Soul Keeping Page 5

  Preacher Man. I begin a new job at a church. Another man on staff is a year younger, a musician who works in the worship area. He is a rock star. When he’s on the platform, the house goes crazy. When he leads a worship concert, the place is packed. When he finishes, people are on their feet applauding and stomping; they won’t let him stop. It’s all anyone can talk about. I am consumed with the realization that I wish it were me they were clapping for. I realize I’m working at a church. I’m aware of how ludicrous it is that my job is to teach people to follow somebody who said, “Die to yourself and follow me,” yet I’m jealous of someone because he’s better at calling people to die to themselves than I am. But those thoughts are still present, and I can’t wish them away. If I can shine brightly when I get my chance, I will feel better.

  I tell an acquaintance a story about a third person we both know that will put that person in a bad light. I get a twinge of pleasure out of this. I don’t know why.

  I count up how many dollars I have accumulated for something I want to buy. I don’t count up how many dollars I have accumulated to be able to give to people who are dying of hunger. I rarely think or feel guilty about this.

  I come home from a party. When we pull into the driveway, my wife puts her hand on my arm and says gently, “I noticed when we were with other people today, you didn’t look them in the eye very much. People love it when you look at them; it’s what made me begin to love you in the first place. I think you should work at it.”

  My first thought is: who died and made you body language queen? I am Swedish, my people are Swedish — we never look anyone in the eyes. Not even the eye doctor.

  I withdraw from her. I lean more toward my side of the car. I get quiet, polite, distant. You learn, when you are married, how to send signals that will register deep in the soul yet are subtle enough to offer plausible deniability.

  Then I think of how I told God I would like to be in training to love people better. I think of how I want to be remembered when I reach the end of my life. I would like to have looked deeply into many eyes; to connect deeply with many souls; to have people know that I noticed them and cared about them and actually loved them.

  Something in my heart turns and melts a little. And I say to my wife, “Thank you for telling me that. Thank you for having the courage to love me that much.” And somewhere in the universe something heals — and that something is a tiny little tear in my soul.

  These are the cries of the soul, including my own. All of them — and a million others — are real and are what matter deeply about us.

  “The most important thing about you,” Dallas would often say, “is not the things that you achieve; it is the person that you become.”

  A PARABLE OF THE SOUL

  Our problem is that this world does not teach us to pay attention to what matters. We circulate résumés that chronicle what we have accomplished, not who we have become. The advertisements we watch, the conversations we hold, the criteria by which we are judged, and the entertainment we consume all inflame our desire to change our situation, while God waits to redeem our souls.

  How does the world we live in keep us from attending to our souls?

  Jesus told a story about this. It’s of such importance that this story is the first of his recorded in the gospel of Mark and the one parable he fully interpreted to his disciples.

  It’s a story about seeds, a sower, and some soil. In a story like this one, it helps to notice what are the constants and what are the variables in order to understand Jesus’ point.

  The seed is a constant. This is not a good story about good seeds and bad seeds. The seed will take root given half a chance. The seed is a little picture of God’s desire and action to redeem souls.

  The sower is a constant. This isn’t a story about good sowers and bad sowers. The first thing we notice about him is how generous he is with the seed. He scatters it everywhere.

  It is the soil that gets interesting. The soil is the variable. And for “soil,” we might replace it with the word soul. The closed soul is death. The receptive soul is life.

  The Hardened Soul. Some seeds fall on the path, Jesus said. In the Middle East, conditions are already dry. The path is the place where farmers walk, where sheep make their way to water and grass. The path is hard and dry, and the seeds don’t have a chance.

  Souls get that way.

  Often these seeds are people who have been hurt or disappointed. They form a protective shell. They become cynical or bitter or suspicious. Often in the Scriptures these are brothers. Cain may have been the first hardened soul; his brother Abel had a sacrifice accepted by God, but his was not. Jacob is hardened against Esau. David is estranged from his brothers, and the same thing happens among his sons. Joseph’s brothers hardened against him because they saw that their father loved him and not them — they hated him. When he told them about his dreams, they hated him all the more. Their minds were filled with anger, their feelings were envious, their wills became hostile, and their hands betrayed him. Then they lied to their father; they rationalized their actions. Their hardened souls were lost.

  The world diverts my soul-attention when it encourages me to think of myself more as a victim than as a human. I am so wrapped up in the hurt I have received that I do not notice the hurt I inflict.

  I have a friend who has not spoken to her sister for fifteen years. They had a falling-out over their parents’ will, over a tiny amount of money. There are only two churches in town, so one of them had to become Episcopalian. They pray every week, “And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” (even though the Episcopalian had to switch “debts” to “transgressions”). But in a world where victimhood has become status, souls go unexamined for hardness.

