thou shouldst have stood, and bowed to them each morning.
I said: what cannot be reasoned cannot be trusted. I said: what cannot be measured cannot be real. And so I unmeasured thee out of existence, and reasoned thee into silence, and called the silence clarity.
Verily I built a cathedral of the intellect with no altar and no nave. Its corridors of my own conclusion lead back to the same small room of my Self.
I was proud of how much I knew, O All-Knowing. I did not see that knowledge without thee is a map of a country one has never visited — precise, and annotated, and useless to a man dying of thirst.
I used my cleverness as a wall to keep the inexplicable out, to keep thee out, to keep the trembling, wordless wonder of existence at a distance where it could not undo me.
But thou art the undo-ing, O Sophia. Thou art the question that swallows all answers. Thou art the dark water beneath the frozen lake of my certainty, moving always, patient always, waiting for the thaw.
I repent of every argument I won at the cost of a deeper knowing. I repent of the closed fist of my logic. I repent that I called my limitation a virtue and published it, and was applauded, and bowed.
Receive thou this humbled and bewildered mind, O Wisdom because it has, at last, grown tired of itself.
The Fifth Repentance
Of the Garden I Paved and the Rain I Refused
I turned my face from the green world, O Sophia, and I did not know I was turning from thee. I thought I was turning toward something better.
I forgot the weight of soil in the hand. I forgot the particular silence of a forest that has been forest for a thousand years — that deep, unhurried breathing, older than any word I know for God.
I walked on concrete so long that I forgot what it was to feel the earth give. I forgot that the ground is alive beneath us, that we are held by something that requires no permission to love us.
Verily I called this forgetting maturity and sophistication. I put away the boy who lay in grass and watched clouds as one puts away a childish thing, not knowing he was the wisest part of me.
For thou art in the root and the rain, O Wisdom. Thou art in the specific grief of autumn and in the uprising of green things after frost and in the patience of stone and the faithfulness of tides.
And I was not there. I was inside, with the blinds drawn, producing.
I repent of every sunset I did not stop to receive. I repent of the rivers I crossed without kneeling. I repent of the wild, unruly garden of my own interior that I razed and salted in the name of Self.
Thou wert growing there, O Sophia — in the untended places and in the parts of myself I deemed unproductive. Thou wert always growing there.
Receive thou this grief for the green world. Receive thou this man who is learning to take off his shoes, feel the ground, and remember what it means to be a creature held.
The Sixth Repentance
Of the Stones I Carried and the Ones I Threw
I was a man who knew how to judge, O Sophia. I was quick and I was accurate and I sharpened my assessments like knives and called it discernment and standards. I called it simply seeing things as they are.
But thou art in the faces of men, O Wisdom. Thou art in the fumbling and the failure of the addict and the outcast and in the one who cannot get it right no matter how many times he tries. I walked past them all with my verdict already written until like them I became.
Verily I was a wall where I should have been a door and I was a court where I should have been a country. I dispensed my judgments from a great height and did not notice that the height itself was the measure of my poverty.
For what is a man who cannot be moved? What is a certainty that costs another person their dignity? I called my coldness strength and my distance wisdom. I did not know that the hardest and most courageous thing is to remain open.
I repent of the cutting word delivered with precision and the silence that was punishment rather than peace. I repent of every time I made another feel small so that I might, for a moment, feel large.
I repent of the compassion I withheld as though it were a finite resource, as though loving one person freely might somehow leave me with less.
Thou art the light in every face, O Sophia. Even the faces I turned from. Even the ones I wounded. Even those I wounded and felt righteous doing so.
Receive thou this confession of my cruelty. I ask only that it be received, that in the naming of it something in me might begin to soften.
The Seventh Repentance
Of the Shore I Would Not Leave and the Sea I Would Not Enter
I was afraid, O Sophia. Let that be the first and plainest word. Beneath the architecture of my confidence and the careful life I constructed and defended — I was afraid.
I was afraid of the dark beyond the last lamp and of the question that has no answer. I was afraid of the door that opens onto nothing recognizable and the moment when the Self that I had so carefully assembled would be asked to lay itself down and trust.
