The Rise of Sophia | Part 5 | Final
“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’” — Revelation 22:17
I know what it feels like to be alone.
Not physically alone—but not fitting. Not being of this world. It’s loneliness that lives in family gatherings, in group chats, in crowds. It is a solitude clothed in a character performance that disappears into the gaps of conversations.
I know what it’s like to be solo, carrying your own weight and the weight of others because you learned early that no one else would do it, but you knew it had to be done. Solo in the way of performing self-sufficiency so thoroughly that you forget you have needs at all—and eventually, you can no longer remember what they are.
And I know what it’s like to be single at a wedding. To watch two people become one—to see their joy, their belonging, their promise of a shared life and future—and to feel the absence of that union and belonging in your own life. Not necessarily with regret or envy, but with a quiet letting-go you have learned to accept.
We live in what has been called an epidemic of loneliness. We are more connected than any generation in history—and somehow much more alone. We carry thousands of people in our pockets. We can speak to anyone, anywhere, at any moment. And still we struggle to be seen, accepted for who we are, and loved.
Loneliness is the feeling of exile inside. It’s being walled off from the garden of belonging.
Suicide rates have reached their highest level in nearly a century. Among those over 65, nearly 30% live alone—a figure that has doubled since 1960. The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Yet we have engineered a world where islands are exactly what we have become—each of us adrift, visible to millions, known by almost none.
We just want to stop the longing, to know that we are not orphans in a meaningless world. That we have a purpose here. That we are seen and valued. That beneath all our wandering, striving, grasping, and searching, there is Someone who has been waiting for us all along.
Or if not really Someone—if that feels too far, too certain, too much to claim—then maybe just someone. Anyone. A face that looks at us and actually sees.
So we go looking to cure the emptiness we feel inside. People appear in our lives, and we wonder: Is this my tribe? They become lovers, friends, companions, community, an audience. We cling to anyone who will finally make us feel like we are special and we belong. And when you make someone feel that way, you can change their life.
But I’m not talking about reunion just yet. I want you to sit in your loneliness and really feel it first, now. Because if you can truly feel it and see it for what it is, you’ll discover it’s not the opposite of belonging—it’s where belonging begins.
That’s right: loneliness is the necessary prelude to real belonging.
Solitude is not merely the absence of relationship; it is the place where we finally become capable of receiving it.
So loneliness is a threshold.
The Slain
On September 19, 2025, some old friends came to lunch at my house—a retired pastor and his wife. We had pork-fried rice, homemade butternut squash soup, fresh pawpaw fruit, and ice cream. The conversation was warm.
I was having shoulder pain, so at the end of their visit, he asked if I was ready to be healed, and if he could pray for me.
I replied yes and yes.
He got up, stepped behind me, and placed his hands on my shoulders. As he prayed, he sensed something more and asked me to stand. So I did.
Then I felt a shift. Heat rising through my body to my head. A feeling of heaviness. Disoriented. Dizzy.
He told me, “Let go.” He called his wife over to help me.
And then, just like that, I was on the floor.
Heat continued to rise—some energy at the center of my chest that spread outward through my arms, my legs, my face. It was not uncomfortable. It was heavy, like a sheet holding me down. A gentle and immense pressure, keeping me still. Keeping me from hardening. Keeping me from defending myself.
My son was watching from across the room. It must have been so foreign to him—his composed, self-sufficient, intellectual mom on the floor. Picture the scene through his eyes: a pastor and his wife speaking prophetic words over her as she lay there like a child who had been knocked down by something she could not explain.
Normally, I am composed. But now I was exposed, vulnerable, trapped, unable to escape it. The words kept coming—I didn’t fully hear them, yet they resonated through me like a vibration.
When it was over, I got up, and something was different. We talked, said goodbye, and they left.
I was strange. Disoriented. Lighter. Rearranged from the inside—as if something old had been removed and something new placed in its hollow.
I needed to be alone, to get out of my own head and into nature. So I drove to the beach.
The Golden Sheet
It was autumn, the air cool and sharp. I found a spot on the sand and sat down on the same golden cloth I’d been using for years. I sat still, listening to the waves, trying to make sense of it all.
