To grow a soul

A sermon by Reverend Mark Worth

Aug. 15, 2010

Readings

  1. From A. Powell Davies (1902-1957), Welsh-American Unitarian clergyman, Without Apology: Collected Meditations on Liberal Religion, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998

    At the end of the summer of 1936, I was crossing the Atlantic Ocean, westbound on the Queen Mary. A westbound ship, as all ocean travelers know, sails into the sunset, and on this particular evening the sunset was unusually beautiful. I stopped to look at it. “Take this sunset,” I said to myself. “There is no soul in it.” It is just something that clouds do to a source of light. And what are clouds? They are noting but moisture suspended in the earth’s atmosphere. … And my eyes that see all of this, what are they but water and dust, briefly blended for the short space of a human lifetime, so that this insignificant blob of protoplasm that I call myself may see something that isn’t altogether there?

    But isn’t it altogether there, I immediately asked myself? If I am not seeing this sunset with my eyes alone, I am seeing it with a sense of wonder and a joy of beauty, and the solice of it is slowly pervading me, even while I stand and look. I am seeing it with what I can only call my soul. If I do not call it that, I cannot call it anything; yet there it is. I cannot define it – no, but this sunset as a thing of beauty is definitely real. Indeed, the sunset is not only in the sky; it is in my soul.

    Everything that comes to human beings, everything they do, has something of this in it, I remind myself. You can put the sunset into the language of physics, but when you have done it, you haven’t got a sunset, you haven’t even got a complete description of the thing you are experiencing. Not at all. In the same way, you can put a living creature on a dissecting table and separate him into all his component parts, but in the end of the process you won’t have a living being; you will only have a lot of dead parts. The life that gave them unity and meaning – it will be gone.

  2. From Thomas Moore (b. 1940), The Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, HarperCollins, New York NY, 1982

    A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.

The Sermon

What is the soul? An encyclopedia definition would tell us that the soul is “the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing; the animating and vital principle in humans.” Or it is, “the spiritual nature in humans, separable from the body at death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.”

Many philosophical systems say either that the human body contains a soul – or that we are eternal souls inhabiting temporary bodies. Some believe that when the body dies, the soul leaves the body and can either live eternally in heaven, or be tortured forever in hell; or that the soul can be reincarnated into another body on this earth.

But do we literally have souls? It depends on how we decide to define “soul.” For instance, is the soul the same as, or different from, the “spirit” and the “self”?

C. S. Lewis said, “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” Contemporary spirituality author Thomas Moore says, “Soul is different from spirit – the deep soul is the way we live everyday, our longings and our fears.”

Aristotle defined the soul as the core or essence of a living being, but argued against a separate existence for the soul apart from the body. In Aristotle’s view, a living thing’s soul is its activity, that is, its “life.” What we do determines what our souls are. The soul, to Aristotle, is not a ghostly occupant of your body – but the soul is the actuality of a living body. It cannot be immortal, he suggested, because when you stop doing, you cease to be.

If a knife had a soul, Aristotle said, it would be the essence of cutting. When the knife is destroyed, it will never cut again. So if the knife had a soul, the soul would cease to exist when the knife could cut no more. Similarly, without your body, you can no longer do the things you do – therefore, Aristotle believed, your soul will cease to exist when your body ceases to exist.

Buddhism teaches that everything is always in a state of flux – everything is changing all the time. Therefore, you and I are not exactly the same now as we were when I began this sentence. Because we are constantly changing, and because we are dependent on so many factors around us, Buddhism teaches that there is no permanent, independent self or soul. The words “I” and “me” do not refer to any fixed, permanent, thing. They are simply convenient terms that allow us to refer to something that is always changing. Therefore, there is no permanent soul or self. This Buddhist teaching is called “no-self,” and its aim is to help us get rid of our sense of self-importance.

“Soul” and the Bible ~

The book of Genesis in the Bible tells us that “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” This could also be correctly translated, the Lord God “breathed into his nostrils the spirit of life, and the man became a living soul.” In the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) we translate the Hebrew word ruah as both “spirit” and “breath.” This double meaning suggests that if you are breathing, you have a spirit. When you no longer breathe, your spirit is gone. And the word we translate as “soul” is nephesh. A nephesh has a body, is breathing and alive, has feelings, gets thirsty, angry, is capable of falling in love, and is imperfect (it makes mistakes or commits sins).