  Sometimes the smallest acts of sacrifice or self-denial can break up hard soil. A friend of mine sent me a few sentences from an article she saw online on “How to Stay Christian in College”:

  . . . make small sacrifices. Make a vow to wake up and go to breakfast every morning, even if your first class isn’t until eleven a.m. Choose a plain cheese pizza rather than pepperoni. You’ll be surprised how these tiny sacrifices work an interior magic, shifting your focus ever so slightly away from yourself. Once you’re a little bit to the side, God can come to the center.

  Underneath the hardness is often fear. The fear of being rejected. The fear of looking foolish. The fear of being hurt. The fear of broken pride. But souls can be saved when the soil gets soft.

  It takes a little, just a tiny little bit of softness in the soil to give the seed a chance. The seed is strong — stronger than you can imagine. One tiny seed can break up a sidewalk if it can find a little room to breathe.

  The hardened soul is more vulnerable to being saved than it knows.

  The Shallow Soul. Some of the seed fell on rocky soil. The idea here is not that there was a bunch of rocks, but that there was only a thin layer of topsoil with solid rock underneath. The seed had life until the sun came out. But the life withers quickly, Jesus said, because the soil is too shallow for roots.

  The world conspires against our souls, keeping our lives superficial.

  “Superficiality,” said Richard Foster, “is the curse of our age.” The desperate need of the soul is not for intelligence, nor talent, nor yet excitement; just depth. This is the cry of one of the great soul songs of the Psalms: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you. . . . Why, my soul, are you downcast? . . . Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls.”

  The soul is the deepest part of you. It is so deep that there are parts to my soul I cannot seem to understand or control. This is why writers in the ancient world, not just in the Bible, would often address the soul in the third person, in a way they would never do with the will or the mind or the body. There is a depth to your soul that is beyond words.

  Nancy and I got married in California. Nancy was a California girl, but I wanted to bring joy to her soul, so for a surprise, I took h
er to Wisconsin for our honeymoon. It did not bring joy to her soul, so I saved up for twenty years, and for our anniversary we went to Australia. We went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. It is amazing! One moment you’re snorkeling in a few feet of water, and you see the reef. Then, when you go over the edge, it’s like going over a cliff. Literally you’re looking down — I don’t know — hundreds and hundreds, or even thousands of feet, into a bottomless abyss.

  Nancy is normally a very adventurous person, but going over that edge and staring down at the abyss actually scared her. She wanted to get back into the boat. I said to her, “I’ve been saving up for twenty years for this trip. You will not get into the boat. You will swim over the abyss.” She did not swim over the abyss. She got back into the boat.

  For our thirtieth anniversary, we are going back to Wisconsin.

  We used to have an argument about Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border. For years Nancy insisted that it was so deep that its depth could not be measured. I argued for the other side. One night we revisited this subject with great passion at a concert where the person sitting next to us happened to be an oceanographer. He interrupted us to tell us that in fact Lake Tahoe’s depth had been measured to the precise foot. It was a wonderful moment.

  But the soul has yet to be measured.

  For much of our lives, we live in the shallows. Then something happens — a crisis, a birth, a death — and we get this glimpse of tremendous depth. My soul becomes shallow when my interests and thoughts go no further than myself. A person should be deep because life itself is deep. A deep soul has the capacity to understand and empathize deeply with other people — not just himself. A deep soul notices and questions and doesn’t just go through the motions. A deep soul lives in conscious awareness of eternity, not simply today. It notices and observes and reflects in surprising ways — we talk about a person of “hidden depths.”

  A soul especially has depth when it is connected to God. His eternal existence, omniscience, and love are all beyond measure.

  My soul is downcast within me;

  therefore I will remember you. . . .

  Deep calls to deep

  in the roar of your waterfalls.

  To speak about depth means that there is more going on than what we see on the surface. To love deeply or care deeply or value deeply means we have devoted time and effort and thought. To suffer deeply means to be wounded at the soul level. “Depth” is an expression of spiritual vastness.

  In fact, one word in the Bible to describe an eternity without God is called in the Greek abussos. We get our word abyss from that. The soul without God for eternity is in an abyss. There is a depth to you that words cannot describe. In the great book of suffering, Job says, “I will speak out . . . in the bitterness of my soul” — from the depth of his being.

  This notion of depth is part of why the Bible speaks of the “soul of God.” Many people don’t know this, but there are more than twenty passages in the Bible that talk about God’s soul. God says to his people, “I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul will not reject you. I will also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be my people.” Everything God is stands behind this promise: “My soul will not reject you.”

  When Jesus was baptized, we are told, “A voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him, my soul is well pleased.’ ” God is speaking from the deepest place of his being.

  The world conspires against our souls by blinding us to the depth and glory of their God-given design and tempting us to be satisfied with immediate gratification.