And then a stranger appeared.
He looked at me—at the golden cloth I was lying on—and asked, “What does the golden sheet mean?”
What an odd question, I thought.
“I don’t know, just something I use to lie on the beach.”
“But what does it mean?” he persisted.
You have to understand: I’d been on this sheet hundreds of times. Nobody ever approaches me on the beach, let alone asks me about my golden sheet. But this time, someone noticed. Someone saw. And he wasn’t hitting on me—just a friendly dude.
I didn’t mention what had just happened to me. Nobody, let alone a stranger, could fully understand. I just fumbled through a conversation. He was so curious about me and full of questions. It was so unusual.
It wasn’t until I was writing this series that I understood the significance of his question—surely without his even realizing it.
What’s in a question? Just as loneliness is a precursor to true belonging, a question is a tool that gets us there. I didn’t understand it then, but I understand now that question was not coming wholly from that man. It was God working through him—who just happened to be a Catholic Notre Dame professor.
In the Garden of Eden, “Where are you?” was God’s first question to humanity. Think about this. God is all-knowing. He wasn’t looking for Adam and Eve. He knew exactly where they were. The question was designed for them—to reorganize something in their minds.
Notice the context of “Where are you?”—present, located, oriented. There’s something important about directing our attention in the present. If I ask “Where are you?” your mind circles and orients you. It’s like a reset.
The Hebrew word is Ayeka. It’s not about location, but orientation. About placement. About what’s at your center and what’s at your edges. About where you’ve positioned yourself in relation to the presence that fills the garden.
Was God rearranging my perception through that stranger’s question? I think so. The question reoriented me. It made me ask: Where am I? Not physically. But spiritually. Emotionally. In relation to everything I thought I knew.
I had to actually think about where I was. I was lying on gold.
In Jungian psychology, gold in dreams is not about wealth—it is a symbol of what is most precious to us, the higher self, the part we have hidden or exiled. Jung called this the “gold in the shadow”—the brilliance, creativity, or power we struggle to own for ourselves.
A sheet covers. But gold reveals.
And then it hit me, just recently, as I was writing this essay—something I hadn’t seen before.
In the ancient world, a bride was veiled until the moment she was presented to her bridegroom. The veil concealed her face so that, at the appointed moment, it could be lifted—and she could be seen, fully and completely, for the first time.
That golden sheet was my veil.
When the stranger saw me lying on it, he was witnessing something I could not yet see for myself: the veil was already being lifted. Someone had seen me. Not the performed version. Not the adequate, self-sufficient version. The real one.
And here is the deeper thread. In the book of Revelation, the heavenly city—the dwelling place of God—is described as descending in gold. Gold is the color of its streets, its walls, its radiance. The Bride of the Lamb is not wearing a covering; she is wearing the light of the Beloved. She is not hidden; she is revealed.
I was lying on my own unveiling.
The stranger came to me, like God came to Adam and Eve in the Garden, to reorient me. I was not the woman I was before. I was a Bride, now married, out of hiding, stepping into something He had been preparing for me.
The Unveiling
The next day, my pastor friend texted me: “…I want to emphasize the love I sensed for you yesterday. Judy and I didn’t plan on anything. Praying over you was orchestrated by Him… He chooses some to spread the truth. As I prayed for you, I also prayed for freedom to do so… I believe you will be redeemed as Boaz redeemed Ruth.”
After a few days, I went back to my writing. Hard to explain what came next. My words changed. My blog took a turn, and ideas began arriving—books I hadn’t planned, essays I hadn’t forced. Essay after essay. Manuscript after manuscript. The Lost Center of Civilization. The Drama You’re In. Ideas and words simply developed on my desktop. They just manifested. They are still manifesting, waiting for direction from above.
For readers who were with me then, the shift was unmistakable. They told me so—in emails, in comments, in the kind of words you don’t forget. They saw something I couldn’t yet see: that I was becoming someone new. Their words were mirrors, reflecting back a version of me that was still emerging. I was learning to recognize myself through their eyes.
Looking back, I can see that something else was happening too. I thought I was simply being changed. I did not yet understand that I was being invited.