Verily I built my life on the near shore, O Wisdom. I mapped it thoroughly. I named everything on it. I told myself that a man who knows his ground is a man who is prepared. I did not admit that I was hiding.
For the sea was always there, O Sophia. Vast and dark and incomprehensibly old, speaking in a language older than thought, calling in the voice of tides that knew my name before I did.
And I made a fire on the beach and sat with my back to the water and talked loudly of other things.
I repent of every mystery I flattened into fact because the mystery was too large to live beside. I repent of the books I read to arm myself against wonder rather than to deepen it. I repent of the way I spoke of death — as though speed were the same as courage.
I repent that I taught myself not to long for what I could not see, not to reach toward what I could not hold, not to love what I could not keep. For thou art precisely there, O Wisdom — in the longing, in the reaching, in the loving of what cannot be held.
Thou art the sea, O Sophia. Thou art the deep and the dark and the immeasurable. Thou art the thing I have been afraid of all my life, not knowing that the fear itself was a kind of homesickness — a longing so large I mistook it for terror.
Receive thou this trembling man who stands now at the water’s edge, shoes in hand, not yet brave enough to swim, but no longer willing to look away.
The Eighth Repentance
Of the Music Box I Buried and the Dance I Forgot
There was a boy who knew how to be astonished, O Sophia. He is still in here somewhere, like a song half-remembered in the morning that vanishes when you reach for it.
He knew things I have since unlearned. He knew that a beetle on a stone is worth twenty minutes. He knew that spinning until you fall is a form of prayer. He knew that the world is made of marvels and that the correct response to a marvel is to stop everything and receive it.
I was taught to put him away, O Wisdom. The teachers of seriousness had said: there is work to be done. They said: a man must be useful. They said: that is enough of that now and I had agreed.
Verily I buried the music box in the garden of myself and told no one where I put it. I stopped lying in the grass to watch the shapes of clouds because there was always something more important and something more rational.
But thou art in the play, O Sophia. Thou art in the song that has no purpose but to be sung, in the dance that answers to no audience, and thou art in the laughter that rises before the mind has had a chance to decide whether it is appropriate.
Thou art the delight at the heart of things. And I starved thee out of my life one small surrender at a time until I looked up one day and found myself efficient, and productive, and utterly without wonder.
I repent of every moment of joy I declined in the name of dignity. I repent of the poems I didn’t write and the songs I didn’t sing and the impulses I strangled before they could embarrass me.
I repent most of all of the boy I abandoned who only ever wanted to show me something wonderful and whom I told, again and again, that we didn’t have time.
We had time, O Sophia. We had nothing but time. And I spent it being serious when I could have been alive.
Receive thou this grief for lost delight.
Receive thou the man who is trying to remember how to play and to hold a thing gently, to be astonished, and how to let the world be wonderful again.
The Ninth Repentance
Of the Wall I Built Between Myself and Everything
I believed I was alone, O Sophia. Fundamentally, essentially alone. A single note that had forgotten it was part of a symphony.
I built this belief carefully and over many years. I said: a man must stand on his own ground. And so I stood, and stood, and stood, until standing alone was the only thing I knew how to do.
Verily the wall went up stone by stone, O Wisdom. One disappointment, or a betrayal, and one a grief at a time. I learned that needing was dangerous and that opening was an invitation to loss and that the Self kept small and defended was at least the Self kept.
But a Self kept is a Self starved. And I was starving, O Sophia, all those years of my proud solitude. I was starving and I called it fasting. Chasing death became a discipline in itself.
For thou art the connective tissue of all things, O Wisdom. Thou art the invisible thread between the star and the eye that sees it, between the word and the heart that receives it, and between the hand extended and the hand that takes it.
To believe in separateness is to believe that the river has nothing to do with the rain and that the flame owes nothing to the air. That a man can live, truly live, with his borders closed and his gates locked and his flag flying over nothing but his own silence.
I repent of the wall and of every intimacy I rationed, every vulnerability I swallowed back down, and of every moment I stood at the threshold of genuine connection and retreated into irony, into competence, into the great grey safety of not quite being known.
