As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
These things I remember
as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
under the protection of the Mighty One
with shouts of joy and praise
among the festive throng.
Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
(Psalm 42:1-5)
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. (Deut. 6:4,5; Mark 12:30)
The goal of loving with our hearts, minds, and strength is to drill down and touch the eternal place where our souls rest in God, rather than remaining on the surface of our lives through emotivism, intellectualism, or frenetic activity. As we pierce the surface of life to encounter and embrace our soul, our true self in God, our whole person becomes the best sort of apocalyptic event, the place where resurrection manifests. We cannot experience resurrection life if we judge our hearts, mind, and strength by conventional means in the world outside ourselves. Integration only happens at the soul-level, as we recognize we are not even the culmination of our thoughts, feelings, or actions; but what we have been taught makes us “us” is united by something deeper than them all.
By prioritizing our love for God, we see the degree to which we have experienced resurrection in how we love our neighbor. The soul, the true self resting in God, is untouchable by the hands of humans. Who are our enemies if they cannot disrupt our souls? How might we feel life happening around us, how might which think about the world, how might we offer our energies to the world if we have been set free by this truth?
What is the soul? The modernist era has decried the existence of a soul by reducing reality to only what we can measure empirically, as if humans are in totality bags of meat that have chemical reactions in their brains that make them react to the world around them. A significant contribution to the meaning crisis in the West is our denial of the existence of the soul - there is no inherent purpose to life, no essential Truth that guides and animates us. The rises in addiction, depression and anxiety, and suicidality are symptoms of what happens when we are told there is no soul and life does not have significance beyond what we can manufacture for ourselves. We see the void created by removing language about God and the soul filled in by Nietzsche’s “will to power” or Freud’s “pleasure principle”, causing massive pain and anguish in the human family.
The soul binds together the three ways of seeing - how we take in the world around us, and what we put back out into the world. I want to offer you two seemingly incongruous images of the soul’s relationship to the rest of the human person. It is natural for us to prefer that our analogies and metaphors have a sense of cohesion among them, but I have found that paradoxes, or creative tensions, actually facilitate the kind of understanding that pushes us beyond the bounds of conventional thinking into true mystery.
Psalm 42 is a magnificent poem that helps us grasp the idea that the soul is what is deepest and truest in us. We can trace a few of the key images here to get a sense of how the Sons of Korah envisioned the soul:
“As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?” The soul is the engine of human desire that is attuned to what we crave most - union with God. It is the aspect of the human person most attuned to the Presence. Even as our hearts, minds, and bodies are tossed back and forth by the waves, our souls act as a spiritual compass pointing us to what truly matters.
“These things I remember as I pour out my soul…” We are not passively connected to our souls; we engage in practices that help up draw up our deepest desires, much as we might draw up water from beneath the earth in a well. The soul is untapped potential, hidden from the world beyond the boundaries of our person.
“My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you…” Our souls are searching for equilibrium, a sense of “home”. When we are unmoored from our true source, it disturbs us on the deepest level of existence, and no amount of surface solutions that engage the heart, mind, or body will satisfy.
“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” Perhaps the most poignant imagery for this view, the soul is the deepest part of us. It is the base note for our humanity, the thing that radiates out and is expressed through the heart as the seat of emotions and expression of desires, the mind as the interpretive faculty of a person, and the body as the material landscape of self.
The water metaphor is especially profound when understanding the soul when we consider the ocean. Living in Florida, I have been to the ocean many times and seen it’s many forms - still and glassy on a cool night, rhythmic and insistent on a hot Saturday morning, tumultuous and dangerous in the midst of a hurricane. Yet what we perceive from the beach is barely the whole. The truth is that the majority of the ocean is further out and farther down. The deepest places are not subject to the changing temperature of the sun or the squall of storms, but a place of quiet and stillness. Our soul, the Deep of us, cries out to the Deep of God. Like a sunken ship, we are saturated with the love of God in the depths; the ship cannot contain the ocean, but the depths of the ocean contain the ship.
Saint Brendan was one of the original twelve apostles of Ireland in the sixth century. Best known as “The Navigator”, Brendan’s mission took him to sea many times to establish monasteries in the Aran Islands, Britain, and France. He is always portrayed in a ship, often with an accompanying sea monster or whale that becomes central to his myth. Well-acquainted with the poetic language of seafaring, Brendan offers us this prayer:
"Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.
Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You."
Amen.