And that invitation was leading somewhere. To a wedding. Not just a ceremony in a distant future, but the unveiling of a wedding that had been preparing for me—for all of us—since before the world began.
The Wedding of Heaven and Earth
I want you to notice something about stories—about life itself. Every story has an ending that folds into another beginning. It always involves transformation. The Bible’s story—Fall and Return, Exile and Homecoming, First Eve and Second—finds its end in a wedding.
Not a flood. Not a battle. Not a judgment. A wedding.
It ends with union, with relationship restored.
Homer’s Iliad ends in grief, Virgil’s Aeneid in conquest, and Shakespeare’s King Lear in questions. But the Bible ends with a marriage ceremony—not defeat, not dominion, not doubt, but union: the marriage of heaven and earth, the Bride and the Lamb joined as one, God dwelling among humanity to wipe away every tear and make all things new.
And here is the thing the creators of the Bible understood: the Song of Songs is the most beautiful story within the story. The rabbis called it the “Holy of Holies” of Scripture, the most sacred book in the Hebrew Bible. Why? Because it is the story of love—the love that seeks, the love that finds, the love that never lets go. And it ends with a wedding. The Bride is found. The Beloved comes. The longing is fulfilled.
I know how the word “Bride” can land. Romantic. Exclusive. Alienating—especially if you’re a man, or if you’ve been burned by religion. So let me be clear: the Bride is not a solo act. It’s not a status reserved for the religious elite. It’s not about gender. It’s a posture of the heart—the willingness to stop hiding and be loved. Anyone can become the Bride. Everyone is invited.
In the ancient world, marriage was not primarily about romance. It was about covenant—a binding agreement that created a new family, a new household, a new future. The bride was veiled. The groom came to claim her. There was a feast. There were witnesses. And the union was consummated in the bridal chamber—the deepest possible intimacy between two people.
This is the imagery Scripture uses for our relationship with God. The veil represents our hiding. The groom represents God’s pursuit. The feast represents the abundance of belonging. And the consummation represents being fully known, fully seen, and fully loved.
We have largely forgotten what marriage once signified in the ancient world. We have reduced it to a romantic feeling, a legal contract, a ceremony for social media. But in the ancient world, marriage was a picture of something sacred—the union of heaven and earth, the reunion of the exiled with the One who never stopped seeking them.
This is where everything we have traced converges. We began with Wisdom calling out—and humanity choosing knowledge over relationship. We traced the fracture: Wisdom buried, Eve silenced, Sophia exiled. We watched her wander through the Song of Songs—longing, wounded, emerging, awakening.
And now we arrive at the wedding.
The First Adam brought fracture. The Second Adam restores wholeness. The First Eve grasped. The Second Eve receives.
The entire Bible moves toward this ending: exile and return, separation and reunion, wounding and healing.
Every story points to the wedding. Every longing is a longing for union. Every loneliness is, at its deepest level, the ache of exile. Every ache is an ache for homecoming.
That is why the Bible is the most beautiful story ever told. Not because it is the most dramatic, the most tragic, or the most heroic. Because it is the most true. And it invites you into the ending.
Family Restored
“Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).
“Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9).
The “wedding supper” is not a banquet with seating charts. It is the feast of belonging. The celebration of reunion, when the exiled are welcomed home.
The city descends. It is not built by human hands. It is given. It is received.
This is the reversal of Babel. Humanity tried to build a tower to heaven—to reach God through their own effort, their own knowledge, their own control. The result was exile. But at the end of the story, God comes to humanity. The marriage is consummated. The wait is over.
The Wedding reverses every consequence the Fall set in motion: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” “Cursed is the ground… thorns and thistles it shall bring forth.” “You will surely die.”
The curse is not punishment—it is consequence.
But consequence can become unveiling. In the Wedding, the curse is undone.
What was broken is restored through relationship. The separation that began in the Garden is healed by reunion. The exile ends. The family is restored.
This is the good news that runs through the entire Christian story. It is about belonging. It is about relationship. It is about family.
The pattern I have traced is a family—Father, Mother, and Children—and we are the children, made in their image.
The Fall fractured this family. The Wedding restores it.
