I’ve had many conversations with my age group about death. Invariably the subject of an afterlife comes up. The discussion revolves around ideas of a soul and whether it survives after our death. The soul’s been talked about forever. It’s tricky to define.
As a child, I began reciting this prayer as a nightly ritual. I knelt by my bed, reverently placed folded hands on the covers while saying:
Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Next I prayed for all my deceased relatives, asking God to look after them. I didn’t want them to feel abandoned, the way I did when they died.
Their souls and mine, I imagined were like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Like wafting smoke, in its incorporeal state, my soul would one day go through walls and closed doors like Casper, and unconstrained by any physical obstacles, soar between heaven and earth as it chose. I wasn’t frightened in imagining the soul’s ghostly mien. I thought it was neat.
I knew that the best time for seeing souls during the day was when cumulous clouds rolled overhead. Their cotton-like configurations took forms I believed to be the heavenly host. Heaven, I noticed, had a lot of old men with long white beards and there were always loads of sheep. Like the childhood myths that I once treasured and that served me well, they became less credible as I grew older. The feeling that I had a soul, however, I never lost. I had only vague notions about what it might be.
Many people believe the soul survives our body. The specific formulas vary with religious and cultural traditions but the belief that there’s life after physical death is remarkably persistent throughout all traditions. Is it a wish? Is it a fact? On our spiritual journey, we will, at some point, wonder about it.
As children, we saw the world with a clarity we might never have again. A child is always curious. What he or she hears, sees or touches is approached with an anticipation filled with wonder. The child’s fascination at Christmas is a case in point. In childhood we live expectantly, anticipating the next wonder to appear. I believe that then, we were close to what I understand a soul to be. The locus of a soul is in the imagination. I don’t mean this dismissively, like “It’s all in your mind,” but, yes, it’s really all in your mind. I would add “heart” to that.
The tradeoff in going from childhood to adulthood is that the adult mind becomes conditioned by information that, rather than enlightening us about what we see, can skew the clarity of perception. The greatest receptor in a child’s mind is his or her curiosity and imagination. There a child encounters the world and processes it. There’s purity in that way of seeing that’s hard to capture as we grow into adults. By the time we are adults, we have developed “opinions.” Opinions are the gatekeepers of our imagination. These gatekeepers admit to awareness only what has been first thoroughly censored. The imagination gets compromised. I believe that the search for our souls will take us back to our imagination. We’ll find our souls but only after rummaging through all the opinions that have kept it hidden from us. Our souls are the elusive agency by which we see to the heart of a matter.
Einstein, one of histories geniuses changed the world because he had an insatiable curiosity, a florid imagination and some whacky ideas. He said as a child he loved to imagine that he was riding on a light beam. This product of his imagination became the impetus for eventually developing his theory of relativity. He liked playing with his imagination – he called it “gedankenexperiment,” the German for “thought experiment” or what some might call head-trips. The head-trips, however, were deeply rooted in the seat of his imagination. To say the revelation he had was all in his mind is not an understatement. The mathematical computations eventually validated the science of the idea but the revelation of it came first; it appeared to him as an image, in his imagination.
In the spiritual life the same phenomenon is called revelation.
An old tale gets at this strange wonder in another way.
The gods in their celestial abode convened an emergency meeting. Human beings were increasing encroaching on the gods’ divine attributes and they were anxious that they’d lose their powers to humans. Humans had invaded heaven with their space rockets, decoded DNA, developed computers that speak, transferred hearts from one person to another and made new limbs for the lame to walk. “They think they’re god,” one minor divinity commented.
The gods decided they must hide the divine spark where humans would never find it. A variety of proposals were made: hide it in the earth’s core, lose it in black holes, or place it on the highest mountain. They finally agreed on this proposal: hide the divine spark deep in the human mind (I would add, heart) and they’ never guess in a thousand years that’s where to find it.
Ever since we first walked the earth, we’ve been searching for our souls and, would you believe , they’ve been right there with us the whole time.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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