Soul Keeping Page 4

  Dallas helped me understand what I have wondered over the years about the soul. It is the deepest part of you, and it is the whole person. This is so true that the word soul, in both the Old and New Testaments and elsewhere in the ancient world, is often simply a synonym for the person. Even in our day it is interesting how our language reflects this. Questions on airplane or ship records sometimes ask, “How many souls on board?” Most people have no idea where this comes from, but it traces its origins to the ancient world. For example, in Acts 27:37, Luke reports on a shipwreck involving the apostle Paul: “And we were all in the ship two hundred threescore and sixteen [276] souls.”

  Your soul is what integrates your will (your intentions), your mind (your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience), and your body (your face, body language, and actions) into a single life. A soul is healthy — well-ordered — when there is harmony between these three entities and God’s intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul.

  UNHEALTHY SOULS

  Therefore, according to Dallas, an unhealthy soul is one that experiences dis-integration, and sin always causes the disintegration of the soul. As Leonard Cohen put it, “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold, and it has overturned the order of the soul.” A few years ago I was asked to speak at the church of a pastor in the Deep South whose success had made him famous. Pictures of him with famous people and framed covers of his best-selling books lined his office walls. But now he was beyond the age when most people retire, his church was shrinking, his influence was waning, and he was miserable.

  When I met this pastor, he began to tell me how wrong his critics were, even though I hardly knew him or his critics. He chastised his people for not bringing enough visitors to fill the empty seats. “I’m tired of looking at empty seats,” he said, as if the goal of church is empty-seat avoidance. He had climbed to remarkable heights in church ministry, but his mind was preoccupied by bitter thoughts. His face attempted smiles that were disconnected from his feelings, and his will strained to maintain a façade that had been hollowed out long ago.

  His soul was dis-integrating.

  I thought of another man, a businessman who devoted his life to making money. His children always knew that they had less priority than his job. He never said so, of course, but our deepest devotions simply leak out of our bodies by how we spend our time and what makes us smile and what claims our energy. The man built a corporate empire, but his employees all felt used.

  He and his wife bought a magnificent home overlooking the ocean in Southern California. He had a stroke, yet no one came to visit him. He sits in a wheelchair now, breathing from an oxygen tank, alone in a mansion cage.

  He still obsesses over what he owns and remains incapable of gratitude or generosity.

  This is the ruined soul.

  When I think of that pastor and this businessman, I recall Jesus’ memorable words about the soul: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” I have always thought this verse meant that in the long run it won’t do you any good to acquire a lot of money and have a lot of sex and other sensual pleasures if you end up going to hell.

  When I mentioned that to Dallas, he gently corrected me: “That is not what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not talking here about people going to hell.”

  He explained that Jesus is talking about a diagnosis, not a destination. If we think of hell as a torture chamber and heaven as a pleasure factory, we will never understand Jesus’ point. For the ruined soul — that is, where the will and the mind and the body are disintegrated, disconnected from God, and living at odds with the way God made life in the universe to run — acquiring the whole world could not even produce satisfaction, let alone meaning and goodness.

  To lose my soul means I no longer have a healthy center that organizes and guides my life. I am a car without a steering wheel. It doesn’t matter how fast I can go, because I am a crash waiting to happen.

  Farmers in the Midwest used to run a rope from their house to the barn at the first sight of a blizzard. They knew stories of people who had died in their own yards during a whiteout because they couldn’t find their way home. Parker Palmer writes that the “blizzard of the world” is the fear and frenzy and deceit and indifference to the suffering of others that separates us from our own souls and our moral bearings. What we need, he said, is a rope from the back door to the barn so we can find our way home again. “When we catch sight of the soul, we can survive the blizzard without losing our hope or our way.”

  You don’t have to believe the Bible to believe this. Just look around you.

  A mom struggles to create the perfect home. Her husband does not help much. She doesn’t tell him how much she resents it, mostly because she’s always been afraid of conflict. She is angry at her children for not being perfect, for not being on track to get into the right school, for not making her look good as a mom. She is angry at her body for aging; feeling attractive has been the one unforced sense of worth in her life, and it is ebbing away. She withdraws. She drinks a little too much. She gossips with her friends about her other friends. She finds ways to fill time.

  She thinks that her problem is her husband, or her kids, or her age, but it’s not. It is her soul.

  I don’t mean to be unkind. Only God knows, with any given individual, what battles they may have fought with addiction or biology or abuse or simply temptations that I have never known. The point is that what Jesus said is true: gaining the outside world doesn’t help you if your inside world collapses. Look at me. Look at you.

  We live on the planet of lost souls. That is the human problem. It is not some superficial thing that only relates to getting the right afterlife if you affirm the right doctrines. It has to do with the depth of the human condition, which Jesus identified as nobody else ever has.

