Welcome to a brief series inspired by my reading of Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore. He’s a theologian, writer, psychologist and former monk. Thanks to Dad for the used copy. I ask for your forgiveness in advance for any theological ‘looseness’ or over-psychologizing which may be found herein.

And yes Mike, I’m using the word ‘soul.’ Perhaps the series will provide us food for thought about what we all mean by the word.

Overall, these posts will be a reflection on life as part of a church community, specifically my life as a student, theologian, psychologist, female (Tom Petty fan, and Golden Spoon addict) living as part of a church community. Let’s begin with a quote from Moore’s work on cultivating soulful living as part of a community.

But a community is not a wholly rational construction. Each community has a complicated personality, with a varied past and mixed values. It has a soul and so it also has a shadow. –p. 190

Shadow. A word psychologists use to describe that within our own souls, and the soul of a community, which we would rather bury deeply and forget to put on the map. Christians use the phrase sinful nature to connote something related. George Lucas prefers the dark side. Stevenson got at it literarily through Mr. Hyde. Try as we might, we simply cannot erase completely the uglier parts of human life or self, and I do not refer simply to those things typically termed ‘sin,’ but rather to those seemingly intrinsic aspects of life which we fear: Conflict, anger, disappointment, shame, failure, loss, etc. We attempt to write these experiences out of our personal and communal lives by casting them into a category of needless or unpleasant things. But what if there is more use and more worth for these undesirable experiences than we care to believe?

Church life in particular has been plagued lately by the shadow-side of success: failure. We worship “success,” whether it takes the form of increasing numbers, adequate financial giving, ‘peaceful’ and ‘unified’ relational exchanges. Anything outside this mold is perceived as a threat to success, and threats are always to be feared.

But sometimes fear is good. It gives the gift of the opportunity to face squarely that which is larger than we are, which denies our attempts at control, and which demands a recognition of our limits.

If we could understand the feelings of inferiority and humbling occasioned by failure as meaningful in their own right, then we might incorporate failure into our work so that it doesn’t literally devastate us. –p. 190

No one likes to feel inferior or humbled, but since we are and ought to be, we may as well learn to help one another through. As we backtrack, useless map in hand, to the place where that which we fear is buried–unmarked but not forgotten–we travel to a point of surrender, to one another and to God. As we unearth the less acceptable side of our soul and life together, we open ourselves to the humbling, healing, and growth which only an honest recognition of our genuine thoughts, feelings, and limits can bring.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 at 3:43 pm and is filed under From the nation of Indig. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.