As we make our journey through different elements of healing our whole selves, today we come to the matter of healing our souls. I want to ask two questions this morning: what do our souls need healing from? And, what are some ways to find healing for our souls? The well known Greek word for soul is the word from which we get our word “psychology.” In the modern world psychology has been the primary way we deal with our souls. But that is a very recent development. What Thomas Moore calls the “Care of the Soul” is something that has usually been the purview of religion – priests and shamans have been the primary “psychologists” for most of human history.
But there is a problem with religion being the realm for caring for the soul. Religion is often perceived as primarily a moral enterprise. Religion imbues society with moral values and then guards those values. At the same time, moralism is one of the most effective shields against the soul because it protects us from its intricacy. A great deal of soul is hidden behind moralistic attitudes. This means that many people who are drawn to religion fear the soul and are afraid to reflect on their moral principles because they might change. At the same time, people who are drawn to the soul often resent religion because it tries to impose its morality on them. I have always loved today’s passage from Jeremiah because I believe it offers a path for religion that doesn’t get trapped in moralism and offers true life and healing for the soul. What does our soul need healing from?
Our souls need healing from the dishonoring they received in childhood. I have been repeating every week that each of us is born with a gift that only we can give to the world. If we are able to respond to that gift our souls thrive. If we fail to give it the world won’t receive it. And if we fail to discover and appreciate it our souls will shrivel up.
Most cultures believe that our souls are given a companion that guides us in discovering, giving form to, protecting and exercising our gift. The Romans called this companion “genius.” The Greeks called it the “daimon.” Christians call it the “guardian angel.” Some views of parenting call for breaking the spirit of the child in order to help the child function effectively in society. Unfortunately, if & when the person wakes up & discovers that what was broken was his or her true self, there is a need for deep healing.
Sometimes the genius is so strong it refuses to be broken. Yehudi Menuhim, the great violinist, used to go with his parents before he was even four years old to hear violin concerts. The concertmaster Louis Persinger would break into a solo passage as little Yehudi sat with his parents up in the gallery of the Curran Theatre. Later in his life he wrote how, “During one such performance I asked my parents if I might have a violin for my fourth birthday and Louis Persinger to teach me to play it.” It was a very grandiose request for a four year old. His hands weren’t even big enough to hold a violin. But his genius knew what it wanted and needed. His family responded to his request, but with a gift that they considered appropriate for his age and size. On his fourth birthday a family friend gave him a toy violin made of metal with metal strings. He writes, “I burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing more to do with it.” (Unfinished Journey, Yehudi Menuhin, NY: Knopf, 1976, p. 22-23)
James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) points out that the soul isn’t age appropriate. Yehudi’s arms could not extend and his fingers could not articulate enough for a full-sized violin; but the vision was full-sized to match the music in his mind. He had to have what he wanted because “I did know, instinctively, that to play was to be.” Sometimes this takes the form of literally crushing the gift. Parents get so impatient with the mismatch between the soul and the fingers that they break the fingers. At other times the soul is wounded when society & family teach children to adopt a common story as they grow up. When the common story is taught before or instead of the soul’s story, everyone loses. Jeremiah admits that under the old covenant or the old agreement this was the case. People started out in life with common laws and a common story. This is a living from the outside in. The new agreement Jeremiah anticipates encourages people to discover their story rather than learn it from someone outside who teaches them. Then we can develop our own relationship to the common story.
A second soul wound that needs to be healed is literalism. Walter Breuggemann speaks of the prophetic imagination. Nothing kills imagination like literalism. Many Christians have tried to turn the prophetic word into literal predictions of things to come. In so doing they miss the energy and the healing power of the prophetic tradition. One of the teachers I met this summer said, “The real problem is a loss of faith in the dream of life and the immediacy of the spirit that animates the world…We are in a struggle for the presence of genuine imagination in the face of the hardening of ideas and the narrowing of hearts that ensues when people make god one-sided and consider their own beliefs to be literally true and universal.” (Water of life, iii)
One powerful example of how taking things too literally destroys imagination is the city of Jerusalem. Jeremiah spoke of the city being rebuilt. But was he talking literally or was he engaging the imagination? Michael Meade speaks about how over the millennia, taking Jerusalem literally has created tremendous conflict. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all see it literally as a place of origin. It is the place that all three religions began according to their stories. It is a place of three feuding brothers. When the world was thought to be flat, Jerusalem was considered the center of the world because on the summer solstice the sun shines exactly vertically on the site of the temple. Maps from that time show Jerusalem as the center from which everything else in the world flowed.
