Soul: Sermon and Celebration

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 10^th of March, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
on a late winter's morn
to worship, to offer praise
that we can offer praise at all,
that we are alive to aliveness
and aware of the joys and sorrows
that deepen our lives and hone our souls.
And at the end of our celebrations…

may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

The river of life
has flowed with blood this week.
Those of us who look upon this river
from a distance beat our breasts
over the place of our broken heart,
our broken heart,
our broken heart.
See? There are blood red clouds
towering up over bleak Afghan hills,
and caskets raised into the doors of planes
and carried along dusty roads.
As the ancient Qur'an puts it:
"And now you have a Messenger
who has come from among you.
the Messenger grieves over your suffering,
and is very anxious for you."

See? There is blood flowing in the streets of the holy land, and the Jordan River itself runs red. Look, do you see them? Keening mothers calling out to Allah and to Adonai! They throw back their heads. They cry until they make no noise, their mouths open. Or as the ancient Scroll of Jeremiah says:

"There is Rachel weeping for her children because they are no more. And she will not be comforted."

In India too, blood on the train tracks, sorrows, rage, the loss of lives no less precious than our own. As the ancient Baghavad Gita puts it, "my limbs falter, my mouth becomes dry, my body shivers."

So much heartbreak in the world these days! But to be alive at all is to be vulnerable to the heartbreak as surely as it is to be vulnerable to a risen crocus glowing purple in my eye. And now, for the sake of my soul, I pour myself into this river of silence. May its deeps be for me as a scripture yet to be written, a scripture that begins to mend a broken heart.

(silence)

The river of our lives flows and touches a thousand shores for but a moment, our past, our present, our dreams of the future. Thus, in the continuing silence, we express, either in our hearts or with our mouths, the names of people standing on the shore… those who have companioned us on our way, taught us, challenged us, nurtured us, loved us, and all those whom we cherish…

(naming)

The river of life flows,
flows like a scripture text across the page,
flows like a choral anthem floating in the air.
The river of life flows, expressing the sorrows, joys and wonders of the human soul no less than the Qur'an, or Jeremiah, the Gita, or any poet.
May the river sing us into life and love
and bring our souls sufficient strength so as to meet the days ahead….

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is a poem by James Brandi, which I have used once before a while back, but which is certainly rich enough for a second reading. This poem has some rather clear erotic language

Beyond You, Beyond Me

Beyond methods of science, fact, proof over speculation's rim, deep in the apple's seed, along the violin's chalked string is a hidden intention, unconquered peak.

Beyond the sword's flashing swing over Bikini Atoll, still swirling as ash and light is a grain of shameless dust that returns no answer.

Beyond sweet talks and sweet walks and quiet afternoons, is a Sunday in the park a strong wind moving men's knotted ties lifting women's skirts, exposing surprised desire.

Beyond you, beyond me beyond God's name which shouldn't appear in churches, forests or poems like these is a painted wheel turning on the wing of a Phoenix.

Beyond greed, anxiety, nervous coughs is a flame, a summertime where nobody feels anybody else up, is a brilliant September a gentle agreement, a quiet drop of dew.

Beyond them and us and him and her is the first morning, no echo, no secret rage no hammering argument, no shadow, no one to listen, no self in the way of creation.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is a poem by Pulitzer Prize winning Louise Gluck, called

FIELD FLOWERS

What are you saying? That you want
eternal life? Are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that? Certainly
you don't look at us, don't listen to us.

On your skin, stain of sun,
dust of yellow buttercups:
I'm talking to you, you staring through
bars of high grass shaking
your little rattle - O the soul! The soul!

Is it enough only to look inward?

Contempt for humanity is one thing,
but why disdain the expansive field,
your gaze rising over the clear heads
of the wild buttercups into what?

Your poor idea of heaven: absence of change.

Better than earth?
How would you know,
who are neither here nor there,
standing in our midst?

Sermon - Soul: Sermon and Celebration [Next][back to top]

Many of my friends outside the church are simply not church-goers or synagogue members. They do not attend mosque on Fridays or sit with others in a Zendo when they meditate…if they meditate. Most are not religious in any concrete sense of that term.