Yet this understanding of the soul has its limitations. It can become quite easy to fall into a sort of gnostic dualism that assumes our soul is our true self divorced from our other faculties, that our physical attributes are corrupt and temporal. The idea of the “souless body” comes from the writings of Plato, not the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Greek philosophical outlook, as beautiful as it was and continues to be, had no conception of incarnation or resurrection, pivotal concepts for us in the Christian household. Rather than a view of God Who blesses physical reality with spiritual significance, Platonic dualism envisaged an escape from the physical to attain the spiritual.
In many streams of Christianity we see this play out in an eschatological vision of heaven in which the material world is burned away and our souls are transported off to some other place to be with God, rather than the Biblical vision of a whole world redeemed from the cosmic scale right down to the individual person that has been shattered by sin and death. Salvation becomes an escape from the confines of the material world rather than a redemption of all creation, atom by atom.
In worldviews beyond the Christian one we witness this dualism about the “true self” as well, in such a way as we can change or throw away parts of who we are to attain enlightenment. Silicon Valley types are often possessed by the transhumanist ideas that we can transcend the decaying body and death itself in order to attain a disembodied immortality. One of the more contentious underlying premises of the current gender debate is the difference between sex as a biological category that can and should be overcome, and a “gendered soul” that is a person’s true essence. In this line of thinking, essence supersedes the mistaken or misaligned physical attributes of biology as the true self caught in a lie, and biological reality must be edited to match essence reality.
This is why I find the creative tension with a second understanding of the soul to be corrective. Rather than seeing reality as corrupt physicality and perfect spirituality in contest, we can think in terms of invisible and visible intertwined. This is more akin to what we call sacramental theology, which offers us visible signs of invisible grace.
Saint Hildegard, a German saint in the twelfth century, tells us that “the body is in the soul, not the soul in the body.” This challenges the Platonic notion that the soul is the really real part of us because it carries on even after we die, the philosophical inheritance many of us in the West carry without realizing it. If the visual representation of the first analogy is the soul as the foundation of self upon which the other human faculties are built and bound together, then for the second we can imagine the soul as a container that wraps around the heart, mind, and body. This image is one of unifying the parts of ourselves that have been ruptured by evil - like the liquid gold the Japanese artist uses to repair a broken vessel in the Kintsugi tradition, the soul in union with God repairs the breaches and closes the gaps in how we think, feel, and act so that we may be whole again.
If the soul is the binding animus that holds a person together, and holds relationships together, then to exclude or denigrate an attribute of our humanity from our notion of “true self” is to negate the soul. It tears us apart rather than binding us together.
This has fascinating implications for the concept of salvation. In the model described above, a Christian message infected by Platonic or gnostic dualism, Jesus saves our souls so we can go to heaven when we die. It is a one-and-done change in status - we were lost souls that are now saved. This version of the Gospel has very little to say about our hearts and minds, least of all our bodies. It also has few implications for the world beyond our individuality, which is why many who have been indoctrinated into this way of thinking are suspicious of social justice or creation care initiatives in the Church. Those are issues that distract from the real work of salvation.
In contrast, to see the soul as the binding force of our true nature is to be curious about how salvation becomes ongoing redemption for the whole person. Saint Paul writes to his friends in Philippi: “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Phil. 3:12,13). What I love about this imaging of salvation is that he blesses the ongoing process by understanding what is truest about us on the soul-level, and seeing it transform how we think, feel, and act over time. For me, this becomes a pivotal verse in understanding Paul’s writings that keeps us from mere behavior modification. I often note the irony of the Protestant tradition in particular, that we tend to convey a message we should work very hard to be saved by faith and not works. What Paul seems to be saying in contrast is, “learn what is truest about you in the Deep, and make true what is on the inside true on the outside as well”. As he reminds us here, the work is more about opening ourselves to the actions of the Holy Spirit within us, gifted at our baptism. Spiritual practices are not ways of earning God’s favor, but submitting to the Spirit. As Father Richard Rohr comments, “all great spirituality is somehow about letting go”. Methodists call this process “sanctification”, the Orthodox call it “deification”; whatever term we use we can shift our understanding to see the gradual transformation to wholeness typified by Christ as we partner with God.
We can pierce through the surface illusions of life by engaging our hearts, minds, and bodies to encounter our souls. This entails a lot of fear, because we must engage with the anxieties and disorders that our feelings, thoughts, and activities often seek to cover over, like a pot lid on boiling water. Soul care blesses and integrates the whole person, by encouraging us to be gathered up in God through love. This is the power of the Shema prayer (Deut. 6:4,5) that is central to the Jewish liturgy and the commandment upon which all others hang for Jesus (Mark 12:28-34).