  THE NEGLECTED SOUL DOESN’T GO AWAY; IT GOES AWRY

  Our world has replaced the word soul with the word self, and they are not the same thing. The more we focus on our selves, the more we neglect our souls.

  The word psychologist comes from the Greek word psyche, which actually means “soul.” That ought to be what psychology is about, apart from what anyone thinks about religion. Sigmund Freud wrote that “Treatment of the psyche means . . . treatment of the soul. One could also understand it to mean treatment of sickness when it occurs in the life of the soul.”

  But psychology has focused on the self, and self carries a totally different connotation than soul. To focus on my soul means to look at my life under the care and connection of God. To focus on myself apart from God means losing awareness of what matters most.

  The Journal of the American Medical Association cited a study that indicates that in the twentieth century, people who lived in each generation were three times more likely to experience depression than folks in the generation before them. Despite the rise of the mental health profession, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to depression. Why? Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it’s because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That’s the self. We’re all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves.

  Ironically, the more obsessed we are with our selves, the more we neglect our souls.

  All of our language reflects this. If you’re empty, you need to fulfill yourself. If you’re stressed, learn how to take care of yourself. If you’re on a job interview, you have to believe in yourself. If you’re at the tattoo parlor, you must learn to express yourself. If someone dares to criticize you, you have to love yourself. If you’re not getting your own way, you have to stand up for yourself. What should you do on a date? You ought to be yourself.

  What if your self is a train wreck? What do you do then?

  Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves. T
he soul always exists before God. So soul is needed for deep art, poetry, and music. Former opera singer Scott Flaherty said it best: “I mean, when you sing you’re giving voice to your soul.” Imagine singing, “Then sings my self, my Savior God to thee,” or “Jesus, lover of my self.” Innately we know that the self is not the soul, even as we do everything we can to preserve it.

  ATTENDING TO THE SOUL

  Every now and then I try to get away to the ocean and spend most of a day alone. It’s a strange thing I don’t fully understand. I have a lot of people in my life who love me and will tell me so, but when I am alone for an extended period of time, all the obligations and expectations and need to perform kind of melt from my mind. I am reminded when I’m alone that God loves me — that there is something about life that is infinitely deeper than all the expectations and roles and performance stuff of my outer life. It changes my body. I can feel it. My soul feels its worth.

  You are only able to live in a way that really helps and loves others when your soul feels its worth. Yet we often pay far more attention to our work or our bodies or our finances than to our souls. But the soul is what we will take into eternity.

  Attending to the soul doesn’t mean we neglect those practical things like career or health. The soul lies at the center of them all. It means I don’t simply ask, “How can I be more successful in my work?” or “How can I acquire more money?” Instead, I learn to understand how my involvement in each area of life is marking my soul.

  In fact, your soul can be all right when everything in your world is all wrong. Consider these marvelous words from Peter to a little flock: “Though you have not seen him [Jesus], you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

  The salvation of your soul is not just about where you go when you die. The word salvation means healing or deliverance at the deepest level of who we are in the care of God through the presence of Jesus. Sooner or later, your world will fall apart. What will matter then is the soul you have constructed.

  Horatio Spafford invested most of what he had in real estate. He lived in Chicago and lost everything in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It destroyed his home. They had no insurance. He lost most of his money. In 1873 he put his wife and their four daughters (their son having died of scarlet fever in 1870) on a ship heading to England as he stayed behind to restimulate his business. A few days after the ship departed, he received a telegram from his wife: “Saved alone. What shall I do?” There had been a shipwreck. All four of their daughters perished. Horatio quickly boarded another ship to England, and as it passed over the very same place in the ocean where his daughters had drowned, he wrote these words to as song:

  When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

  When sorrows like sea billows roll;

  Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,

  It is well, it is well with my soul.

  When Dallas and I left Chili’s, it had stopped snowing. On our way home, I sang that song with Dallas. Many years later, on another voyage, in his home in Box Canyon, we would sing it again.

  So what makes it well with my soul?

  CHAPTER 3

  A SOUL-CHALLENGED WORLD

  I am interviewing Dallas at an event called Catalyst West. The church world has its own subculture of events and rhythms and networks. If you are a young leader in that world, you know of a conference called Catalyst, a gathering begun several years ago in Atlanta that exploded so in popularity that a West Coast version was needed a few years later.

  This one is taking place in Irvine, California. Thousands of young pastors and wanna-be pastors and musicians and artists are in a room with fog machines and lighting artistry and sound systems that make it kind of a twenty-first-century, evangelical, indoors Woodstock. I feel like I am the oldest person in the room, culturally if not chronologically (Dallas being twenty years older than I). Dallas wears a jacket and tie. It is for him — the boy who could not afford socks in college — a gesture of respect for his audience. No one else in the room wears a tie. No one else in the room owns a tie. No one else in the room would know how to tie a tie.