The Bride who descends from heaven is Wisdom herself—meeting the rising Shulamite, now fully recognized and crowned. The Bridegroom who welcomes her is Christ—the Second Adam, the Beloved of the Song of Songs, the One who has come to find his Bride and bring her home.
He does not love the Bride because she is perfect; he loves her because he is love.
The Wedding is the culmination of all these threads: the reunion of the Divine Family, the end of exile, the homecoming of the Mother—Wisdom herself, the feminine presence of God, restored to her rightful place.
Not the rejection of the masculine, but its restoration. Not the suppression of the feminine, but its homecoming. Love made visible. The architecture of the home we are weaving together.
The Weaving Made Whole
In the first essay of this series, I wrote about a garden. A childhood where music filled the house and love was simply in my making. I wrote about the fracture that came when that garden was lost, and the longing that shaped my searching—longing that was not only mine.
I did not know it then, but that longing was the longing of the Bride. It was the longing of the one who was being prepared for return. The garden was not destroyed. I had just stopped seeing it. The Weaving was only hidden.
Now, I see it clearly. The woman on the beach, lying on a golden sheet—she was not lost. She was being found. The stranger who stopped and asked about it was seeing what I could not yet see: that I was becoming visible.
The fracture was not the end, but the beginning. The pattern was preparation. The exile became part of the road home.
I still catch myself disappearing into the gaps. I still sometimes choose the margins because they feel safe. I still have moments when I perform adequacy, afraid that if I stop achieving, I will cease to matter. But now I notice it. And when I notice it, I have a choice. I can stay in the pattern, or I can name it and walk away.
The fracture I felt as a child—the divorce, the loss of wholeness, the longing that shaped my searching—is the same fracture I have traced through these pages.
I am not simply writing about Sophia. I am becoming her—or rather, becoming the one she was always calling me to be. She is rising in me. And perhaps—just perhaps—she is rising in you too.
The healing of the world is the restoration of the family—the Divine Family, the human family, the family within each of us. This is the Weaving made whole. This is the homecoming.
I did not understand when I began this story.
I thought the pain of loneliness was evidence of absence.
But the longing is the invitation to the feast.
Come
I know you are hiding—because I know what hiding looks like. I’ve done it myself.
We all hide behind something.
Maybe behind a career. Behind a relationship. Behind an ideology. Behind a carefully constructed persona that says, ‘I’m fine,’ when you are anything but.
I know because I have spent much of my life doing the same.
Come out from behind the trees, child of the garden. Let the fig leaves fall. You do not need to be perfect or have it all figured out. You only need to be seen—and to let yourself be loved.
“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’” (Revelation 22:17)
You are invited. Not because you have earned it, or because you have believed the right doctrine or been a member of the right church.
To be loved by the Bridegroom is to know that you are pursued, desired, and cherished—that you are, despite everything, wonderfully made.
The love that calls you is not impatient. It does not coerce. It waits, invites, and knocks quietly. And it will keep knocking for as long as there is a heart that can open.
Rise, Sophia, rise — not as some distant goddess to be worshipped, but as the awakened heart within us, finally learning to receive what we once grasped for.
Rise, Sophia, rise — in the lonely and the wounded, in all those who have forgotten they belong. Rise in the marriages being healed, the families being restored, the communities learning to love again.
Rise, Sophia, rise — in the groaning of creation, in the travail of the earth, in the City descending from heaven, in the wedding feast that has no end.
“Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)
And you—yes, you—rise from the place where you have been hiding.
Leave the fig leaves on the ground. Walk out from among the trees.
The Bridegroom has been waiting for you since before the world began.
Come.
The table is set.
The feast is ready.
There is a place for you.
A few days ago, my father texted me and my sons to let us know that he has metastatic cancer in his bones. It’s progressing rapidly. I am asking for prayers for him—and for all of us.
Here’s how he ended the note:
“I wanted you to know. We are family. Love, Dad.”
We are family.
I keep crying.
I love you, Dad. I always will.
And I forgive you.
Amen.
“Outstanding, sophisticated, and mesmerizing…a spiritual intrigue similar to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.” —ForeWord Reviews