Descent of the Soul

Meaning

Mar 12

Written By Kevin H

The valleys everyone must pass through.

Kevin Ham, MD

The Last One Picked

I was usually one of the last ones picked.

I always felt so relieved when I was not the very last one picked. It meant I was more highly valued than at least one other person.

Last. That distinction belonged to someone else. And I was always grateful for it, as one is grateful for anything that distracts from obvious humiliation. But I was still late. The last of a handful of picks. The teams would form with the obvious stars first, down to those who seemingly didn’t matter.

I would apprehensively stand at the edge of that contracting pickup line, waiting. Tiny for my age. Just peeking over five feet in Grade 6. Quiet in a way that registered as invisible rather than deep. Easy to overlook.

I once fought the toughest kid at school. The biggest guy in Grade 5. Not because I was brave. Because something inside me wanted to show the others I was present. And the only language available for what I needed to say was physical. Words could not express the depths of my loneliness. I got him on the ground. A kid yelled, “Punch him!” I did. Right in the nose. He started to bleed. I got up and walked away. Afterward, the other kids looked at me differently, and that shift mattered more than the outcome. I could go up against the biggest and prevail.

Inside was not what the outside suggested. I had a creative spark inside of me that was insatiable. I was devouring Tolkien, reliving the Shire and the Mines of Moria with a completeness that left little room for the world requiring me to be smaller than I was. I was on that journey to Mount Mordor. I could visualize every scene. Peter Jackson did it almost as well as the visuals that played in my head. Then C.S. Lewis. The Narnia series. I did not know at the time that he was also a great philosopher. Then the Thomas Covenant series, which nobody else I knew had read, except my older brother Don, who introduced that and Terry Brooks’ elven series to me, which was precisely why I loved it: a leper, unclean, rejected, transported into a world where his very disease became a form of power. Then the Black Stallion. Then everything I could find. I was not reading to escape. I was reading to locate something I could not yet name. A self that the exterior world could not translate, but that I could feel the shape of, pressing outward from the inside.

The word I would have used, if I had known it then, was anointed. This word is special to me. Not in the religious sense. There was something in me that had been set apart before the setting apart had been made visible. The overlooking was not the verdict. The field was not the destination.

I did not know that word. But I found the men who did.

I David

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.”

Psalm 51, written after Nathan said: you are the man

My mother sent me to church with another Korean family with the same last name, Ham. I don’t recall much except that I had memorized some verses from the book of Proverbs and won a Bible as the prize. I read one of my favourite Bible stories, David and Goliath. The shepherd teenager who went against the giant and beat him. I found David the way you find something you had been looking for without knowing you were looking.

Here was a young boy who had been left in the field while his father presented the other sons before the prophet Samuel. The youngest, the smallest, the one not considered worth summoning until the prophet asked: Are these all of your children? And even then, David arrived covered in the smell of the field, ruddy and wild-eyed, not the picture of an anointed king.

This is the one, said the Lord.

The oil was poured. And David simply went back to the sheep.

What reached me was not the crown. It was the dozen or more years between the anointing and the crown. David returned to the same life he had lived before Samuel came. Anointed and unknown. Carrying an authority that had no external expression yet. Hunted through the wilderness by the king he served and would replace. Building an army out of men who had been cast out by the world and found him worth following. He was thirty years old before anyone outside his circle saw the fruits of the oil that had been poured.

I understood it then, not as theology, but that this pattern could also be in my life and everyone else’s, too. The field is not the failure. The obscurity is not the verdict. The anointing precedes the confirmation, sometimes by decades, sometimes a lifetime, and the work of the valley years is not to convince the world that the anointing is real. It is to become, through the pressing, the person capable of carrying what the anointing requires.

“You have shed much blood and have fought many wars. You are not to build a house for my Name, because you have shed much blood on the earth in my sight.”

