Soul Keeping Read online

  I was nervous when I knocked on the door, but Dallas was a difficult person to remain nervous around. “Hello, Brother John,” he said, and somehow I felt immediately accepted into a little circle of belonging. He invited me in and offered me a glass of iced tea, then sat down on his favorite chair across from an old sofa.

  Dallas was larger than I had pictured, because I had not known that he had played forward on his college basketball team. His hair was wavy and steel-gray; he wore glasses; his clothes suggested that he had long ago mastered Jesus’ suggestion: “Do not worry about what you should wear.” When Dallas met his future wife, Jane, in a small religious school called Tennessee Temple, she noticed he did not wear socks and assumed it was because he was a rebel; she did not know it was actually because he couldn’t afford them.

  His appearance was unremarkable except for two things. His voice had the faint suggestion of British precision that all philosophers seem to pick up, but it also carried the touch of the Missouri hills. On the thinker/feeler scale, Dallas was almost pure thinker, but there were times when in speaking or praying, his voice had a tremulous note that suggested a heart that was nearly bursting over some unseen wonder.

  The other remarkable characteristic of his body was how unhurried it was. Someone said of him once, “I’d like to live in his time zone.” I suppose if the house was on fire, he would have moved quickly to get out of it, but his face and the movements of his body all seemed to say that he had no place else to go and nothing in particular to worry about.

  Many years later I had moved to Chicago. Entering into a very busy season of ministry, I called Dallas to ask him what I needed to do to stay spiritually healthy. I pictured him sitting in that room as we talked. There was a long pause — with Dallas there was nearly always a long pause — and then he said slowly, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” I quickly wrote that down. Most people take notes with Dallas; I have even seen his wife take notes, which my wife rarely does with me.

  “Okay, Dallas,” I responded. “I’ve got that one. Now what other spiritual nuggets do you have for me? I don’t have a lot of time, and I want to get all the spiritual wisdom from you that I can.”

  “There is nothing else,” he said, generously acting as if he did not notice my impatience. “Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

  As I sipped my iced tea at that first meeting, Dallas asked me about my family and my work. The phone rang — this was before cell phones and answering machines — and he did not answer it. He didn’t even look as if he wanted to answer it. He just went on talking with me as if there were no phone ringing, as if he actually wanted to talk with me more than to answer the telephone, even though it might be someone important. I had the odd sensation (I have talked to many others since then who have noticed the same thing) of having my own heart rate begin to slow down to match his.

  The house fit him. Dallas grew up in the Great Depression in a part of rural Missouri that did not have electricity until he was eighteen years old. When he was age two, his mother died. Her final words to her husband were, “Keep eternity before the children.” As a two-year-old boy, Dallas tried to climb inside the casket to be next to his mother’s body. Since there was not enough money to keep the family together, Dallas was passed from one relative to another until he graduated from high school. Despite these circumstances, he was president of his senior class — all eleven members.

  I began by asking him the questions that I thought were why I had come: How is it that people change; what makes change so hard; what does it mean exactly to say that human beings have souls, and why do souls matter? Why is it that I lead a church full of people who believe the right things about God and even read the Bible and pray, but don’t seem to actually change much? Why don’t I seem to change much?

  He began to talk, and as he spoke, I couldn’t help but think that he was the smartest man I had ever met. Many years later, when he was very sick, Nancy and I would spend a day packing up some of his books in a garage near his home. His primary library was in that home; his secondary library was in another home next door that he and Jane bought many years ago to catch the overflow; his tertiary library was at USC. We packed up more than one hundred boxes of books from his quaternary library, in that garage: books in Latin and German and Greek; books from the world’s greatest minds and from backwoods country preachers. I tease sometimes that I never got in an argument with Dallas because I was afraid he would prove I don’t exist.

  Yet Dallas never made me feel stupid. I was dimly aware, as I talked to him, how badly I wanted to impress him with how smart I was, and how I couldn’t turn that little “impress him” switch off in my mind even if I wanted to. Somebody said that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

  Nevertheless, something about Dallas was so safe that I found myself offering unsolicited confessions. “I can’t even talk without trying to sound impressive.” I wanted to impress him, yet at the same time, I was ashamed of that wanting and knew life would be better without it, and that somehow this was a smart guy whose identity was not in his IQ.

  Toward the end of one of his philosophy classes a student raised an objection that was both insulting toward Dallas and clearly wrong. Instead of correcting him, Dallas gently said that this would be a good place to end the class for the day. Afterward, a friend approached Dallas: “Why did you let him get away with that? Why didn’t you demolish him?” Dallas replied, “I was practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.”

  So, “Yes,” Dallas said in response to my confession. “Being right is actually a very hard burden to be able to carry gracefully and humbly. That’s why nobody likes to sit next to the kid in class who’s right all the time. One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.”

  Huh?

  Over the years, that’s the question I most frequently posed to Dallas. “Huh?” Sometimes we would speak together publicly, and my main job was to ask the same questions for others that I asked when it was just the two of us having a conversation.

  “Hell is just the best God can do for some people.”

  Huh?