Thus, my whole career is a complete mystery to them. The hours I spend fretting over a sermon, attending meetings, or visiting a member in the hospital who just had surgery, remain largely beyond their comprehension.

They surely don't understand my work schedule. They will call me at home on Saturday, instead of the office where I am working, because the idea of working weekend nights doesn't make sense to them. They will absent-mindedly invite me to brunch on Sunday morning, forgetting that I am not available.

But some of them really show how little they understand about my livelihood when they ask me, "So, Mark, how's all your soul-saving coming along?"

Soul-saving. They think I am in the business of saving souls. So think of this sermon as a more fleshed-out version of what I say to them when they say that to me.

It's a strange word, soul. I first encountered it seriously in my parochial high school. It was the source of my first sense of contradiction between science and religion.

In science class, I learned all about the brain, the three pound knot of gray matter curving under the crown of my skull.

"This is the part of the brain," said Fr. Galvin, "that sorts out signals given it by the optic nerve…this, rather than the eye, is the true organ of sight." He tapped a certain section of this plastic cerebral cortex model he brought into class that day. "And this part of the cortex," he continued, using his pen as a pointer, "is the center of human reasoning." Then, jabbing at a little purple arch at the bottom center of the brain, he said, "This is the limbic system, the center for the emotions…rage, fear, love, tenderness."

Then I went to my religion class. "The human soul," said the teacher, "is the immortal center of all human reason and passion. It is your real self, your mind and heart, so to speak. It has no form, no substance, and it cannot be seen, heard, or touched in anyway."

Well, which of these two am I, I wondered, a brain or a soul? A body or a mind? I obviously thought, at one time, that asking such things was a deep religious question.

I no longer think so.

But as I grew through my education, I realized that I was hardly the first person to ask this question. I also realized that throughout history, folks have come up with many answers to this question, too. Based on their elaborate thinking, but also based on their experience.

My thinking about this was at first not very elaborate. I had, by my twenties, rejected the religious teachings of my upbringing, and I pretty much figured that Fr. Galvin knew a lot more than my religion teacher. I figured my sense of self was generated by my brain, and that the word "soul" was, at best, a spiritual fossil of a bygone age when no one actually knew what the brain did.

However, my thinking about this subject was shaped by work in a great teaching hospital where I was working as a chaplain at the time. The first time I saw a brain-dead person, I realized at once why some people think of the soul as some sort of life force….for despite the regular breathing caused by a sophisticated machine, despite the warm flesh, it struck me as clear as a bell that the person before me was no longer home. I could see very clearly why someone might think that a powerful life-force, an immortal soul, had left the premises.

But you need to understand that I heard the word soul far away from my high school, too. As most of you know, I grew up in Detroit, Motown. And as I was growing up, I heard the word "soul" sung a thousand times more by Aretha Franklin on the radio than I ever saw it written in the catechism. This word "soul" clearly meant something far more alive than life itself, and not necessarily some sort of transparent "me" without a body.

I also learned about soul while watching Jackie Gleason on television acting out his sad bum character, The Poor Soul. His shuffling, sad-sack creation was not a theological speculation, but a clown's exposure of social and psychological realities.

Later, in seminary, when I studied the ancient scriptures, not with eyes of childlike belief but of adult skepticism, I was surprised that anyone in the church had ever come up with the idea of "soul" as some sort of ethereal self in the first place.

After all, in the Hebrew scriptures, the word translated as soul was nephesh, meaning literally something like "pulse," a pulse like the one flashing in your carotid artery right now. It's first used in the famous story about the origin of humankind, a new creature pinched out of a lump of earth. In the words of the Torah, "And G-d breathed the breath of life into the earth creature, and it pulsed with life: a new living soul…. nephesh." And in the Greek scriptures, the word "psyche" was used, as in the famous question, attributed to Jesus, "What good is it if you acquire everything in the world, but end up losing your psyche?" (i.e. your "self" or your "soul").

