WHAT THE SOUL WANTS

Parker Palmer in Spirituality and Health (September/October 2004) writes this about the soul. “The soul wants to keep us rooted in the ground of our being, resisting the tendency of other faculties, like the intellect and ego, to uproot us from who we are; the soul wants to keep us connected to the community in which we find life, for it understands that relationships are necessary if we are to thrive; the soul wants to tell us the truth about ourselves, our world, and the relationship between the two, whether the truth is easy or hard to hear; the soul wants to give us life and wants us to pass that gift along, to become life-givers in a world that deals too much with death.”

     The soul holds us together when other forces, both within and without, seem to want to tear us apart. Without the soul life would be chaos; with it life is at least manageable most of the time and tolerable the rest. But it is a battle all of the time given our innate predilection to want things our way, to go it our way, to lie to ourselves and to do so much that is neither life-giving nor life-sustaining.

     The soul’s greatest gift, however, is its ability to keep us sane and on track and we don’t even know that that is what is taking place inside us. Yes, we are aware of the truth that there are internal and external conflicts that come our way each day, sometimes battles within wars. Whether we realize it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, it is the soul that keeps all those battles from getting out of hand and the longer-lasting and more difficult wars from overwhelming us.

     The soul, as Parker hints, is what keeps our ego in check, that part of us that so easily runs amuck in its pursuit of honor and glory, deserved or undeserved. Our egos can get the better of us, driving us in directions we should not take, even drowning out the warnings of our soul that we are headed for trouble if not downright disaster. Were it not for the soul, I suspect our egos would doom us all.

     Why? Well, when the ego gets going, it convinces us, or at least tries to, that we are self-sufficient, that we need no one, that we can go it alone without any support from any community. It is the soul that steers us back into community, pushes us to return to those necessary relationships that sustain and fill us, without which we would be left alone with only a deflated ego to hang on to. Besides, without some community to inflate our ego, what good would it be?

     And even when our ego is at its worst, it is the soul that tells us the truth about ourselves even when we do not want to listen to that truth. We may be able to fool others, but we cannot fool ourselves, not for long and certainly not forever. For it is the soul that gives us life, and in giving us life helps us give life to others.

     As Palmer notes, there is already too much dying and death in this world of ours caused by egos gone wild, communities and relationships being destroyed, dishonesty and deceit everywhere we look. It is not a pretty picture. It is our soul that gives us life in the midst of death and our corporate soul that helps bring life out of death.                 WJP