In the New Testament, which was written in Greek, the word we translate as “soul” is psyche. Psyche, which means “soul,” “mind,” “breath,” and “life,” is a living person with a physical body and is breathing.

The concept of an immaterial soul, separate from and surviving the body, is commonly believed today – but is not found in the Bible. Jews tend to believe that once you die, that’s it. You are dead. This life is the only one we can be certain about.

And although most Christians today probably believe that their souls will go to heaven, without their bodies, that’s actually not what the Bible teaches. The New Testament talks about a bodily resurrection after Judgment Day, not up in the skies somewhere, but right here on earth. Our bodies will come out of their graves and walk around on earth again after the Final Judgment. When I was a Methodist we repeated a creed every Sunday that spoke of “the resurrection of the body,” something that never made sense to me.

And then there’s science. Science and medicine talk about what is observable in the natural world. There is no repeatable scientific experiment that can prove or disprove the existence of a soul. When modern scientists speak of the soul, they generally treat the soul as a poetic synonym for mind. In fact, no one knows for certain whether the human body has a soul that lives on after death. It’s something we believe or don’t believe. Either way, we tend to use the word “soul” in a somewhat poetic sense, to refer to the essence of being human.

A sunset seen in the soul ~

When the 20th century Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies said that “the purpose of life is to grow a soul,” I believe he was talking about a process, the process of maturing, of developing loving-kindness, caring and compassion. His statement suggests that when we are born we have the potential to grow in many different ways. The way in which we grow determines the essence of who we are, and who we will become. He was talking about becoming a better person, a more soulful person.

Davies writes about sailing into the sunset on the Queen Mary in the 1930s, and watching the sunset. If you break it down scientifically, the sun is just a big ball of fire, and the light is reflecting on moisture in the atmosphere. We can analyze the human eye that sees the sunset, and it is just water and dust, he says. When we break it down into science, the sunset has no soul.

And yet we see the beauty of the sunset with a sense of wonder and joy! Davies writes, “I cannot define it – no, but this sunset as a thing of beauty is definitely real. Indeed, the sunset is not only in the sky, it is in my soul.”

And so, although we do not really know how to define the soul, and cannot prove whether or not it exists, we still speak of the soul. Call it poetry, or call it metaphor. Either way, the human soul is very real.

Poetry or arithmetic?

I know many people who are sticklers for scientific fact. They want their minds to be free from sentimental things such as poetry, metaphor and myth. They just want facts.

And I know others who are sticklers for a literal interpretation of the Bible. They think that if it’s in the Bible, it is a fact. You can point out to them all of the places where the Bible contradicts itself, and all the places where the Bible contradicts accepted scientific fact, and all the places where the Bible is morally wrong (such as its support for slavery). It doesn’t matter. Their minds are made up, and they don’t want to be confused with the facts.

So we have two kinds of fundamentalists, the fundamentalists of the right (the biblical literalists) and the fundamentalists of the left (the atheistic or anti-theistic literalists). Both kinds of fundamentalists believe that religion is like arithmetic.

But religion isn’t like arithmetic. In arithmetic, 1 + 1 = 2. It never equals 3 or 84. The rules are clear. Even when you get into something like non-Euclidian geometry, the rules are different, but there are still clear rules. A lot of people want clear rules. They want arithmetic.

But poetry is not like arithmetic. Neither is art, or music, or creative cooking. There’s more than one way to bake bread. Do you want French bread, rye bread, sourdough, or cinnamon raisin? Do you knead it yourself, or do you make it in a bread machine?

There is more than one right way in poetry, and more than one right way in music. We do not say that because Johann Sebastian Bach is right, Igor Stravinsky and Ella Fitzgerald have to be wrong. There is more than one right way in painting with oils on canvass. We don’t say that because Rembrandt is right, Monet and Picasso must be wrong.

Religion is not arithmetic. There is more than one way to be religious. There have been many religious paths, found in many times and places and cultures, and those many paths have brought comfort and peace – and various forms of “enlightenment” or “salvation,” or “wholeness” – for the people who have followed these paths.

