September 19, 2004

Rev. Henry Ticknor
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

Soul Work

It’s been said that confession is good for the soul and I should imagine that church is as good a place to confess as any. So with your understanding I would like to make this confession—I read the comics every morning. If the paper is late or if I have to leave the house extra early and I can’t read my favorite comic strips I feel somehow cheated—no doubt it’s the same feeling that others might have if they miss that first cup of coffee. It gets my whole day off to a bad start.

Now I’m not totally indiscriminant in my comic addiction. I still read Classic Peanuts, Cathy, and the Family Circus but my favorites are For Better or For Worse, Zits, Pearls Before Swine, Rex and Rover, Sally Forth and Pickles. I can’t say that Mary Worth or Rex Morgan or Judge Parker really “speak to me” but most days I skim them just to be informed. However I may try, I just don’t get Zippy The Pinhead.

Pickles deals with the ups and downs of getting older through the experiences of its main characters, Earl and Opal. Their children, grandchildren and a somewhat dense dog, Roscoe, and a sly cat, Muffin, also populate the strip.

The theme of the past few days has centered on Earl exploring some of Life’s imponderable questions. One such question was what is reflected when two mirrors are placed facing each other? Opals’ response was dust.

When Earl somewhat sardonically asks, “why are there cats in the world?” Opal replies, “Why are there husbands?”

In our reading this morning, the poet Mary Oliver asks us to consider some questions: Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl? Who has it and who doesn’t? Does it have a shape? Why should I have one and not another? “One question,” she writes, “leads to another.”

So this morning I would like to explore these questions about the soul.

What is the soul? Who has it and who doesn’t? In many religious traditions the soul is the core essence of our being. Many consider the soul to be immortal and to be strongly associated with notions of the afterlife. Some believe the soul is a physical attribute of life while others believe that it is immaterial.

There are those who believe that the soul is only in our mind. There are others who possess a more mystical trend of thought declaring the soul is a kind of visible aura whose colors can be seen by others.

To the ancient Greeks the root word for soul is the same as the word for “alive” and to them the soul was what made living things alive. Plato considered the soul to be the “essence” of a person that reasons, decides and acts. He considered the soul to be a separate entity from the living body and to be immortal. While Aristotle defined the soul as the core essence of being, but argued against it having a separate existence.

In early Hebrew thought, soul represented the life force. However, over time it began to be seen as something independent of the physical being. According to the Hebrew bible, when God created Adam, he “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. The Hebrew word that means “breath” is often used to mean “spirit” and “inspiration.”

The soul of the righteous was seen as immortal. In Jewish mysticism the human soul has three elements. The first is linked to instincts and bodily cravings; it is the source of one’s physical and psychological nature. The second aspect contains the moral virtues and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. And the third aspect of the soul is what separates humankind from all other creatures. In fact it is the soul that allows one to have an awareness of the divine life-force itself.

In Islam a person’s soul is the spirit that God breathed into Adam. It’s seat is in the heart and it is seen as the source of a person’s motivation to do good or evil in the world.

Eastern religions also have a take on the existence and nature of the soul. For Buddhists all things are impermanent. This is true of our humanity as much as anything else. Buddhists believe that at death the body and mind disintegrate but one’s karma will pass into another incarnation. Thus to Buddhists a living being is neither entirely unique nor exactly the same as it was prior to rebirth.

The Hinduism word that most closely relates to our notion of the soul is “Atman” which can mean soul or “God within.” Like the Hebrew, the literal Sanskrit meaning of Atman is “breath” or “self”. Atman is a basic concept in Hindu philosophy, describing that eternal core of the personality that survives death and transmigrates to a new life or is released from the bonds of existence.

Of course in Christianity the soul is all-important. However, here, too, there are widely differing notions on just what constitutes the soul. Many Christians believe the soul to be the immortal essence of what it means to be human and that after death the soul is either rewarded or punished.

Some believe that their soul precedes them to heaven until at the time of the rapture their physical being will also be lifted to heaven. Some believe the soul to be only an essence of who we are as people; others believe it to be more material with substance and mass that can be measured.

And so, to paraphrase Phil Cousineau, writing in Soul: An Archeology, “If we’re not bewildered by the mysteries of the soul, we’re not thinking clearly…”

Part of my training for the ministry included work as a chaplain at Georgetown Hospital. It was during this time that I found myself particularly engaged in soul work. Visiting with patients who were in the very end stage of life provided me with an intimate sense of what I call our soul.

With many of the patients I visited, there came a time when they experienced momentary clarity. They were able to speak to relatives; they were able to recognize family members, they briefly became oriented in time and place.

It seemed to me that each of these patients had been nourished by their own inner drive to live. A spirit of life, if you will, that stayed alive even when all medical and scientific interventions had been exhausted. This is the essence of who we are. It is part personality, part attitude, and part outlook. It is both our public face and our subconscious.

Thomas Moore, author of the book Care of the Soul defines the word soul in this way. “Soul is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance.” He believes that our soul is what gives our ordinary lives meaning, that it has to do with “cultivating a richly expressive and meaningful life.”