1 Chronicles 22:8

But there is something anguishing in David’s story more than the valley years. The dream he longed for most, the longing that sat at the centre of his life like a fire that never doused, was to build a house of peace. The Temple. Jerusalem: the city of peace. He conquered the Jebusites, the last bastion and city, after centuries and rebuilt the city of David. He had the plans for the Temple. Glorious. Magnificent. Worthy of God. He had gathered the materials. He had devoted his life to making the kingdom secure enough that the Temple could stand.

Then God told him: You cannot build it. You have shed much blood. A man of war shall not build a house for my name.

There is no more heartbreaking sentence in the Hebrew Bible. Not because David was denied the Temple through failure. But because the very quality that made him great was precisely what disqualified him from the work his soul had been desiring his entire life. He was too good at the wrong thing. His greatest strength was the door the Lord closed. For peace, he had to go to war and shed blood.

When Nathan came with a different reckoning, the Bathsheba reckoning, David did not argue. Using power for deceit, adultery, dishonour, murder and evil. He said just five words, in remorse.

I have sinned against the Lord.

That instant recognition and humility is the priest-work still alive beneath everything, no matter how vile or grievous. His Psalm 51 became the language of confession for every generation that followed. The king-work was diminished by what he had done. The prophet-voice was deepened by what the valley stripped away.

I read the Psalms, all 150 of them, when I feel what I felt in that circle. Passed over. Misjudged. Or when I have sinned greatly. When I am late to be picked, or not picked, or pick myself and discover the self I have picked is smaller than the one I feel pressing from the inside. They do not resolve the feeling. They name it. Which is something more useful than resolution.

II Solomon

“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher. All is vanity. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and chasing after wind.”

Ecclesiastes 1, written at the end of everything

Solomon, the ‘illegitimate’ son of David, unlikely to be heir and king, did become king. He had the kingdom set up for him by his father. Anointed in David’s last days. He was so young that when God asked him at Gibeon what he wanted, he asked for wisdom to rule the people. And he got plenty of wisdom. More wisdom than anyone in history, a direct gift, in exchange for nothing. You can feel and read that wisdom in his Song of Songs, the most ecstatic love poem in any language, and in his three thousand Proverbs, aphorisms crystallized from a man who observed human nature and nature with an eternal eye. He built the Temple that David had been forbidden to build, and his writings on the vanity of life and its conclusion in Ecclesiastes. I ponder these books daily. I have a dream to inscribe them in my heart so I may have a heart of wisdom. But I wondered, how could someone so wise have become so foolish, especially when he had everything given to him?

I was foolish, so it was understandable, and so I seek wisdom, but once you have wisdom, can you become so foolish as to completely unclothe wisdom?

“He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.”

Deuteronomy 17:17. The law written for kings, before Solomon was born

Before any of it, God had given the kings four laws specifically for kings. Four prohibitions, each one a warning written in advance against the temptations specific to the man who sits on the throne. Do not multiply wives. Do not multiply horses. Do not multiply gold. Do not place your trust in foreign alliances above the Lord.

Solomon opened all four doors.

Seven hundred wives. Three hundred concubines. The Temple of the Lord and the altars of Moloch, the same man, the same city, the same life. The wisest man who ever lived warned specifically against his specific temptations, violating every warning systematically.

Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

I have built companies. I have assembled a kingdom, three hundred thousand premium domains bought during the dot-com bust while everyone else was fleeing. I have read Solomon’s reckoning, the way a man reads a story that could have been written about him. Not the wives. But the accumulation. The building of structures that kept the deepest question at a horizon’s distance. The way achievement, if you build enough of it, functions as insulation from the self that was anointed before the building began.

Solomon found his way back. At the end of Ecclesiastes, stripped of every layer, the thread he had buried under a thousand coverings became visible again. What he had known at Gibeon, before the wives and the horses and the gold: fear God and keep his commandments.

The descent made it recoverable. This is not consolation. It is architecture.

