The Vale of Soul-Making
Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making” Then you will find out the use of the world
—John Keats, 1819
After graduating with a degree in English literature, I found myself working as a tailoring manager for a small company that sold missionary suits. Every day, I used a small razor blade to split pants open by the seams, pulling on the running stitch until the pant legs fell open in my lap. I made careful chalk lines where the pant legs needed to be hemmed or marked out new lines for the legs to be tapered in. Rip, mark, stitch, press, steam, bag, check out. Repeat.
Having worked as a tailor years before, I was what some might call highly proficient. My current tasks, though, were simple enough to do almost without thinking. The methodical, tactile motions kept my hands busy while my mind was free to drift, granting me time and room to think.
I thought about pain. It had taken me ten years from start to finish to complete my undergraduate degree, including two years of dropping out of school completely—all of this amidst relentless physical pain, which I still battle daily. I attended every class, took every exam, and wrote every paper with a constant headache that resisted any kind of treatment—a medical anomaly for the dozens of doctors I had seen.
I thought about what pain was for, the ways in which it came into our bodies and minds and went out of them. I thought about what I was doing with mine. I thought about pain’s paradoxical utility: If it is meant to lead us to greater compassion towards the pain of others or to help us grow, why must it be so debilitating? It seemed to extinguish all of my energy, leaving little fuel behind for ministering to others or for pursuing the things that its refining had supposedly prepared me for.
In many cases, the pain we bear is not so physical. A few years prior, a significant and harrowing family trauma had caused deep mental wounds that now felt more like the slightly gnarled and pink traces of scars—sealed but not yet invisible. As I was finally closing in on the end of my educational marathon, a close family friend called with news that shattered my world in an instant. I learned that my mother had been hospitalized following a brutal attack that nearly took her life. Living on the other side of the country, I couldn’t see her in person right away, but the graphic photos of her in the hospital forced me to reconcile with the reality of what had happened and the darkness that is possible in this world. That event, and the spiritual rupture which attended it, led me into frequent dissociation, deep loneliness, and unreachable isolation.
In my prayers during that time, I asked God if he could still hear me.
A few years later as I sat working, endlessly plucking squiggled threads out of missionary pants, a scripture that had come to mean more to me over the past few years felt ever present:
In the world, ye shall have tribulation (John 16:33).
The verse continues with the well-known, often repeated message from the Savior to “be of good cheer,” as he promises, “I have overcome the world.” But the first part of this verse, the Savior’s reminder that pain and suffering will inevitably be a part of this world, somehow grounds me in a different kind of comfort and significance.
The Savior knew better than anyone that we inhabit a blighted star. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy writes the story of a young country girl, Tess, who suffers acutely from the injustices of life caused by the cruelties and negligence of the men around her and her family’s desperate circumstances. One night during a wagon ride, Tess and her younger brother Abraham ponder their fortunes while looking up at the stars. Trying to make sense of the world and their place in it, Abraham asks Tess:
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
As stated in the Pearl of Great Price, our world is also a star among many:
And I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God (Abr. 3:2).
By virtue of God’s plan of redemption, our world was destined to fall. Living on this blighted star often leaves us feeling that we’ve somehow contracted its nature by contagion, slowly losing our innocence and the safety of the presence of God, which Adam and Eve left behind in the garden long ago. In the Book of Mormon, we learn that “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy” (2 Ne. 2:25). This scripture is often quoted to remind us that our purpose here on Earth is to experience joy, but the verses just above it also teach us that such joy is impossible without first knowing pain. Without the fall, Adam and Eve “would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin” (2 Ne. 2:23).
In the “wisdom of him who knoweth all things” (2 Ne. 2:24) and as a consequence of living in a fallen world, our joy is often tempered with its equal measure of misery. Despite the promise of Christ’s Resurrection and the possibility of returning again to God’s presence, the struggling soul may still pleadingly ask: What is the pain for?
No stranger to pain himself, the poet John Keats suffered from tuberculosis, a bacterial infection that eventually took his life at the young age of twenty-five. Although Keats rejected organized religion, he maintained a strong, sustaining belief in the divinity of human nature. In an 1819 letter to his brother and sister-in-law, Keats offers incredible insights on what he believed the use of the world was. He wrote that he objected to the Christian notion of life as a “vale of tears” as both “misguided and superstitious.” To him, the idea that we pass through this life of suffering only to be redeemed at the end by “a certain [arbitrary] interposition of God and taken to Heaven” rang hollow. He preferred to call the world instead “the vale of Soul-making,” offering a purpose behind our pain.
For Keats, there is a distinct difference between a “Soul” and an “Intelligence”: There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.
Keats uses the term “intelligences” to indicate individual spiritual beings, much like the scriptures in the Pearl of Great Price describe the spirits in the premortal realm. In Abraham 3:22, we read:
Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones;
Keats continues, considering how an Intelligence can then eventually become a Soul: “How then are Souls to be made? . . . How, but by the medium of a world like this?”
Following Keats’s logic, life on our blighted star is the means by which we can transform from mere Intelligences into Souls. This concept of the world as a place of testing aligns with the continuation of Abraham 3 and its discussion of intelligences:
And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell;
And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them (Abr. 3:24–25).
For Keats, without traversing the perils of a blighted star, an Intelligence can never become “personally itself.” Mortality is how we gain our identity, and it is through the refining experience of pain that we become a Soul and for the first time, truly ourselves.
Like Keats, American psychologist William James also recognized the transformative power of suffering to bring souls to a knowledge of the divine and the unification of their divided selves. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James compares what he calls the religion of the once-born consciousness with the religion of twice-born consciousness. Those of the once-born consciousness, the “healthy-minded,” are content to remain with their beliefs in God as they are; their faith has never been pushed to its brink by deep suffering. For some, the system of the once-born is adequate, “but it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes.”
Those of a twice-born consciousness represent a deeper understanding of what it is to be human than the “healthy-minded” can, having first fought through the darkness of what James describes as the “sick soul.” For those who wade through physical, spiritual, or psychological afflictions, it can feel as though “the sun has left [their] heaven”:
The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold.
Those of this twice-born consciousness, however, learn something crucial that those of the once-born consciousness have not: They know what the pain is for. Through the process of conversion, James writes: “a self hitherto divided . . . becomes unified and consciously right[,] superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities.”
James’s idea of the necessity of suffering to gain true and lasting conversion relates well to Keats’s discussion of a “World of Pains.” Calling the world “a School,” Keats writes:
Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!
Like Keats, James also concludes that the “evil facts” of life “may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” Cast out of the garden and the presence of God, only the “sick soul” who has experienced the emptiness of a world without him knows what it truly means to fight desperately for the light again and find it.
