Soul Keeping

by John Ortberg

  Souls keep popping up in our most loved stories. Harry Potter is a teenage wizard with a chosen destiny to overthrow the evil dark wizard, Voldemort, who murdered his parents. Harry discovers deep connections of the soul with the Dark Lord. The greatest sin, murder, is discovered to tear the soul asunder, damage that can only be healed by honest remorse. The Dementor’s kiss is a fate worse than death — to have one’s soul removed by a soulless creature. To live without a soul is worse than not living. “Have you no soul?” is really another way of saying, “Is it possible that your mind with its values and conscience are not even troubled by what your will has chosen and your body carried out?”

  Does a fetus have a soul? A whole debate about abortion rages around this. Does life happen at conception? Is that when a being becomes human? Plato believed souls were reincarnated based on how elevated they were last time around: wise souls come back as seekers of beauty or kings or athletic trainers, whereas cowards come back as women and boozers may come back as donkeys. Augustine said that maybe souls preexist somewhere and then slip into bodies on their own, like people picking out a good car.

  We are not sure what the soul is, but the word sells. Advertisers speak of cars being soulful; Kia actually manufactures a car called the Kia Soul. Is it for people who want to go beyond transportation to transmigration? You can also find the Soul Diva (for the “style conscious woman who regards her car as important as her entire outfit”); the Soul Burner (the “bad boy” of the Soul concept); and the Soul Searcher (for the driver focused on “achieving personal inner peace and creating a calm cocoon for occupants”).

  Maybe that’s my problem: when I was growing up, we had a Rambler.

  The word soul won’t go away, because it speaks somehow of eternity:

  Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’em out and look at’m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars. . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.

  A movie called The Sixth Sense starring Bruce Willis tells of a little boy cursed with the gift of seeing dead people. A huge twist comes at the end of the movie; I don’t want to spoil it for you, but Bruce Willis, much to his surprise, turns out to be one of the dead people. A kind of mirror image to the story — and maybe the eeriest of all psychological diagnoses — is a condition known as “Cotard’s syndrome.”

  Named for the French neurologist who described it in the 1880s, Cotard’s syndrome ranges from claims that central organs are missing to the belief that one is already dead. It’s sometimes called Walking Corpse Syndrome. Jules Cotard described a woman he called Mademoiselle X, who claimed that God did not exist and that her soul did not exist and that she was nothing more than a decomposing body. Eventually she died of starvation — which must have come as a great shock to her. In one condition, a soul is dead but thinks it’s alive; in the other, the soul is alive but believes it’s dead.

  Are souls reserved for humans? If a computer were able to think — could it have a soul? Stanford professor Clifford Nass wrote the book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop. He has found that human beings treat computers the same way we treat people — we are flattered by their praise; we want to please them; we will even lie to them to avoid hurting their feelings. Could a computer be able to love a family, or enjoy a sunset, or grow in humility? What about souls and technology? Aristotle said that a friend is one soul in two bodies. Would the same thing be true of somebody if you cloned them?

  A WINDOW TO YOUR SOUL

  We speak of the eyes being the window to the soul. Scientists say the eyes can reveal our inner thoughts. For instance, when people are doing hard mental work, their pupils dilate. Daniel Kahneman wrote about researchers monitoring the eyes of subjects trying to solve difficult math problems. They would sometimes surprise subjects by asking them, “Why did you give up just now?”

  “How did you know?” the unsuspecting students would ask.

  “We have a window to your soul.”

  Psychologist Edmund Hess writes how pupils widen when people look at beautiful nature pictures. When I was in grad school, I saw two famous pictures of a lovely woman — identical, except that in one of them, her pupils are dilated, and that picture is always judged much more attractive. Belladonna, an herb-based drug that expands the pupils, is actually sold as a cosmetic. Professional poker players sometimes wear sunglasses simply to keep their pupils from giving their excitement away.

  U.S. President George W. Bush said that when he looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes, he was able to get a sense of his soul. Senator John McCain later said that when he looked into Putin’s eyes, he saw three letters: “A K and a G and a B” (a reference to the former Soviet security agency).

  My first date with the woman who would become my wife did not begin well. She actually fell asleep. But it was the last ten minutes that turned things around, when we talked to each other, and (she told me later) I made great eye contact. She told me she thought that was sexy. Can a soul be sexy?

  We can’t talk about our work without talking about our souls, although they often seem at odds. A “soulful work” movement suggests that while cubicles and monitors make us more efficient, our souls lose something when disconnected from the rhythms of working outdoors, of making things with our own hands. And the Internet is full of lists of the ten or twenty most soul-crushing jobs in the world, such as “Jobs that make you feel like a caged ADHD Chihuahua on Red Bull.” Maybe there should be a Take Your Soul to Work Day.

