First Parish Bedford UU

“Soul”
A homily by Rev. John E. Gibbons
delivered on Halloween Sunday, October 31, 2010
at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

If you were not here last Sunday you missed something remarkable. Mark Morrison-Reed preached up a Universalist storm about a God so loving that she would drag by the collar every last soul kicking and screaming into heaven – not only Hitler, Mark assured us – but every last one of you skeptics as well!

The last time someone preached here with such conviction about God’s love, it was then-UUA President Bill Sinkford. And when Bill was finished, I recall our minister emeritus Jack Mendelsohn complimenting Bill…on his tie, and his posture, and his delivery! Everything met with Jack’s approval except the content of his sermon.
 
I think had Jack been here (instead of New Orleans where he was last weekend), he would have complimented Mark exactly as he had complimented Bill.  

Jack is more than a little suspicious of preachers who favor God and love. That’s not his idea of religion!
 
Religion ought to pay more attention to real human beings, Jack would say, and not so much to the gods we create. Love is all right, Jack will concede, but it tends to sentimentality. Really we should aspire to empower love, Jack would say, for when love is empowered it strikes for justice – and no matter what God is or is not doing – most of the time Jack at least is ready to drag every last one of us by the collars, kicking and screaming, into the human struggle for justice.
 
So this morning I am preaching, not so much about God or love, but about another word that is vulnerable to Jack’s and your criticism. Because it’s Halloween – All Saints, All Souls, Day of the Dead, Hallatak Napja – I’m preaching about soul. Soul.

I’m actually going to be reading to you a lot from a couple of other people, the first of whom is Columbia College philosophy professor Stephen Asma who says, “No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown there’s no there there. But make no mistake, our students are very interested in the soul….”
 
But because soul is such a discredited concept, students aren’t sure what to do and so Asma says, “One response is for believers to rush headlong into a faith-based rejection of rationality and just hold fast to the traditional soul idea; another is to give it a New Age paint job with quantum energy talk.”

“I have been offering them a fresh alternative,” says Asma. “Instead of asking whether we can verify the soul’s existence” – using some ghostbuster positive ectoplasmic field generator technologies or one of the cauldron and test tube machineries that have been getting a workout here this weekend – this professor Asma suggests a Wittgensteinian approach (one of the things I love about preaching is that I get to say things like Wittgensteinian!).

Following the Austrian philosopher, Asma asks: “How do people actually talk about the soul? How is soul talk used in ordinary language? And here we find that the soul is alive and well in certain kinds of expressive language. …You find the following kind of expressions: ‘He is my soul mate,’ or ‘She really sold her soul,’ or ‘That’s good soul food,’ or ‘This nature hike is good for my soul,’ or ‘She is an old soul,’ or ‘James Brown has soul,’ … or ‘Her soul is in heaven now.’”
 
This morning we’ve got soul cakes (said to be the precursor to all trick-or-treating) and there are soul kisses and one of the more unattractive periods in my experiments with facial hair was when I grew a soul patch. Looks good on some guys but not on me.

“When we say that someone is a great soul or that something is good for one’s soul, we’re not using empirical descriptive propositional language but, rather, we’re expressing an emotional attitude. If I say, ‘You’ve got soul,’ I’m not describing some factual state of affairs but it’s more of an evaluation and it expresses as much about the subject (how I see or experience the world) as it says something about the object referenced.”

This professor Asma says more: “The soul is meaningful to many of us without any scientific verification of its existence. That is not the same as just having faith in the soul despite a lack of evidence. I’m not suggesting that familiar view. What I’m suggesting is more sly – the soul can be deeply meaningful whether it exists or not….”  And just by the way, this tends to be my view of God and love, as well.
 
Now here Asma says some things I would not and I actually have some trouble with but hear him out, “When a minister tells parents at their son’s funeral that they will see their son again, and his soul is in a better place, I cannot dismiss it or heap scorn on it. If we professors hear this language as a description of reality, then we’re bound to be irritated by the issue of truant evidence and the lack of warrant. But if we hear it as emotive hope, then our objections fall away. The students in my class are right to want to hold on to this language. Metaphysics aside, the minister’s language seems to suggest that there are emotions so deep and bonds so strong that not even death should end them. That is a beautiful sentiment no matter what you think of the soul.”

I believe that religion ought to pay most attention to human beings, that we ought not let love be diminished to mere sentimentality. But I also believe there are emotions so deep and bonds so strong that not even death can end them. If that means I believe in the human soul, then so be it.

Last Tuesday I lost a friend and a Unitarian Universalist ministerial colleague, Mary Harrington. I first met Mary when she came east to serve our congregation in Marblehead and later in Winchester. She was just my age, 58, young! – and in 2006 she was diagnosed with ALS/Lou Gehrig’s disease.
 
Mostly after her diagnosis Mary led 14 service trips to help rebuild the Gulf Coast after the hurricanes. About a year ago, she and her husband moved to Sheepscot (near Wiscasset) Maine where her bed looked out on a quintessential stunningly gorgeous marsh. I visited her there last month and it was most beautiful. It was not unlike looking out these windows right here now, and seeing the colors and the leaves change.
 
Mary wrote a blog she called DuckDreams and this is what she wrote one week ago, last Sunday, only two days before she died. As I read her words, just look out these windows and imagine what she saw.

“Loose Ends”

Nothing ever really ends. I see this in the marsh, where things certainly change, but they don’t stop. The colors provide a continuing lesson in how the color green, for example, can become greener, or greenish, or green-like, or sort of green, depending on the day, the season, and the light. Right now this is especially true of the browns: the umbers, khakis, caramels, and military camouflage abound. There is no one true brown when you look out the window. Instead there are many many many variations.

So what does this have to do with loose ends? In my life as a person, I have stretched myself towards certain goals, such as the kind of spouse, mother, sibling and friend I long to be for those people in my sphere. Once in a while, I have had that particular thrill of feeling I had gotten something just right, and perhaps I did. But it only lasts such a short time, then there’s the next day, or month, etc. So I can never become a truly pure, purely good anything. There are always changing circumstances – cranky days, and loose ends. Nothing can get pinned down for long. Just like the browns outside don’t stay any particular shade of brown for more than a week or two.

Which leads to the realization that even if you could try with all your might to hold on to one of those glorious connections, it just couldn’t last. This makes leaving hard, wanting so much to find the moment when all is well in every part of my life, and with every person in it. Instead, I have to settle for knowing that at a certain point, things will simply stop where they do. And my ability to improve, repair, refine, or finish will have to be sufficient, and enough.

This is why I rest my eyes on the marsh. The slow, languorous, drawn-out days fill me with a little bit of peace and solace. Sometimes there’s the excitement of a storm, or an astronomical tide – these really get my attention. Mostly, I attune myself with what is easy, swimming, or in flight, or the way the current carries the water in and out with such deftness.

My hope is that I too will sail off on a such a gentle, peaceful current as my friends the geese and ducks do, leaving behind whatever loose ends my little ducky toes didn’t have time to complete – but knowing that my people will come with me in my heart.

There are emotions so deep and bonds so strong that not even death should end them. Mary was a great soul. And as for you, my friends – you who still have the great privilege to kick and to scream and to argue about God and love and politics and every other little and big thing – you as well are great souls.
 
Whatever loose ends your ducky toes don’t have time to complete, you too will come with me in my heart. There are emotions so deep and bonds so strong that not even death should end them.

Amen.  May it be so.  It is so.