Neither of the Hebrew or Greek words seemed awfully theological to me. They both seem to mean self… person…human being. Period. After all, when I stand up to leave a dinner party and say, "I'm gonna take myself home now," I don't imagine for a minute that my "self" is something separate from me, some transparent thing that I can carry home with me in a sack.

Now all of these learnings confused me. Clearly, somehow, the idea that a soul was like an inner ghost, the real person, had come about from some source. It's not clearly found in either the Hebrew or the Greek testament.

So where did this idea come from?

As I studied more, I learned that some of the Greek philosophers had come to see the psyche, the soul, as the changeless part of a human being. They figured that there was something continuous about the "I am" spoken by a five year old, the "I am" spoken by a twenty-five-year-old, the "I am" spoken by a fifty-five-year-old, and the "I am" spoken by an eighty-five year old. The child might be crawling on the floor playing, the young person might be running a race, the fifty-five-year-old might be out of shape and gray, and the eighty-five-year-old might be stooped and walking with a cane. Yet all of these physically different types answered to the same name, and cried out, "Here I am!"

There must be something that does not change, philosophers like Plato reasoned, and that is the psyche, the soul, the imperishable reality inside us. Our flesh, so subject to change like wounds and wrinkles, is only like a set of clothes; one day we shall take off these clothes, and rise to join the changeless and immortal Spirit.

However, other Greek philosophers, like Herakleitos, reasoned just the opposite. "Everything changes," said Herakleitos, "even the soul." If you put your foot into the river once, you can never put that foot back into the same river. For both the river water will have flowed on, and the foot itself will have changed position, and its toes at least will have wiggled a bit since first dipping in the water.

The Buddhists agreed with Herakleitos. "An Atta," said Siddartha the Buddha in his native tongue, expressing his most basic doctrine… "no soul, no self." Any sort of permanence is all an illusion. Everything flows. Nothing stays the same. And human beings are not so much things, as they are processes flowing like rivers through the landscape of the ages. They flow until they lose themselves in the sandy delta of the sea, called by the well-known Sanskrit word "nirvana."

Of course, Buddha himself was reacting to Hindu philosophy, which says that the Atman, or Soul, at its very essence, is the same as the Ineffable Godhead behind all of creation. The personal Self, when seen in all simplicity, is the local outlay of the great divine Self which glows at the heart of the Universe with imperturbable serenity.

By now you can see how talk of the soul can be frustrating. The more you know, the more complex it gets. When Wink Smith, in my former church, pointed out Charlie Smith (no relation) sitting quietly in his chair, weeping after a moving sermon given by an intern, he said, "That man there is the soul of this church." He wasn't saying Charlie was a ghost or a little piece of God…he was saying simply that Charlie was the first to be moved by things among the congregation. He was kind of an emotional barometer, in tune with the deep things of the heart and unashamed to show it.

Furthermore, the great psychologist Freud worked with human souls, not minds. He used the word "psyche" in all of his writings, even though the English versions translate that as "mind." Freud himself meant soul. After all, as an educated European, he knew the famous Greek story of Eros and Psyche, and he conceived of the human soul with such storied language. He saw the stories of a person's life, and their unconscious reflections in image and impulse, to be the measure of the human soul. And Carl Jung, his great rival, nonetheless agreed. He thought of himself as standing in the same line as pastoral religious clergy, who, a thousand years ago, referred to themselves as curates, that is those who had, in their hands, the ability to help cure broken souls. In short, they were what my friends say I am, a soul saver.

Our two poets this morning seem to reflect this complex and beautiful history. Louise Gluck speaks in her poem to fragile wild flowers glowing in the field through a fence. "O the Soul, the Soul!" she cries out, apparently to the voices of theologians haunting her head. "Your poor idea of heaven…. absence of change. Do you really want eternal life? Are your thoughts really so compelling as that?" Gluck chastises the theologians for looking for changelessness, and like Herakleitos and the Buddhists, urges them to stop looking inside themselves so much, and to consider the "expansive field of buttercups" that they are part of, fragile and waving in the wind, and quite perishable.