  On the stage I ask Dallas questions about ministry. His response: “What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.”

  Huh?

  He speaks of eternity, and how the soul is formed, and how temptation works, and why sin is so destructive. He speaks of the slow, unglamorous building of character. I worry about how this is going. Other speakers at this event speak with great passion, while Dallas speaks in the cultivated monotone of an academic. Other speakers tell dramatic stories of radical devotion and hellish suffering, but Dallas tells no stories at all.

  When he is done, the whole crowd of twenty-something, tattooed clergy dudes leap to their feet. Dallas is presented with a kind of Lifetime Achievement Award. They cheer as if he’s Jack Nicholson at the Oscars. I am at a loss to account for this response. And then it occurs to me:

  The soul searches for a father.

  SOUL-DAMAGED LIVING IN A SOUL-CHALLENGED WORLD

  Consider these vignettes from people trying to survive:

  Success Man. When I was young, I had finished college and started life. I was married; I had children. I got a job as a financial analyst for an investment firm in Manhattan. I monitored the world. Currencies were my specialty: I would place bets on when the yen was going up and when the euro was going down. I had monitors that kept me in touch with every time zone every hour of the day. My cell was on vibrate twenty-four hours a day, because a window can open and close at any time.

  My boss was a remarkable man — one of the inventors of the hedge fund, which can enable investors to make money on anything whether the price goes up or down. Everybody who worked in the firm was twenty years younger than he was. We would sometimes sleep on cots in our offices to be able to pull the trigger on deals in a heartbeat. I got more money for Christmas bonuses than my dad ever dreamed of making in a lifetime.

  My family lived in an apartment not far from Central Park. The kids went to a private school we could barely afford. We bought a place in the suburbs that we could escape to on weekends. I would wake up at 5:00 a.m. and start a coffee IV and live on adrenaline all day. My wife did most of the day-to-day stuff with the kids; we had a kind of Inside/Outside arrangement where I was Mr. Outside. I had only one secret.

  I heard voices. One voice actually. It came at random. I could never make out what it was saying. Whenever it spoke, something else was going on, or someone else was making noise, or I was on my way somewhere.

  It bothered me, but I could not figure it out. When I would be still to try to catch it, I heard nothing. It was like footsteps behind a character in a movie; as soon as the character stops to see if they really are footsteps, the footsteps stop too.

  One day, when I got home from work, I heard it clearly.

  I am your soul. And I am dying.

  I did not hear it again for many years.

  Not-So-Successful Woman. I am in a seventh-grade algebra class, sitting next to a boy who is smarter than me. During a test, I sneak a look at his paper. Not enough to get caught — once or twice, enough to help me move up to an A-minus. I don’t really think about whether or not I deserve this grade, or if what I am doing is fair to other students. I know that if I get a good grade, I will be happy and my parents will be proud. I dimly tell myself that because I really did study, and because most of the questions I answer myself, it’s not really cheating. I have done this before. Outside of the risk of getting caught, it doesn’t really bother me.

  I am playing in the finals of a tennis tournament. I come to the net, and my opponent hits a lob over my head. I call it out, though it was not. There is an umpire at the net who doesn’t initiate calls, but is available to arbitrate. My opponent trusts me; she doesn’t question my call.
The umpire, whom I know, looks at me after the point. Does he know? I feel queasy. Is it because I cheated, or because I think he knows? How much better would I feel if I had simply cheated and no one had noticed? How much worse would I feel if everyone knew — not just that the call was wrong, but that I had done it deliberately?

  My mother and my father achieved so much that I could never compete. I was never the pretty one, or the smart one, or the talented one; I just filled out the family roster. Now I am married, but my marriage brings me little pleasure. My husband is as committed to his career as he is passive at home. I want to scream at him sometimes because anything would be better than his shallowness and silence. I tried teaching, but don’t do it well. I have tried writing, but every rejection from every publisher is so painful that I can’t bring myself to risk it again.

  I work at a job I do not like that does not challenge me, and I feel buried. My two daughters struggle with not being liked by boys and not having the right appearance. When I see other parents at school or at church with children who look successful and happy, for whom life and school and athletics come easily, I find myself feeling furious with them and with God and myself. I am not an alcoholic, but I look forward to three glasses of wine at night so I can finally feel relief from this knot in my gut. I do not expect that my life will ever be any different.

  Famous Man. One of the most successful television shows of all-time recorded its final episode. Its star, Ray Romano, had ridden its popularity from struggling stand-up comedy to fabulous wealth and staggering fame. He lived in his parents’ basement until he was twenty-nine years old; by the end of his sitcom’s run he had become the highest paid actor per episode in television history. After filming the last show, he stood before the studio audience and reviewed how his life had changed and who he had become. When he had moved to New York nine years earlier, he said, his big brother Richard had tucked a note into his luggage. Ray read it, in tears, to the audience: “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”