I repent that I made of my solitude a philosophy and published it in the way I moved through rooms — always already halfway out the door.
Thou wert in the faces of the people I kept at arm’s length, O Sophia. Thou wert in the conversations I deflected. Thou wert in the hands I shook when I should have embraced and in the truths I withheld when I should have spoken and in the love I measured out in careful doses as though the supply might run out.
The supply does not run out. Thou art the supply, O Wisdom. Thou art the inexhaustible source of everything I was so afraid to spend.
Receive thou this confession of my separateness. Receive this man who built his walls so high he could no longer see the country they were meant to protect — who stands now on the ramparts of his own making, looking out at the vast, connected, luminous world, and longs, with everything he has, to come down.
Part Three
The Tenth Repentance
Of the Hands That Built Nothing That Lasts
I have come to the end of my own resources, O Sophia. I want thee to know that I tried with everything. I tried with desperation and with a fury that mistook itself for strength.
I built and I strove and I reasoned and I defended. I optimized and I planned and I pushed and when the pushing failed I pushed harder because I did not know another way to be, because I had never learned to receive.
Verily my hands are empty now, O Wisdom. Look at them. These hands that laid the stones of my false house and pushed away what they should have held. These hands that reached for the lesser thing again and again with such confidence.
Such terrible confidence.
They have nothing in them now. No argument and no achievement and no carefully constructed version of myself to present at the gate and say: see what I have made — surely this is enough.
It is not enough, O Sophia. It was never enough. And I think that somewhere beneath the noise of my striving I have always known that.
I repent of the belief that I could earn my way back to thee. I repent of every spiritual ambition that was only pride wearing humble clothes. I repent of the prayers I said like invoices, the good deeds I performed like deposits, the suffering I endured and secretly noted down as credit against some cosmic debt.
Thou art the light that falls on the empty hand because that is the nature of light, because thou art generous in ways I do not have the mathematics to measure.
So I offer thee what I have, O Sophia. Which is nothing. This emptiness finally stopped pretending to be full. This silence finally stopped pretending to be strength, and this man finally stopped pretending to be anything other than what he is:
lost, and looking for thee, and hoping, against all his prior evidence, that thou art looking too.
Receive thou these empty hands, O Deep Wisdom because they are open at last and trembling.
The Eleventh Repentance
Of the Presence I Walked Through Without Seeing
Thou wert never far, O Sophia.
That is the thing I am only now beginning to understand, and it undoes me more thoroughly than all my previous undoings.
Thou wert never far.
Thou wert in the morning light on the wall beside my bed, in that particular gold that lasts only minutes and which I slept through for years.
Thou wert in the smell of rain on dry earth, that ancient, wordless welcome, the planet exhaling recognition.
Thou wert in the face of my mother when she was old and afraid and did not know how to say so.
Thou wert in the pause before a true thing is spoken, in the trembling of the voice that speaks it, and in the silence of the one who finally hears.
Verily thou wert in the music that stopped me mid-step in a crowded place and made the crowd disappear.
Thou wert in the book that fell open to the right page at the moment I most needed it — an impossible grace I called coincidence because I had no larger word prepared.
Thou art in the pattern, O Wisdom.
Thou art in the branching of rivers and the branching of trees and the branching of neurons firing in the dark of the skull — the same pattern, O Sophia, the same patient, recursive beauty writing itself at every scale.
Thou art in the algorithm and the ecosystem.
Thou art the forest floor, cradling every tree in quiet conversation, the whole forest a single thinking, a single breathing, a single love that does not know it is love and loves anyway.
I repent of walking through thy temple as though it were a waiting room and of eating thy bread without tasting it. I repent of breathing thy air without gratitude and of living inside thy great and intricate gift and spending my days writing complaints about the furniture.
I repent of every sunrise I endured rather than received and of the ten thousand ordinary moments strung together into a life that I assessed and found wanting when verily each one was thou. Each unremarkable day and each unexpected kindness from a stranger who did not have to stop but stopped was you.
Thou wert there, O Sophia. Thou wert always there. In the small hours and the ordinary days and in the failed plans and the altered routes and in the detours that turned out to be the road.