When this view continues to be held literally it leads to terribly destructive strategies. The current administration in this country operates from a literalistic Christian perspective in attempting to get a foothold in Iraq that will eventually lead to Jerusalem so that we can bring freedom to the entire Middle East. That view bumps up against the equally literalistic view of Jewish and Muslim administrations in other nations. Doesn’t that miss the point of the prophetic imagination? Isn’t the prophetic imagination fueled by a mythic vision of Jerusalem as the city of God descending from above? To literalize that vision is to make people spill endless blood on that hill, to fight over other people’s ideas of what happened on that temple mount. In order to heal our souls we need to rediscover the world as a place where the sacred is seen as present and announcing itself all the time. When we disconnect from the sacred, we tend to make the wrong sacrifices over and over again. When we wake up we wonder again about the sacred, and ask if we want to send our children into a sacrifice that we no longer see as having any value. That is happening today as we wonder what is happening to our souls as we keep sending our young to die in Iraq.
So what are the things that heal our souls? This section of the Book of Jeremiah is called the Book of Consolation. In the midst of Jeremiah’s long complaint, he reminds people that judgment is never God’s last word. Restoration and renewal always await us.
Jeremiah offers a number of elements that lead to healing. The whole chapter leading up to the verses we read is full of singing and water, mostly in the form of weeping. “Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob.” “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back. I will let them walk by brooks of water.” “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion.” “Their life shall become like a watered garden.”
Singing and weeping opens the heart to both the sorrow and the joy of the world. Shedding the tears shaped within each heart moves the soul and softens the boundaries between people. Most cultures that are still in touch with their roots know the healing power of singing and weeping. I’ve experienced it mostly among African Americans and Latin Americans. In the presence of anger that is about to get out of hand or sadness that is about to overwhelm, someone breaks into a song and everyone gradually joins in. The singing is often accompanied by weeping as if the waves of sound were washing ancient wounds in a river made fresh with tears.
Tears can also transform anger. But it happens mostly by releasing untold stories that shift the ground on which people are fighting. Storytelling helps us see the larger themes that circle our lives. There was a tense moment one night at the retreat when we got to talking about divorce and marriage. A number of men were telling how they had either anguished over a decision to divorce in the past, or were currently considering divorce in order to save their souls. Their stories were intense, and evoked empathy from many of us. But some of the men and youth were arguing that marriage must be saved no matter what – that it was wrong to talk about saving the soul through something like divorce. Their responses felt like a form of judgment that felt inappropriate and alienating.
Then their stories started coming out. Several young men talked about growing up without a father. They literally pleaded with the men in the room not to abandon their children by getting a divorce. One man was especially harsh and persistent in his judgment. Several men who hadn’t said anything stood up and literally screamed at that man saying how inappropriate his comments were, and how he was alienated from the spirit of the group. This went on for a long time until that man’s story started spilling out: “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be so harsh. But my wife died 18 years ago and I would give anything to have her back, and I just can’t believe that anyone would voluntarily give up something like I long for every day.” Then he started weeping – waves of lament that went on for 10 minutes while the whole room just listened and cried whatever tears his tears evoked in us. It shifted the whole mood. It didn’t eliminate the anger over the judgmentalism, but it built bridges where bridges had been blown up in the previous hour. Tears and songs and stories are powerful elements for healing the soul.
Jeremiah ends this passage offering forgiveness. Stories of forgiveness signal our longing for forgiveness. Ernest Hemingway tells the story of the Spanish father who wanted to be reconciled with his son who ran away from home to the city of Madrid. The father misses the son and puts an advertisement in the local newspaper El Liberal. The advertisement read, "Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana at noon on Tuesday. All is forgiven! Love, Papa." Paco is such a common name in Spain that when the father went to the Hotel Montana the next day at noon there were 800 young men named Paco waiting for their fathers! Hemingway's story reminds us how desperate all of us are for forgiveness.
Another story is told about a six year old girl named Ruby Bridges taught the world an unforgettable lesson about forgiveness. In 1960, Ruby walked into the William France elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana the first day after a federal judge mandated the desegregation of the New Orleans school district. Ruby was the only African American student in the entire school. Every day she walked through a gauntlet of angry adults who insulted her with racial slurs and foul language. Robert Coles, the Harvard psychologist, interviewed Ruby Bridges in the midst of this pressure packed situation. Coles had seen the little girl walking through the crowd with her lips moving. He asked, what she was saying? Was she talking back to them?
"No!" she replied.Dr. Coles said that Ruby Bridges' gracious act of forgiveness transformed his own life.
"Then what were you saying?" Coles asked.
"I was praying!"
"Praying?" Robert Coles said in a surprised voice. "Why were you praying?"
Ruby said, "I usually pray before I go to school but this particular morning I forgot so I prayed as I walked into the school."
"What did you pray?" Robert Coles asked.
I prayed, "God forgive them. That's what Jesus did on the cross."
Discovering our own story, and connecting our stories to the stories of others is core work in the healing of our souls. As I shared three weeks ago, Immanuel is entering a year in which we need to engage each other around our stories in order to heal the soul of this church, and to find healing for our own souls. A week from Saturday we will be gathering to share some of the stories that have been emerging this month. I encourage you to join the circle of healing.
