In today's Gospel reading, Jesus speaks powerful words about our soul, raising the question of what is there if we gain the whole world at the cost of losing it. To ponder the soul that God has given us, I'd like to share two stories with you.
The first story is from my days of teaching at our Theological School at Trinity College. During that time, I
was a member of the Centre for Ageing and Pastoral Studies at Charles Sturt University (now called the
Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture). I undertook research into our relationship with God as we
get older. Especially the relationship the people in their 80s to 90s had with God. (If you look up, you will
see that I have written two chapters on this subject in two textbooks and two academic journals).
In our research team was a senior gerontologist whom I used to call Doc Long fondly. I called him Doc
Long because he had the spitting image of the US Congressman Rep. Clarence D. Long. He played an
essential role in securing funding for the Mujahedeen rebels' covert war against Soviet troops in the 1980s Afghanistan. His name was immortalised in the 2007 Hollywood movie Charlie Wilson's War. "Doc" was Long's nickname.
In 2008, Gerontologist Doc Long was 83 years old and was a real character – he was young at heart and
never considered himself old. He always used to refer to the elderly we were working with as "old people"
and got offended if anyone had called him old.
I shared this brief anecdote to tell you about someone very special we met in a Retirement Village in
Melbourne. This extraordinary person's name was Gertrude. She was 88 years of age. As a way of trying to
understand how we may think about ourselves and God as we reach our 80s and 90s,
we used to invite people to write poems as a research method. Here is a part of the poem Gertrude wrote for me.
My beautiful face wrinkled and old;
my hair is no longer curly and long …
My beautiful body isfragile and torn;
wasting away like a candle lit in the barn
My soul shining bright like a flame,
I don't think I am old
I love my God, who keeps my soul warm
Until I die when I am old
Very beautiful. Gertrude passed away after about a week of writing this poem. And I remember us
celebrating her life. Later, I came to know more about the beautiful life that she had spent in service to God and fellow human beings.
The second story is from my final year as a theological student in 1992, when I completed the 6-month Advance CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) in a psychiatric ward at the Auckland Hospital. I hope you remember me sharing my experiences from that time and about meeting the exceptionally skilled Jesuit psychotherapist Fr Marcus Prior.
Recently, while searching for a book in a box that I had not unpacked since 1999, I came across the DOS
computer disks in which I had stored verbatim I had written from the days of my CPE. (As some of us may remember, DOS discs were the discs in which we stored computer-written documents in the 1990s before USB storage sticks became the norm). I was extremely excited to find these discs. I got the documents in the DOS disks converted into modern Microsoft Word format so that I could read the verbatims of conversations and therapy sessions again.
Compiling these verbatims helped me reflect on them and discern God's grace, which was at work in the people who came for therapy.
The people who came for therapy were ordinary people like you and me but who had challenges in life
like all of us have, but found it difficult to understand or cope with them.
The purpose of the therapy sessions was not to treat people as "patients" or dis-eased with mental problems but to help people discover the purpose of their lives. In giving therapy, Fr. Marcus spoke to the soul of the person and helped the person to understand why God has placed him/her in the situations they have found themselves in.
Reading them anew amazed me, and I discovered new insights into my writing.
Although I never formally became a psychotherapist, I have studied the art of accessing people's souls and developed skills in ministry over the last thirty years or so.
With these experiences behind me now, I came to read the verbatims I wrote in 1992 with fresh eyes.
With those new insights, I could throw fresh light on the words of Jesus: the question Jesus asked in
the Gospel reading: What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or
what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?
As we live in this world, it goes without saying that we struggle to have some control over what
happens to us. We struggle to understand why life treats us the way we experience it.
Just now, with the daily increase in the number of people contracting COVID-19 and stringent restrictions
being put into effect, individually and collectively, we all are struggling. Many people in our communities
struggle to make ends meet and in the process, trade-off our well-being, our families, our loved ones, our
health, and our own lives. The grocery items I had collected over the last few months had been almost
given away to people who come to the vicarage with genuine needs.
Thinking of it all, how many circumstances make us feel sad, lost, bewildered, angry, depressed, and
hopeless?
These are all everyday experiences we share to one degree or another. Some experience them less, but
today, most people experience them more and most of the time. Of course, life has a way of
normalising these and helping us come to terms with them.
But do we understand what happens to us when facing such experiences?
Reflecting on those verbatims from 1992 and my experiences in ministry, I know now that each time
we experience sadness, loss, sickness, or despair, we lose a bit of our souls. The loss is not a quantitative loss like a glass of water evaporating. Still, it is a loss in the sense of the soul being lost to our physical life – like it being made to withdraw and suppressed.
In such times, we begin to forget the beauty with which our souls came into this world – the gifts, the
talents, and strengths we came with to accomplish the will of God for our lives in this world.
Sometimes, we lose our souls when various projections are put on us by our families, friends, authority
figures, and even by the society and culture we belong to, which makes us forget who we really are. This is when the saying "the lights are on, but nobody's home" becomes a reality of our lives.
Through my experiences in ministry, I have learnt that sometimes extreme circumstances can make us lose our souls entirely. I have ministered to victims of rape, war, and divorce, and also with those who have tragically lost a loved one, mothers who have had miscarriages, and people who had lost limbs due to an accident, illness or surgery. In all such circumstances, we are faced with the risk of losing something of our soul and losing it entirely.
In all these experiences, we lose something of our soul. In extreme conditions, I have witnessed how
Someone could lose their soul and never find it again.
Isn't it interesting that we, even without formal training in psychotherapy or theology, we can identify
someone who has lost the soul and name that person a lost soul?
My gerontologist friend Doc Long had a wicked sense of humour. Sometimes, when we visited elderly
people who are demented, that is, those who have lost their memory, he would ask aloud: "Is anybody
home?" Really, he was talking to the person and asking whether his or her soul was in the body.
It is easy to get ourselves entangled in the things we do and our experiences and lose our
souls. Jesus' words are loud and clear: What's the point of getting control of the whole world if getting it
kills you? And what worth is it if you are to lose your soul It is pointless if we try to compete for more than it is necessary and try to possess more than what we need other than what we really need. It is even pointless trying to earn more than what we really need. It is also pointless to eat more than it is necessary to live because it will, sooner or later, make us sick and irreversibly compromise our health.
Jesus is speaking to us today and asking again: What's the point of getting control of the whole world if
getting it kills us?". And, what worth is it if we are to lose our soul?
We are not without hope. We have a good shepherd who cares for us and watches over us. Our Saviour tells us: "Come to me, all who labour and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest. Take my
yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Mt: 13:28) Jesus is our Saviour. I do not know whether you realise that Saviour comes from the Greek word Soteria. Soter means the one who heals. Jesus heals our wounds. The wounds of sadness, loss, grief, shock, and illness. All that can make us lose our souls.
May we hear his words and not lose our souls.
Gertrude's words tell us how our souls can flame even in the hardest of times if we give heed to Jesus'
words:
My soul shining bright like the flame,
I don't think I am old..
I love my God, who keeps my soul warm
Until I die when I am old.
Amen
Let us pray:
Eternal God, the light of the minds that know you,
the joy of the souls that love you,
strength of the wills that serve you;
grant us so to know you that we may truly love you,
and so to love you that we may gladly serve you,
now and always. Amen.