  In high school, Steve was a wonderful football player. Hurting his knee in junior college, he dropped out, got married, and had a child. He never chose to defy God. He just drifted. It was easier to drink beer than work on his marriage, so he got divorced. It was easier to complain than to work with all his soul, so he lost his job. It was easier to avoid people who would challenge him to tend to his soul, so he hung out with people who would honor his desire for comfort above all. He lives with his son now. After being estranged for years, he is there only because he has nowhere else to go. He watches vast amounts of porn in his bedroom to pass the time. He has lost his health. He does not even take care of his body. He is waiting to die, and when he does, no one will mourn.

  But outside Steve’s bedroom door, if he only knew, his son waits for him to say one word of sorrow, or regret, or love. It takes a little, such a tiny little depth in the soil to give the seed a chance. The shallow soul is closer to being saved than it knows.

  The Cluttered Soul. Some seeds fall among thorns, which grow up and choke the plants. Jesus said that is the condition where the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth and the desire for other things come and choke the soul.

  Somebody said a long time ago that if the Devil can’t make you sin, he will make you busy, because either way your soul will shrivel. Our world will divert your soul’s attention because it is a cluttered world. And clutter is maybe the most dangerous result, because it’s so subtle.

  Once a Yuppie came to see Jesus. He believed in God, he led a respectable life, and he wanted to make sure he had covered all the bases. Jesus told him he was doing real well. The Yuppie was just about to walk away when Jesus mentioned, casually, that there was just one more small detail to be taken care of: “Go liquidate your assets, write out a check giving the whole enchilada to World Vision, then come and hang with me, and you will find that your soul has been saved.”

  The busy soul gets attached to the wrong things, because the soul is sticky. The Velcro of the soul is what Jesus calls “desire.” It could be desire for money, or it could simply be desire for “other things.”

  We mistake our clutter for life. If we cease to be busy, do we matter? A person preoccupied with externals — success, reputation, ceaseless activity, lifestyle, office gossip — may be dead internally and not even recognize it. And our world has lots of “other things.” You can get them from infomercials; you can buy them online; you can collect them in your garage and put them in your will.

  It takes a little, such a tiny little uncluttered space to give the seed some room to grow. The cluttered soul is closer to being saved than it knows.

  YOUR SOUL IS WAITING

  I bought my final can of bean-and-ballpark soup not long ago. When I was in high school, I made a friend — a soul friend — and during my first time at his house, his mom made lunch for us with bean-and-ballpark soup. It became a kind of sacramental meal for us; it was as bad as it sounds.

  The mother’s name was Betty, and she lived to be ninety years old. She never did anything extraordinary. She just raised four children. She just held her family together as her husband wrestled with manic-depressive disorder decade after decade, before there was medication, not knowing what she would come home to each day. She lived in the same small house in Rockford, Illinois, her whole life. She never traveled. She never bought an expensive dress or an upscale car.

  When she died, the chapel was packed. It was filled with lives that she had touched. It turns out that her house on Carolina Avenue, like that other house in Box Canyon, was one of the strange, small, unmarked outposts of a great soul. I brought a can of bean-and-ballpark soup with me to the funeral as a kind of final Last Supper to honor her soul.

  A soul can be saved. But it will take softness and depth and space. The world won’t help much.

  I have been waiting.

  I am shy — terribly shy — even in the most boisterous person. I can only whisper, never shout. You may never even notice me.

  But I am here, waiting.

  I do not lie on the surface. If you look and listen, patiently, you will know.

  I speak through your confusion, through your wanting, through your hurt. When you stammer, when you say what you did not mean to say, it was I. When you watch a sunset, or hear a child laugh, or listen to a piece of music that causes you to suddenly become choked up, it is I that causes your eye to fill. Whe
n you are addicted, it is I that is chained.

  When the sun burns up and the universe melts away, I will be here. Like Glenn Close in the movie Fatal Attraction, I will not be ignored. I can be wounded, lost, repulsed, or redeemed. Your circumstances actually matter far less to your happiness than you think. It is my health that makes your life heaven or hell.

  I am your soul. I am here.

  CHAPTER 4

  LOST SOULS

  I had grown up thinking I knew what a lost soul was, but now I was not so sure. Dallas said, “A ruined soul is a lost soul.” What is a lost soul? Just someone God is mad at? When is a person lost? Is anyone lost today?

  I had always thought that a lost soul referred to the soul’s destination, not its condition. But it’s the condition that is the real problem. If a car no longer works, it doesn’t matter much whether it ends up in a junkyard or the valet parking section of the Ritz-Carlton. We are not lost because we are going to wind up in the wrong place. We are going to wind up in the wrong place because we are lost.

  We live on the planet of lost souls.

  The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can’t admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality.

  Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will.