  When we talk of love, we speak of soul. No one searches for the love of their life on a site called BodyMate.com. In his dialogue The Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes present the story of soul mates. Aristophanes states that humans originally had four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces, but Zeus feared their power and split them all in half, condemning them to spend their lives searching for the other half to complete them. In the film Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise’s character expresses the idea unforgettably to Renée Zellweger: “You complete me.” Can one person really complete another? Do we all have one and only one soul mate out there in the world someplace?

  Churches are supposed to know about souls. We often sing a song that originated as a psalm: “Bless the Lord, O My Soul.” How can your soul bless, or make happy, the Lord? Sometimes we speak of souls as if they are spiritual scalps: certain people who are highly regarded as “soul-winners” or who are especially adept at going after “lost souls.” We get teary-eyed at the evangelist who desires to win “just one more soul for Jesus.” Old-time evangelist Billy Sunday used to calculate how much money it cost him to save a soul: in Boston in 1911 it was $450. Churches did the job more economically: Congregationalists came in at $70 per soul, Baptists at $70, and Methodists at a staggeringly low $3.12 — which was cheap even by the 1911 standards!

  The universal distress signal, SOS, is said to stand for “Save Our Souls.” What does it mean for a soul to be saved?

  “I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one,” writes Douglas Coupland. “I know because it hurts.”

  Remember that woman named Pat whose body betrayed a glorious soul? What Jeffrey Boyd did not write in that particular account is that Pat was his wife. Watching her body crumble, he watched something deeper than a body shine. He wrote in another place, “If a child is born with such withered legs that there will never be a possibility of walking or crawling, [is] the child’s soul limited by these architectural disasters of the spine, pelvis and femurs? I had a son born with precisely these deformities. His name was Justin. That son also died.”

  We search for the soul because we’re curious. But not just that. The search for the soul always begins with our great hurt.

  If I shou
ld die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take . . .

  What is the soul?

  CHAPTER 2

  WHAT IS THE SOUL?

  I went to pick up Dallas Willard on a typical Chicago day in February when the roads were covered with salt trying to melt the ice, but the snow was coming down so fast you could hardly see the car in front of you. I was driving my ancient Toyota Corolla, in which the alignment was so out of whack that when I went over forty miles per hour, the car shook as if it had palsy and pulled to the left. Because of an earlier accident, the seat belt on the passenger side had to be threaded through the armrest to hold the door closed.

  “Sorry about the car,” I offered, though I thought Dallas wouldn’t even notice. He was a little grayer since I had last seen him. I had moved from California to Chicago two years earlier, but he had agreed to talk with me monthly by phone. Eventually he came to Chicago to speak at our church.

  We chatted while we drove — very slowly — to lunch. Every once in a while Dallas would absentmindedly start singing a hymn, such as “Rock of Ages” or “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and I would join in. He used to lead music as well as preach at the little Baptist churches he served in the hills of Missouri.

  We pulled into a Chili’s and sat down at a table. Having not been with him in a while, I was reminded again of how at ease he was with himself. He was the same person, whether he was talking to an assistant janitor or a famous leader. When Dallas finished speaking at a conference, people would line up to talk with him, and he always obliged them. It’s not just that he didn’t hurry through those conversations; he genuinely didn’t seem to want to hurry. The clear impression I got was not that Dallas was working hard to be patient. It was as though impatience and worry were simply not in his body. He had an inner life that seemed at peace with the life everyone else sees.

  I wanted to know that kind of inner life.

  THIS TINY, FRAGILE, VULNERABLE, PRECIOUS THING ABOUT YOU

  We each have an outer life and an inner one. My outer self is the public, visible me. My accomplishments, my work, and my reputation lie there. My outer world had changed a great deal since I had last seen Dallas. I was working at a church that — in the little world of my profession — was large and visible. There were more people on staff at this church than there were attendees at the church where I had last worked. Suddenly people sought out my opinion more and assumed I was smarter than I was and invited me to speak at their events. My outer world was now larger and busier and more complex than it had ever been.

  But my inner world had not grown at all. My inner life is where my secret thoughts and hopes and wishes live. Because my inner life is invisible, it is easy to neglect. No one has direct access to it, so it wins no applause. Abraham Lincoln was a brilliant lawyer, but notoriously disorganized; he used to have a bulging folder labeled, “If you can’t find it anywhere else, look here.” My private self can begin to look as chaotic and untended as the inside of Lincoln’s folder.

  I thought that such a large change in my outer world would bring a quick upgrade to my inner one — more fulfillment, more gratification. Instead, the very busy-ness and complexity of it was almost like a private blizzard that made it hard to navigate my internal world clearly.

  What drew me to Dallas was the sense that here was someone who had mastered the inner life — or had at least gone much farther down that road than most. There was leisure of spirit to him. It sounds strange to say, but he had an overwhelmingly calm face.

  I asked him, “Why am I not happier, now that I’m getting to do what is in many ways a dream job?” I asked him, “How can I have a private self that is flourishing no matter what my public self is doing?”