Another 20th century Unitarian preacher, John Haynes Holmes, wrote, “When I say ‘God,’ it is poetry and not theology. Nothing that any theologian ever wrote about God has helped me much, but everything that poets have written about flowers, and birds, and skies, and seas, and the saviors of the race and God – whoever He may be – has at one time or another reached my soul!”

So there’s no mathematical formula that gets you “God” or “soul” or “religion” or “salvation.” But did you know there’s a recipe? The Rev. Roger Bertchausen, minister at the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Appleton, Wisconsin, says this is his recipe for God:

“Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine Emerson’s Oversoul and the Hindu view of god in a small bowl and mix.
  2. Combine all ingredients (including the Oversoul/Hindu mixture) together in a large bowl and mix.
  3. Spread batter evenly into container – namely, me (i.e. Roger Bertchausen)
  4. Bake in an oven preheated to 98.6 degrees for 45 years and 356 days.
  5. Let cool and enjoy!”

A process of achieving wholeness ~

Roger’s recipe isn’t found in any recipe book that I know of. It’s not found in any holy book, either, and there have been lots of holy books over the centuries. This recipe came from Roger’s experience. Yes, it was probably influenced by the Good Book, and many good books. And by the experiences of a lifetime. You, too, have a recipe. You have been writing it all your life, and you are writing it right now.

So, I suggest to you today, if you can “grow a soul,” you need not worry about heaven. If you can grow a soul, heaven, whatever or wherever that is, will take care of itself. Because “heaven” is poetry; it’s a metaphor.

And “the soul,” however we try to define it, is also related to poetry, music, and art. There is no single, agreed-upon provable definition. We have to do the best we can with metaphor and poetic description. Growing a soul not arithmetic! It’s like composing music, writing a poem, experimenting with bread recipes.

When A. Powell Davies, looking at the sunset, tried to analyze it into a ball of fire emitting light which was reflecting off of moisture, he admitted that he lost the “soul” of the experience. Instead of a sterile mechanistic way of looking at the world, he said, “I am seeing it with what I can only call my soul.” Growing a soul is a process of becoming, a transformation or change of heart. It is about learning compassion and loving-kindness. It is about setting aside our own self-importance. Many people think that Buddhist or Hindu meditation is about sudden enlightenment, that you can sit on a cushion a few times and suddenly you will know the secrets of the universe. It’s not like that. It’s a process of living out the teachings of the tradition – whether you follow Buddhism or Judaism or Christianity – it’s a process of becoming more mature, more whole.

And as we change, we begin to see the world differently; and as we see the world differently, we change. Enlightenment is not a sudden “aha” and then you’re there. It is a process, a becoming.

That’s the problem with some kinds of Christians. Their recipe is to just accept a certain theological proposition, to believe that Jesus is your Savior, and then you’ve got something called “salvation.” But what has changed? You haven’t learned to be a better person. You’re still making the same mistakes. You are probably still hurting yourself and the people around you. The only thing that’s different is that you’ve agreed to somebody’s doctrine about Jesus. That’s not what I call salvation, because you haven’t achieved any kind of wholeness in your life. All you’ve done is agree to a theological doctrine.

I’m convinced that God doesn’t care what we think. God doesn’t care about doctrines. What kind of silly little god would care what we believe? What matters is how we live our lives. What matters is the growth and maturity we achieve. What matters is the kind of people we become. What matters is how we treat one another.

How do I know? I didn’t learn that in any holy recipe book, although I’ve read several. I’ve learned it during my lifetime. I’ve learned it, partly, from my mistakes. And I’ve learned it by practicing my faith in community – Christian community, Buddhist community, and humanist community. Of course, I’m still learning, and still growing, just as you are.

We’re still working on our recipes. Growing your soul is a process, like cooking. The holy books, the recipe books, are a good place to start. But then eventually we start to learn to cook. You live your life, you learn from mistakes, you pick yourself up and set aside your ego, you learn to be moral, you learn compassion, you learn gratitude, and over time you grow your soul. Bake in an oven pre-heated for 98.6 degrees for as long as it takes.

When the recipe isn’t working, you learn from your failures and adjust the recipe. Then you try again. Keep cooking. It’s going to be delicious.

Amen.

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