III Marcus Aurelius

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Meditations, written in a military tent on the Danube frontier, never intended to be read

I was introduced to Marcus Aurelius through a film.

Gladiator. 2000. Nominated for 12 Oscars, winning five. It blew me away. It was the evening I had just written my medical exams for my Medical Residency Certification, FRCP. I had the practicums the next day, but because I was building my Internet businesses at the same time, I thought that I would roll the dice. If I passed, I would continue in medicine. If not, I would continue being an entrepreneur. Surely I could not do both well.

I passed.

The old emperor at the edge of the screen, tired in a way that power cannot cure, gives Maximus a commission he knows cannot be kept. What struck me was not the tragedy. It was the face. The face of an aging man who has been required to live a life other than the one he was made for, and who has been living it with such sustained integrity that the requirement and the man have become indistinguishable, and who is still, somehow, the man underneath.

I later read Aurelius’ Meditations. I was not prepared for what I found. I should go back and reread it with new eyes.

This was not mere philosophy. This is a man talking to himself in a military tent on the Danube frontier, in the second person, as if the person he is addressing cannot quite be trusted to remain himself under war and politics. He writes the same principles many times. He is not working out a new thought. He is holding the thread against a current that continually pulls it downstream. Repetition is the cost of maintenance.

Marcus had wanted to be a philosopher. He had built an interior practice of extraordinary depth by his late twenties. Then the emperor died, and Marcus was emperor, and the life he had been building was over. Fourteen of his nineteen years on the throne were spent on the Danube frontier, managing wars necessary but not meaningful, watching his son Commodus developing year by year into the catastrophe he could foresee and could not prevent.

In the margins of the king-life, the priest-work survived. The Meditations were never meant to be read. Originally named Ta eis heauton ("to himself"). They are the private 12-book journal of a man striving to stay true to himself from the demanding life the world required of him. They have been read continuously for eighteen hundred years by people in exactly his situation: formed for one life, living another, trying to hold the thread.

The king-work of the Roman Empire is archaeology. The priest-work of the margins is alive.

The Oil and the Gap

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

Psalm 23:4

My mind always seeks to weave threads in the seemingly unrelated. The brain works this way. Neural networks. Logic on the left brain with creativity on the right. I found the oldest framework to connect these three men and many others, me and you as well: the ancient world had a name for the three offices every anointed life must pass through, and a name for the valley between them. The prophet. The priest. The king. In that order. Each requiring a ceremony before the work could begin. Each requiring the valley before the office could be inhabited.

Three different descents. Three different reasons for the crushing. The same discovery at the bottom: the thing you buried is still there. The oil does not evaporate during the years in the field. It waits.

There was an art teacher who handed back an assignment I had worked hard on and was proud of. I can’t even recall what it was anymore because, for me, it was a traumatic experience.

I was thirteen. I had drawn something I cared about. The grade? C+. Not failure: worse than failure. Failure, you can argue with. C+ is a verdict without appeal: you are here, slightly above mediocre, and that is all you will ever be.

I eliminated art and any subjective courses from my future selections when possible. I decided to focus on exact, objective courses: math and sciences. I became a doctor. Then, a man who built a kingdom where no one would ever be in a position to give me a C+ again.

What I did not know: you cannot remove an anointing. It remains dormant, much like shingles, the chicken pox virus that appears when you are weak. You can only forget it. You bury it deep in your soul. It’s buried in the field. But it arises in the dark. In the valley. Every patient attended to beyond the clinical. Every conversation that became more than business. Every time I reached past the kingdom toward the story underneath it. The drycleaning shop. The three hundred thousand domains. The cardiovascular scan on the wall. All of it pressing. All of its formation.

The olive must be crushed to yield oil. The pressing is essential to the oil’s production. It is the mechanism of production. The crushing is not the destruction of the olive. It is the fulfilment of the olive’s purpose. The oil was always there, latent in the fruit. The pressure does not create it. The pressure releases what was always present but had no way of expression.