  For that, Dallas said, we would have to talk about the care of the soul. I was afraid that topic might come up.

  “I work at a church where my job involves saving souls,” I began. “But if someone asked me, I’d have a hard time saying exactly what a soul is. Is soul just a word religious people throw around?”

  I wasn’t prepared for his answer.

  “Brother John, why is there such value and mystery to your existence? The really deep reason is because of this tiny, fragile, vulnerable, precious thing about you called your soul. You are not just a self; you are a soul. ‘The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ You’re a soul made by God, made for God, and made to need God, which means you were not made to be self-sufficient.”

  In one of his books, Dallas has further explained,

  What is running your life at any given moment is your soul. Not external circumstances, not your thoughts, not your intentions, not even your feelings, but your soul. The soul is that aspect of your whole being that correlates, integrates, and enlivens everything going on in the various dimensions of the self. The soul is the life center of human beings.

  THE LIFE CENTER OF HUMAN BEINGS

  I thought I knew what Dallas meant. Sometimes I will watch the sun set at the beach while I smell the saltwater and listen to the crashing surf; or I will be standing on a ledge along the Big Sur overlooking a mountain range and feel this enormous combination of joy and awe. There is a depth to those moments that goes beyond a body. Your soul connects your thoughts and your sensations and your gratitude and your will and sends a message to your entire being. You can send that message to other persons; you can send it to God. You can say “Wow!” to the universe. That is the soul at work.

  “Anytime you want to care for something, you have to understand it, whether it’s a beagle or a BMW,” Dallas continued. “Take that high-performance automobile you were driving. [Oops! He had noticed after all.] If a car is tuned and fueled and oiled and aligned, it is capable of amazing things — even your car,” he said, smiling. “If you do not understand its parts and how they work — well, we see the result.”

  Dallas went on to make the obvious connection. He said it is terribly important to understand the “parts” of the inner life. Each one must be healthy and working as God intended it to work. If your soul is healthy, no external circumstance can destroy your life. If your soul is unhealthy, no external circumstance can redeem your life.

  But what exactly is the soul?

  Dallas took a napkin and drew the first of a series of concentric circles. The innermost circle, according to Dallas, is the human will — your capacity to choose. You can say, “Yes,” and you can say, “No.” The will is what makes you a person and not a thing. It’s what the Bible is talking about when it says God made people to “exercise dominion.” The will is something we treasure greatly in ourselves and others.

  But if the will is so central, why isn’t spiritual life a lot easier? Why can’t I simply tell people to use their will to do what God says or to feel God’s presence?

  “The will is very central, but it’s also incredibly limited,” Dallas explained. “Do you ever find yourself doing something that goes against your better judgment or values?”

  “Hardly ever,” I said as I finished my second piece of molten hot fudge cake and ice cream.

  “The will is very good at making simple and large commitments like getting married, or deciding to move someplace,” Dallas explained. “But it is very bad at trying to override habits and patterns and attitudes that are deeply rooted in us. If you try to improve your soul by willpower, you will exhaust yourself and everyone around you.”

  Why is that? Dallas drew a second circle around the first to illustrate.

  “The next part of the person is the mind. In the ancient world, the mind referred to both a person’s thoughts and their feelings. By thoughts I mean all the ways a person is conscious of things.”

  That made a lot of sense to me. Thoughts and feelings are flowing through us all the time, mostly flowing in habitual patterns that willpower alone cannot sustainably redirect. When I think thoughts that are false or unworthy, when I entertain desires that are in opposition to wh
at God wants for my life, I damage my soul. The apostle Paul says, “The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.”

  The mind craves to be at peace.

  Dallas drew another circle that he said represents our bodies. “The body is our little kingdom. That’s the one place in all the universe where our tiny wills have a chance to be in charge. Imagine for a moment you had a will and a mind but no body.”

  Huh?

  “Our bodies are like our little ‘power packs.’ We couldn’t be us without them. They are filled with all kinds of appetites and all kinds of habits. In a way, we ‘outsource’ behaviors from tying our shoelaces, to driving a car, to our bodies, so that our wills and our minds don’t have to worry about them. Our bodies are amazing. But they are not the whole story. I am not just the stuff my body is made of.”

  He drew another circle, and this one, he said, represents the soul.

  THE OPERATING SYSTEM OF YOUR LIFE

  “The soul is the capacity to integrate all the parts into a single, whole life. It is something like a program that runs a computer; you don’t usually notice it unless it messes up.”

  According to Dallas, the soul seeks harmony, connection, and integration. That is why integrity is such a deep soul-word. The human soul seeks to integrate our will and our mind and our body into an integral person. Beyond that, the soul seeks to connect us with other people, with creation, and with God himself — who made us to be rooted in him the way a tree is rooted by a life-giving stream.