  “I’m quite sure God will let everybody into heaven that can possibly stand it.”

  Huh?

  “Your eternal destiny is not cosmic retirement; it is to be part of a tremendously creative project, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast scale, with ever-increasing cycles of fruitfulness and enjoyment — that is the prophetic vision which ‘eye has not seen and ear has not heard.’ ”

  Huh?

  Sentences would come out of Dallas that simply couldn’t come out of anyone else, and then he would leave them in your mind like little time-delay bombs for you to deal with when they go off.

  I found myself moving from polite questions about church and ideas to the personal. That little house in Box Canyon began to change from a classroom into a confessional: Why is it so hard for me to love the actual people in my church? Why is it that I know I want to love my children, but I seem to be driven to be a success — especially in a vocation supposedly calling people to die to their need to be successful? Why do I get jealous of other pastors who are more successful than I am? Why am I never satisfied? Why do I feel a deep, secret loneliness? Why is it that I have a PhD in clinical psychology and a master of divinity and work as a pastor and yet I’m not sure who I am?

  “The most important thing in your life,” Dallas said, “is not what you do; it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity. You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.”

  Huh?

  “You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. That’s the most important thing for you to know about you. You should write that down. You should repeat it regularly. Brother John, you think you have
to be someplace else or accomplish something more to find peace. But it’s right here. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are. Your soul is not just something that lives on after your body dies. It’s the most important thing about you. It is your life.”

  Long pause.

  When I thought about how my life was going, I always thought about my outer world. It is the world of reputation and appearance. It consists of how much I have and of what people think. It is visible and obvious. In my outer world, it is easy to keep score. I always thought that improving the circumstances of my outer world is what makes me feel happy inside.

  But this was an invitation to another world — what Gordon MacDonald would call a “private world.” It is unseen, unknown, hidden. It would garner no applause. It could be chaotic and dark and disordered, and no one might know. This house belonging to Dallas was where I would go to learn about this secret world.

  It was a humble house, sweltering in the heat with an ancient air conditioner, piled high with books and papers and a few old pieces of furniture. The sign was invisible, and it would take years before I could read it: “Ye who enter here, enter upon holy ground.” Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, and Love had a home in Box Canyon after all.

  Dallas once wrote about a tiny child who crept into his father’s bedroom to sleep. In the dark, knowing his father was present was enough to take away his sense of aloneness. “Is your face turned toward me, Father?” he would ask. “Yes,” his father replied. “My face is turned toward you.” Only then could the child go to sleep.

  Over the years I sought Dallas’s wisdom to help me understand the human soul, and in this book I will share what I have learned. But I did not really just want to know about any soul. I wanted to know that my soul is not alone. I wanted to know that a face is turned toward it.

  That’s the journey we will take together.

  PART 1

  WHAT THE SOUL IS

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SOUL NOBODY KNOWS

  One of the most important words in the Bible is soul. We throw that word around a lot, but if someone were to ask you to explain exactly what the word soul means, what would you say?

  • Why should I pay attention to my soul?

  • Hasn’t science disproven its existence?

  • Isn’t the soul the province of robe-wearing, herbal-tea drinkers?

  • Isn’t “soul-saving” old-fashioned language that ignores concerns for holistic justice?

  • Won’t it mean preoccupation with navel-gazing? Will I have to go to Big Sur or look some stranger in the eyes? Will I have to journal?

  Belief in the soul is ubiquitous: “Most people, at most times, in most places, at most ages, have believed that human beings have some kind of souls.” We know it matters. We suspect it’s important. But we’re not sure what it means.

  It’s the word that won’t go away, even though it is used less and less.

  From birth to our final resting place (“May God rest his soul”), the soul is our earliest companion and our ultimate concern. The word is ethereal, mysterious, and deep. And a little spooky. (“All Souls’ Day” comes two days after Halloween and has always sounded to me like disembodied spirits floating around at the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland.)

  How many of our children learned this prayer? How many times have you recited it at bedtime?

  Now I lay me down to sleep,

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I should die before I wake,

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  Is it just me, or are those scary words to teach a seven-year-old to pray alone in the dark? I guess it’s not just me: “That [prayer] so, so did not work for me. . . ,” wrote Anne Lamott. “Don’t be taking my soul. You leave my soul right here, in my fifty-pound body.”

  What does it mean to ask God “my soul to keep”? If I expire before sunrise, and he takes my soul, what exactly is it that gets taken?

  HOW MUCH DOES A SOUL WEIGH?

  Jeffrey Boyd is a kind of Don Quixote of the soul. He is a Yale psychiatrist, an ordained minister, and coauthor of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a work in which you will search in vain for a single reference to “soul.” It does include something called “depersonalization disorder,” a feeling of estrangement from oneself. But Boyd also writes books and articles trying to reinject the word soul into our scientific vocabulary.

  In one study of hundreds of church attenders, Boyd found that most people believe they know what soul means, but when asked to explain it, they can’t do it. The soul turns out to be like Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart’s description of obscenity: “It may be hard to define, but I know it when I see it.” About half of church attenders adopt what Boyd calls the Looney Tunes Theory of the soul:

  If Daffy Duck were blown up with dynamite, then there would be a transparent image of Daffy Duck that would float up from the dead body. The translucent image would have wings and carry a harp. From the air this apparition would speak down to Bugs Bunny, who set off the dynamite.