I did not know this when I was the boy at the edge of the circle, waiting to be picked. I did not know it when I gave up on my dreams after the C+. I did not know it when I built the first company, or the second, or when I assembled a portfolio of three hundred thousand domains while the internet was collapsing around me and told myself that this was what I had been made for. You do not know it during the pressing. You only know it when the oil appears, and you recognize it, and you understand that it was there the whole time.

I am somewhere between Bethlehem and Hebron. Between the private ceremony and the public confirmation. Between the anointing and the crown. Forty years in the field is a long time pressing. I am beginning, now, to feel what it has done.

Which Descent Is Yours

“The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

Leo Tolstoy

Every person reading this is in one of these three descents.

The disqualification: the thing you long for most is what your life has made you unworthy to build.
The disobedience: the laws written specifically for you, warning you against your specific temptations.
The assignment: no fault, no drift, only the wrong life handed to the right person, and the question of whether the right life survives inside it.

The pattern is not coincidental. It is architectural. The spirit speaks first. The soul translates. The body builds. In that sequence, properly esteemed, the result outlasts the builder.

The valley is not punishment. It is the expression.

I do not know how this ends. Just as the other side of the summit cannot be seen from the valleys. I do not know what the crown looks like or whether I will recognize it when it comes. I do not know whether the books in my heart get written, whether companies become what I dream about, whether the musical playing in my heart manifests, or whether the cardiac scan in 2028 shows what I believe it will show. I do not know if the anointing I felt pressing outward from the inside at thirteen, in East Vancouver, in the line waiting to be picked, was the real thing or only the wish for it.

What I know is that the oil is not gone. That the pressing has a purpose. That Samuel came to Bethlehem looking for something the world had not confirmed yet, and found it in a field, and that the field is not the end of the story.

The dream did not die with the C+. It went into the field.

It is still there.

Prophet. Priest. King. In that order.

The spirit first. Always the spirit first.

Your Question and Your Assignment

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.”

Jeremiah 1:5

The Life Question

Which of the three descents is yours right now?

Not which one you prefer. Not which one is most exciting. Which one is actually operating in your life at this moment? The disqualification: the thing you long for most is precisely what your formation has made you unable to build yet. The disobedience: the laws written specifically for you, warning you against your specific weakness, and whether you are inside them or outside them. The assignment: the life you are living is not the life you were made for, and the question is whether the life you were made for is surviving inside it.

Write the answer down. One sentence. The descent has a name. Name it.

Three Applications

Find the buried thread. Every person reading this has buried something. A vocation, a longing, a creative life, a calling heard before the world had a category for it. The oil is not gone. Name the thing that was buried. Write it on a piece of paper and put it somewhere you will see it every morning for one week. You do not have to act on it yet. You only have to stop pretending it is not there.
Audit the laws written for you. Solomon had four specific prohibitions. Each one was a door his particular weakness would be tempted to open. You have your own four. They are probably not the same as Solomon’s, but they are equally specific and equally predictive. What are the four things that, if you allow them, will bury the thread? Write them. Post them. Not as shame but as intelligence. You are not weaker than Solomon. You are the same kind of person, facing the same kind of doors.
Do the priest-work in the margins. Marcus Aurelius kept his interior life alive in whatever margin the king-life left. Fifteen minutes in the morning. A journal entry on the commute. A walk without a podcast. The priest-work does not require a monastery. It requires a margin you can write on and the decision to protect it. Identify your margin. Name the time. Defend it the way you defend a meeting with someone you cannot afford to disappoint. Because you cannot. This newsletter is my margin. It pulls on the thread buried deep in the field. I am threading and weaving it through me to you.

There is someone in your life who is in one of these three descents.

You already know who it is. You thought of them while reading this.

Send it to them. It will take you ten seconds. It may matter for years.