On the other hand, the poet Brandi suggests that the soul is something "deep as the apple's seed" inside us. It's like the "chalked string of the violin" before the bow sets it to playing. It's also, movingly, our capacity to feel a deep distress at the thought that our minds have created weapons of mass destruction, such as the nuclear bomb we tested at Bikini Atoll. With Freud, he suggests that the soul is something deeper than surface chatter, the sexual desire underneath skirt and tie coming out as more basic than the veneer of polite civilization. But soul is even more basic than that, deeper than, in his unsubtle words, the impulse to "feeling each other up," deeper than even church things, or the arts, or god-talk itself. Soul is that deep desire for intimacy on a brilliant September noon, the gentle agreement between friends over supper. It's deeper than our secret rages, or our unconscious desires. It's deeper even than any fixed idea of the self, and the poet even uses the word "no self" in his poem, coming back around again to the Buddha. But then, even in English, haven't we always called the most soulful people we know, "selfless persons?"

In the end, for me, the word "soul" benefits from all the riches it gathered along the long river journey toward its meaning. In fact, it cunningly resists any simple meaning. But it does always seems to be asking us to become simpler, to always take the time to look under our surface behavior to our deeper, more basic and simple motivations.

It asks us for our honesty, not so much toward each other, as to ourselves. It asks us to feel…not to explain the music but to make it, not to discuss the meaning of love, but to love so hard as to risk broken-heartedness, and then, with even deeper loving, to transcend even that terrible suffering.

To live a soulful life is indeed to be vulnerable to life, "beyond the nervous coughs," beyond the false "anxiety" that tempts us to think we are neatly in charge of things. It encourages us to give up the "hammering arguments," in Brandi's wonderful phrase, that I began inside me during high school, about whether I am a body or a soul, a physical being or spiritual being.

It's to return, strangely enough for a congregation of Unitarian Universalists, to the old biblical reflection about nephesh and psyche, words which don't allow for some neat split between the material and the spiritual, the high and the low, the deep and the surface. I am a soul, a nephesh, a psyche. That is one way of looking at me. I am also a body. That is another way of looking at me. In either case, I am a whole person, and I am totally myself. Not a physical being only, or a spiritual being only, but a human being.

To try and determine if soul is only some hidden metaphor for aspects of my physiology, or rather inhabits me like a ghost, is as foolish a waste of time for the skeptic as for the believer. For the question itself implies that the soul is a thing, like a thimble or a stone or a rusty pocket watch, and that, folks, is to diminish its deep, deep beauty.

On the other hand, to try and say that I am "only" a body is equally ludicrous, since my body is meaningless by itself. It cannot live by itself, outside a network of relationship to all things. I am not a body unless my body is part of the body of the universe, as interlocked with distant stars and dry grasses out in the memorial garden as it is with its own coursing blood supply and electric nerves.

I am body. I am soul. I am, in short, myself. And like the river, I have been myself all my life, even when I was a tiny trickle in the arms of my mother, and I shall be myself in years to come when, in my old age, I spread out like a delta and enter the great Sea.

Unlike the buttercups in Gluck's poem, however, I am not dreaming of being the same me forever, or of coming to some place where there is absence of change. For if I can say I am a body, and I am a soul, I might also say, I am a river, that moves and changes and goes through time, flowing, flowing, and flowing on.

And in the end, maybe my non-religious friends who tease me about saving souls are not too far off the mark, so to speak…maybe part of my work, and thus part of your work, is to help human souls, human bodies, that is human persons, nephesh, psyche…come to find some peace in the ebb and flow of the currents in their lives, flowing, flowing, changing and flowing, soulfully, bodily, all the way to beautiful, beautiful sea.

Prayer at the Fountain  [back to top]

Up from the fountain of the universe,
the free water of stars and clouds to
quench my soul's thirst.
Up from the fountain of the universe,
the free water of dew on crocus and paper-white petals,
to quench my bodily thirst.
Up from the fountain of the universe,
the free water of my companions,
who quench my deep human thirst.
Up from the fountain of the universe,
a soulful, embodied life of love.
Praise and amen!

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