  It sounds funny to talk about cartoons when it comes to the soul, but as Aristotle said, “The soul never thinks without a picture.”

  The soul can’t be put under a microscope or studied by X-ray. About a hundred years ago a doctor measured the slight weight loss experienced by seven tuberculosis victims at the moment of death, which led him to claim that the soul weighs twenty-one grams. His idea years later created a title for a movie with Sean Penn and Robin Wright, but it was never duplicated and was widely ridiculed in the medical community. Some are convinced that soul language needs to go.

  A philosopher named Owen Flanagan says there is no place in science for the notion of a soul: “Desouling is the primary operation of the scientific image.”

  But Boyd argues that we see people who have a strength of soul that simply will not be degraded by the humiliation their body puts them through. He writes of a woman named Patricia who suffered from the effects of diabetes, a heart attack, and two strokes; she went blind, went into renal failure (which required dialysis), and had both her legs amputated — all while only in her thirties. She was placed in a nursing home, except for those several times a year when she had to be hospitalized, frequently going into a coma for one or two weeks during those stays.

  Pat was part of a church in Washington, D.C., that wanted to create a homeless shelter. They could not find anyone with the leadership skills to pull it off, so she volunteered. In between dialysis and amputations and comas, she pulled together the team and got the zoning changes, architectural help, and fund-raising done. She then helped the team figure out the rules for the homeless people who used the shelter, and she recruited and trained the staff who ran it.

  When Pat died after the shelter’s first successful year in operation, homeless people stood next to U.S. Cabinet members such as Secretary of State James Baker at her funeral.

  The soul knows a glory that the body cannot rob. In some ways, in some cases, the more the body revolts, the more the soul shines through. People may claim to believe that all you are is your body. But Pat said one time, “The only thing I can depend on with my body is that it will fail me. Somehow my body is mine, but it’s not ‘me.’ ”

  Greatness of soul is available to people who do not have the luxury of being ecstatic about the condition and appearance of their bodies.

  THE HIGH AND THE LOW OF THE SOUL

  We can’t seem to talk about beauty or art without talking about the soul — particularly music. Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul. It is possible that if your soul isn’t moved by Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Little Richard, Fats Domino, or James Brown, you may want to check to make sure you still have one. Kid Rock wrote “Rebel Soul.” A sixteen-year-old, wanna-be pop singer named Jewel hitchhiked to Mexico and watched desperate people looking for help and wrote what would become her breakthrough song: “Who Will Save Your Soul?”

  We need the word when we speak of not jus
t the highest, but also the lowest parts of human existence. Over one hundred years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois called his book about the oppressed humanity of a race The Souls of Black Folk. No other word would do: The Selves of Black Folk does not carry the same dignity. “Soul food” would be the name given for Southern cooking that began with slaves who had to survive on whatever leftovers they were given. “Soul power” became the name for a sense of dignity and worth in a people who had been forced to live with neither. “Soul brother” reflects the bond that knits together those persecuted because of skin color.

  Does soul require suffering to make itself known?

  We speak of larger entities having soul. During every election, politicians and pundits warn us that the soul of America is at stake. ServiceMaster CEO William Pollard wrote a leadership book called The Soul of the Firm. (Can a cleaning company have a soul?) Shortstop and team captain Derek Jeter has been given the title “soul of the Yankees.” Quarterback Tom Brady deemed receiver Wes Walker the “soul” of the New England Patriots. These may be metaphors, but they point to the notion of the soul as that which holds a larger entity together.

  Why do the Chicago Cubs never get a soul?

  SOUL FOR SALE

  We speak of the soul as a source of strength, and yet we speak of it as fragile. Something about the soul always seems to be at risk. A soul is something that can be lost or sold. The selling of a soul has been made into countless operas, books, and country music lyrics, as well as a movie called Bedazzled and a musical called Damn Yankees. Jonathon Moulton, a New Hampshire brigadier general in the 1700s, sold his soul to the Devil (according to legend) to have his boots filled with gold coins monthly when he hung them by the fireplace. In the television series The Simpsons, Homer sells his soul for a donut and then impulsively eats all but one bite, which he puts in the refrigerator with the instructions: “Soul Donut. Do Not Eat.”

  Periodically somebody tries to sell their soul on eBay. Most recently a woman named Lori N. offered hers for $2,000 after a car accident left her strapped for cash. No takers, though. It turns out eBay has a “no soul-selling” policy that allows them to stay neutral on the existence of souls: If souls don’t exist, they don’t allow the selling of nonexistent items; if souls do exist, they don’t allow people to sell themselves off one part at a time. The real problem, they say, is that if you sell something on eBay, you have to be in position to deliver what you sell. If you could buy a soul through anybody, it would probably be Ikea — Swedes will sell pretty much anything — but then you would have to take it home and assemble it yourself from instructions that make no sense at all.