Yes, I’m a skeptic, but a yearning skeptic like those characters in the novels of Saul Bellow who reject orthodox religion but are smitten, nevertheless, by the mystical strands of Judaism, like the Kaballah, in which they are intellectually and emotionally wrapped.
Logically, we know we are specks of dust; the earth we stand on is a mass of rock. And our mutual spinning starts and stops. We are tops, both the Earth and we ourselves, and so we spin on for our day before we topple.
What then to make of all this talk of the soul?
It’s an expression that is ancient and impregnable. No one will put aside the word, the thought because I scoff at it a bit. It’s been rolling down the eons, unobstructed, since before we began to make history.
We think of the “primitives” around their campfires, keeping out the dark and chill, invoking the name of their gods, imploring a connection with something larger than themselves. The soul is what united them with what was out there in the dark, beyond, way beyond their rational understanding.
We think, without too much difficulty of the modern primitives who huddle around the campfires of their churches, invoking God and soul against the howling darkness.
Or the mystics, nuts, Hare Krishnas, New Agers, you name ‘em, who insist on connection.
What do you mean by soul? I asked my wife, the other night, part of our pillow talk. As Jen is the daughter of a conservative Protestant minister, she might seem entitled to have an opinion on such things.
She looked at me sweetly and confessed her uncertainty.
I wonder, I said, if it’s not just that connection with our ancestors, the thread both genealogical and more than that, with whatever it is that has come before us — and that will keep us going in the form of our heirs and assigns?
The soul is that “father-stuff,” to use a Whitmanism, or “mother-stuff” that we send through the eons? That spunk off the old block with which we ward off terror and provide for something beyond ourselves? The roots, shoots, leaves, and tendrils with which we reach down, and up, rejoicing that we are not, after all, alone?
You hear the word “soul” and perhaps you think of the Nuns who defined it for you. I think of “soul” and search to find it within my life experience. A Gnostic holds that advantage.