Transforming choices impacting life's meaningless or exhilaration

There is a developmental order in the soul, such that if it does not receive what it needs to receive within appropriate periods of time as it grows, its further progression toward wholeness is permanently hindered. It will never be what it might have been. Sometimes horrible events of later life, such as being tortured or cruelly betrayed, have similar effects, from which the soul may never recover.

Fundamental aspects of life such as art, sleep, sex, ritual, family (“roots”), parenting, community, health, and meaningful work all are in fact soul functions, and they fail and fall apart to the degree that soul diminishes. It is possible that the reason modern intellectuals have failed to find soul is that soul really is no longer present in their individual lives. Perhaps something like a soulless life really is possible and not just something to be portrayed in fashionable literary works.

That would explain why meaning is such a problem for human beings today. “Meaning” in action is fundamentally a matter of “carry over” or transcendence. Meaningful experience flows. It does not leave you stuck on something you can’t get past—whether a word you don’t understand or a pointless social situation. Meaning is one of the greatest needs of human life, one of our deepest hungers—perhaps it is, in the final analysis, the most basic need in the realm of the human experience.5 Almost anything can be born if life as a whole is meaningful. But in the absence of meaning, boredom and mere effort or willpower are all that is left. “Dead” religion or a dead job or relationship is one that has to be carried on in “meaningless” human routine. In boredom and carrying on by mere willpower, almost nothing can be endured, and people who are well off by all other physical and social standards find such a life unbearable. They are “dead souls.” By contrast, though in meaningful experience we are very active, the presence of meaning, with its power of “carryover,” relieves the pain of effort and makes even great strain exhilarating. It is as if a power beyond us meets our action and carries us. That is always, in some measure, the presence of soul.

Or consider Jesus’ teaching that it does not profit one to gain the whole world and lose his or her own soul (Matthew 16:26). One might well ask, before taking up the question of profit, how is that possible? What does it mean to lose your soul? Can you actually do that? Does it describe anyone you know? Well, what it means is that your whole life is no longer under the direction of your inner stream of life, which has been taken over by exteriors. The rich farmer who said, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry” (Luke 12:19), is simply a case in point. He had abandoned his soul in favor of externalities. He had laid up treasure for himself, and was not “rich toward God” (verse 21). He is an illustration of those who do not recognize that they are meant to be “aliens and strangers” upon the earth, and who, as a result, turn their life over to “desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul” (1 Peter 2:11, NRSV).

These and many other passages make clear that the soul is the most basic level of life in the individual, and one that is by nature rooted in God. We must take care to do whatever we can to keep it in his hands, recognizing all the while that we can only do this with his help.

His own greatness of soul made meekness and lowliness the natural way for him to be (Philippians 2:3-11). Being in his yoke is not a matter of taking on additional labor to crush us all the more, but a matter of learning how to use his strength and ours together to bear our load and his. We will find his yoke an easy one and his burden a light one because, in learning from him, we have found rest to our soul. What we have learned is, primarily, to rest our soul in God. Rest to our soul is rest in God. My soul is at peace only when it is with God, as a child with its mother.  pp. 201-209 EYE-OPENING SOURCE