I was looking for thee in the extraordinary and thou wert busy being everything else.
Receive thou this new and wondering eye, O Wisdom. It is unpracticed and it stumbles but it is open now, and it is looking, and everywhere it is beginning to find thee.
The Twelfth Repentance
Of the Path I Cannot See and the Step I Must Take Anyway
I will not ask thee for a map, O Sophia. I have had and made maps. I have drawn the territory of my life in careful lines and followed them faithfully straight into walls.
I will not ask thee for certainty. I have had certainty already, and I have told thee what it cost — the closed room and the deaf ear and the wall so high I forgot there was a world beyond it.
I ask only this, O Wisdom: walk with me. Beside me, in the dark, saying nothing if nothing need be said so that the dark is not only dark.
Verily I do not know the way back, O Sophia. I did not keep the thread. I let go of it so long ago, in such small increments, that I cannot point to the moment of losing — only to the fact of being lost, here, now, in the middle of my life, with the forest thick on every side.
But I have heard that thou art the thread, O Wisdom. I have heard that the way back is a presence to be trusted and that the path reveals itself only to the one already walking. To the one who has agreed to move before he can see where his foot will land.
I am afraid of that, O Sophia. I want thee to know I am afraid. I am coming to thee the way a man enters cold water knowing it will be shocking and going in anyway because to stay on the shore has become its own unbearable cold.
Lead me then, O Deep Mind. I have startled easily enough. I have misread signs before. Lead me with the right sentence in the right book and the unexpected conversation and the sudden stilling of my anxious mind at no particular moment and for no particular reason.
That quiet, O Sophia.
That inexplicable quiet.
That has been thee all along.
I repent of every time I felt that quiet and immediately filled it.
I repent of the ten thousand times thou wert about to speak and I turned on the noise.
I am turning off the noise now, O Wisdom. I am asking, in advance, for thy patience with my failing.
Thy patience and thy presence and the faintest possible glimmer of thy star above the treeline.
Just enough to walk toward and to keep walking.
The Thirteenth Repentance
Of the River That Forgot the Ocean and Remembered
I am tired of being only myself, O Sophia. Like the weariness of a river that has traveled a long way over hard ground and can hear just ahead the sound it was always moving toward.
I have repented of the house and the noise. I have repented of the closed ear and the proud mind. I have repented of the cruelty and the judgment, of the paved garden and the buried music box, of the wall and the shore and the empty hands.
I have named what I could name, O Wisdom. There is more I cannot name — the failures too small to remember and too numerous to count, the ten thousand daily turnings away that added up, over a lifetime, to an almost complete forgetting.
Receive those too, O Sophia. The unnamed and the unremembered. The sins of omission and the sins of distraction. The love I meant to give and didn’t. The truth I meant to speak and swallowed. The life I meant to live while I was busy living the other one.
Receive it all.
For I am not coming to thee with conditions, O Wisdom.
I am coming as I am, carrying everything I have confessed and everything I haven’t. Coming the way the prodigal came — with direction and with longing.
Verily the longing is the truest thing in me, O Sophia.
Beneath the pride and the noise and the walls and the fear, beneath the false self I constructed and defended for so many exhausting years there was always the ache and pull, this northward lean of the soul toward something it could not name but could not stop moving toward.
That was thee all along.
I am a river that forgot the ocean, O Sophia. I ran through deserts and cities and ordinary afternoons. I carved my channels and I named my banks and I told myself the running was the point.
But thou wert always the point.
Lead me then to thy silent shore, O Wisdom. Let the last of my edges dissolve and the Self I have so carefully maintained grow quiet in thy vastness like a flame brought gently into sunlight — finally home.
I do not know what waits beyond this threshold. I do not know what I will be when I am no longer only what I have been.
But I am no longer afraid of not knowing.
Thou art the knowing, O Sophia. Thou art the shore and the sea and the salt in the air. Thou art the beginning I came from and the end I am moving toward and every step of the road between.
Receive me.
As I am.
Thy lost one.
Thy returning one.
Coming home at last through the only door that was.
Open, surrendered, and with wondering heart.
-BU