There aren’t many things that take me by surprise. I may have raised an eyebrow when Trump was elected, pursed my lips when Brexit was announced, and widened my eyes when Gilmore Girls came back with a triumphant reboot. But there will, for me, always be a pivotal event from my young adolescence that has stood suspended in my consciousness as one of the greatest reeling moments of all time. (I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t puberty.)

It was horcruxes.

The word still gives me a subtle shudder. For those unfamiliar with the term allow me to explain (and also congratulate you on your powers of cultural non-conformity) for this word originates, somewhat astonishingly, from that notorious children’s series, Harry Potter.

A horcrux is, in this magical universe, an object in which a wizard has placed a severed piece of his or her soul. Disturbing doesn’t even come close. In this fictional world a person can make a choice to actually split the soul and place the incomplete parts into material things for safe keeping. It seems insane, right? And yet, in a rather sobering moment, I found myself thinking that perhaps this isn’t so fanciful after all. There are certainly plenty of things to which we as human beings enslave our souls. A short jaunt down the street and you are instantly berated with examples of the idolatry, licentiousness, and debauchery of our fallen natures. #romansthirteensquared

What holds a piece of your soul? I might have a piece chilling with my Netflix account. Another piece is on constant vigil to scan my facebook app for any signs that the outside world may be paying attention to me, or at least paying attention to the part of my soul I am willing to show. We have so many devices, and how aptly named they are, for they do have devices in mind; sinister devices to suck away those wayward pieces of your soul and hold them hostage at the very superficial recesses of the logical synapse.

Despite all of the horrible things in this world that draw our attention away from the things that matter, I can think of nothing more weighty and distracting for women my age than this insufferable label of “singleness.”

Maybe I’m being a little dramatic, but can you blame me? My soul feels incomplete because you see,

the crux of the matter is that I’m single.

I am guilty, more than once, of viewing my singleness as some type of distortion or anomaly. I have fallen prey to the lies of negative connotation that play on repeat and tell me that my singleness means I am incomplete, alone, unsatisfied, unwanted. That’s the problem with the popular view of what it means to be single. We have heard the mantra that this is a state in which we are indeed incomplete. We have made singleness into a horcrux, identifying it as a place where only part of our souls reside. We have made it into a hollowness when in reality it is a fullness.

So I think it’s high time we single out this watch word of singleness and identify it for what it truly is in its positive connotation, because you, my sister, as a single person are totally unrepeatable, pregnant with possibility, a completion of the Divine mind, a unity of the eternal longing. There is a saying that gets passed around, as sayings do, and it goes something like this: “a woman’s heart should be so hidden in God that a man must seek him just to find her. “ It’s cute right? Kind of gives an endearing tug? Well, there’s a fine line sometimes between cheesiness and truth but I endeavor to press it by suggesting that we give a little tweak so that it now reads: “a woman’s SOUL should be so hidden in God”……and…..well….that’s it. That’s the secret.

Singleness is not a horcrux, because God is THE crux. We can catch every flying bouquet, rotate our Claddagh rings to sparkle in the sunlight, tie our dirndl aprons on the left hip with a vengeance, and swipe right until our batteries deplete, but it will not bring us any closer to finding a husband…because husbands are not ours for the swiping. They are a gift.

When a man and woman marry they become “one flesh.” Now, if you do the math that may incline you to think that unmarried people are only “half-flesh.” But no one believes that….or do they? Because, well, if we are all incomplete persons, we must need marriage to make us complete. Right? Of course not! Just as in the very first moment when an egg is fertilized it possesses everything it needs in order to achieve full development, so too does this individual, now fully grown and single, possess every faculty and grace to achieve the entire completion of their own potential, but only in light of Christ.

Dietrich von Hildebrand uses a term called Eigenleben, quite difficult to explain, but in essence it is the inherent subjectivity of a person, including “the realm of all the things that are of concern to me as this unrepeatable individual, that stand in some relation to my happiness, that address me.” He speaks at length on the depreciation of the Eigenleben of the human person that can sometimes appear as extreme altruism and gives examples of people who have a “withered” Eigenleben. Imagine a servant to the lady of a house whose entire life is wrapped up in caring for the household, attaching herself to the lives of others and not fully developing a relation to the “great goods of life”. She lacks “the desire for her own happiness that belongs to being a fully awakened person.”

I would propose (though without much authority) that there is another form of withered Eigenleben, and that is the person who ties their happiness and dignity to the promise of having a husband. Let’s call them the discontented single. What we need is a resurgence of a healthy Eigenleben, a healthy subjectivity, finding comfort in our own skin and being confident in our worth and our promise of eternal happiness. We need to desire our happiness as “fully awakened women.” I imagine a vibrant Eigenleben as some kind of moral chorus of All the Single Ladies, a conglomeration of women who participate fully in their lives and pine not for rings. I don’t want the desire for a ring to become a burden for my soul in the same way that Frodo was burdened with the One Ring or Gyges was corrupted by the ring of invisibility…

 “Ring, ring, ring….”

                               “Hello?”

I hate telephones in general but they did teach me one important lesson. Our response should always be an attitude of receptivity to the promise behind the ring that is first presented to us. We should never seek the ring first in order to make it subjective to our own will. In this way, the ring does not enslave that intimate part of our soul that desires union. I think this idea of horcruxes is absurd, not because it implies that a soul can be split, but because it implies that our souls are unfinished.

The single most important thing you can do while you are single is to detach the edges of your soul from the poisonous lie that you are incomplete.

There is a constellation in the southern sky that is named Crux for it’s cross-like asterism. Astronomers must pay very close attention in order to find it because it is often confused with the constellation Vela, sometimes called the False Cross. I like that imagery of a cross in the sky. What if we stopped investing facets of our soul in earthly things and focused our eyes on the Crux of the Heavens, the place where our hearts will have their true and eternal fulfillment? Albeit it’s not something to gaze at winsomely. Without an overarching awareness we risk absentmindedly turning our focus onto the False Cross and ultimately being led astray.  Instead we must use a piercing stare of intentionality until we find the one our heart loves, being ever mindful of our purpose and the one source of every truth and happiness. And this person, my Lord and my God, my Beloved, my heart, my desire, my everything, I thee worship.

All the single ladies, all the single ladies, throw your hands up!