For me this inner essence, this spirit of life, is just one part of what I call my soul. When all my defenses are stripped away, when I am able to be a disarmingly real person and do the deep work of learning who I am as a person, as a husband, as a father, a minister, a friend, a sibling, my soul is revealed. In the various ways I interact with people my soul is revealed. In small ways and significant ways each of us impacts the lives of others.

This is probably what motivated me the most to be an educator and what motivates me today as a minister. I hope that through my being in community with others that in some way I can share with them my true self and pass on a part of my soul to others.

I think we each impart something of our souls when we pass on our love of gardening, the outdoors, poetry, winter and chocolate chip cookies! We pass on the essence of who we are when we are actively engaged in cultivating our own richly expressive and meaningful life.

The other part of my soul definition is less philosophical and much more biological. The other half of my soul is made up of DNA—the stuff of life. I possess the DNA of uncountable previous generation and together Nancy and I have passed on our genetic heritage to our daughters and in time they may have children of their own who will be characterized by their own genetic mix. Who am I and why do I have curly hair or blond hair, or no hair? Why am I short and my children tall. Where did I come from?

How often have you asked yourself that question? We may know our biological parents, even our grandparents; not far beyond that, for most of us the trail begins to disappear into the mist. But each of us carries a message from our ancestors in every cell of our body. It is in our DNA, the genetic material that is handed down from generation to generation. Within the DNA is written not only our histories as individuals but the whole history of the human race.

With the aid of recent advances in genetic technology, this history is now being revealed. We are at last able to begin to decipher the messages from the past. Our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment; it does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead. It is not eroded by wind or rain, nor reduced to ruin by fire and earthquake. It is the traveler from an ancient land who lives within us all.

This too is the essence of who we are. It is the building blocks of life that make our individual beings unique. So to borrow from a question normally used in a different context, what makes our souls so unique is it nature or is it experience? Clearly it is both.

The question that religion is often concerned with is happens to our soul when we die? One popular idea captured in a movie of the same name is that our soul weighs 21 grams. This theory, which is mostly an urban legend, states that a body weighed just before and immediately after death will be 21 grams lighter at the time of death. Those so inclined would believe that this 21 grams constitutes the weight of the soul as it leaves the body. Others see the soul as a supernatural essence and practitioners of eastern religions believe that the soul is immortal continues in a new incarnation.

Many humanists believe that at death we simply cease to exist. Eastern religions hold to a pantheistic view that each person goes through a series of incarnations until they become one with the divine. When one unites with the divine, she or he ceases to exist as an individual and becomes part of the life force.

Some aboriginal peoples believe that after death the human soul remains on earth looking over the generations to come—a thought that I find comforting.

In Islam the belief is that all men and all women were created from a single soul. They believe that the soul is the moral core of a person. The soul is like the conscience—for the soul always knows right from wrong. When Muslims die their soul is judged in terms of bad deeds and good deeds. Those whose good deeds outweigh their bad deeds will enter paradise.

And what do I believe? I believe in the immortality of the soul. I believe that the essence of who we are lives on in all the people we have known just as it lives on as a strand of molecules that determine hair color, body type, and whether we are right or left handed. Just as I believe that I am physically and emotionally the sum of all my parts, in my lifetime I will pass my soul on to others equally through personality and genes.

Forrest Church, in Life Craft: The art of meaning in everyday life, writes:

This process of finding meaning within our lives is hard work. It is soul work. John Haynes Holmes of Community Church in New York wrote long ago, “Nothing any theologian ever wrote about God has helped me very much, but everything that the poets have written about flowers, and birds, and skies, and seas and the saviors of the race, and God—whoever God may be—has at one time or another reached my soul.”

This notion of soul work was perhaps best defined by A. Powell Davies the long time minister of All Souls Unitarian in Washington who said, “Life is just a chance to grow a soul.”

I was discussing this sermon with a friend and complaining how much trouble I was having writing it. After some expected words of encouragement he said you ought to tell the story of Scrooge. He went on to tell of the time he and his family were traveling for summer vacation and for whatever reason they had a tape of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in the car and so on the way to the beach or the mountains or wherever they were headed the listened to the story.

Scrooge I asked? It’s not even Halloween much less Christmas. The story about Scrooge is not about Christmas he replied. It’s ultimately a story about a man and his soul. Just listen to it, he urged me, at some time other than Christmas.

Well, of course, he is absolutely right. If you take away the cold and the snow, the holiday decorations and glitter what you have is the story of a man whose heart, for any number of reasons, has been turned to stone. Through a series of dreams his eyes are opened once again to all of the promises of life. He rediscovers that he is capable of love and caring. He finds a renewed spirit of life that he gladly shares with all the folks he sees on the street. By the end of the story he has rediscovered his soul. One might even say that Scrooge is reborn with a whole new appreciation of the world and with another opportunity to grow his soul. What must each of us do in these uncertain times to resist becoming so cynical that our souls turn to stone? What must we do to keep our soul growing?

Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl? Who has it and who doesn’t? Does it have a shape? Why should I have one and not another? “One question, “ she writes, “leads to another.”

Amen