The chalice lighting is adapted from 683 in the hymnal:
Let our religion be like sunshine, going everywhere;
Let all space be its temple;
The good heart its shrine;
All truth its creed;
All works of love its ritual;
And divine living its profession of faith.
Let me talk for a minute here about the title of this morning's service: "The Soul Project, Phase II." Some of you will know what this refers to, but many of you won't.
About two and half years ago, Steve Botts organized a sharing service in which several members expressed their thoughts on a topic something like "death and immortality." The only part I remember was John Wiesen reflecting about the ways in which he was inspired by an ancient fossil.
In any case, after the service, during coffee, Henry made some dismissive remark about the possibility of there being anything remotely like an "immortal soul," and I demurred, saying that, philosophically anyway, it was an open question. And with that conversation began the Soul Project.
The conversation with Henry turned into a series of email exchanges that, when printed out in small type, comes to thirty-something pages. In May of 2000, he and I did a joint service in which we attempted to summarize our thoughts. Janet followed this with a service on the topic of suicide. I don't remember them all, but I did one or two more in the fall, and then, in the spring of last year, Henry did a series of three services entitled, "Hearts, Hands and Voices." That's where it stopped. And so I refer to all of those services as Phase I. And today, fifteen months later, we begin Phase II.
I will offer a couple of my own thoughts today, but I would like this service to serve primarily as an invitation to all of us to think about, to explore, to feel, and to experience the meaning of "soul."
My two readings this morning are from Mortimer Adler's Philosophical Dictionary, published in 1995. After Aristotle, Adler is my personal favorite philosopher. He was born in 1902 and died just last year at the age of 98-and-a-half. He was best known for his work on the Encyclopedia Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World" project.
Soul
The word "soul" is used by almost everyone with the negative understanding that, unlike physical and material bodies, it represents something that is not physical and not material. But that understanding of soul, in itself and in relation to body, leaves many philosophical questions unanswered.
This issue in the understanding of soul occurred early in the history of philosophy. It is the difference between the views of Plato and Aristotle.
For Plato, the soul was a spiritual substance joined with a material or physical body. In addition, for Plato that union of soul and body occurs only in human beings. Plants, animals, and other living organisms do not have souls.
In the Platonic view, the immortality of the human soul is self-evident, or at least easily demonstrated, because when death occurs, the soul, having a simple substance, is released and continues in existence.
Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" speaks of the soul as coming from heaven which is its home; and refers to the body as "the prison house of the soul."
The Platonic doctrine of body and soul takes on another form in modern times with Descartes' distinction between "extended substance" and "thinking substance." As for Plato so for Descartes, the human being is an almost inexplic-able union of two separate substances-body and mind. Since Descartes, the mind-body problem has obsessed modern philosophy. In the terms in which it is stated by Descartes, that problem is insoluble.
For Aristotle, the word "soul" names the form to be found in the substance of all living matter. A living organism, as opposed to an inanimate sub-stance, is "besouled"-which is to say "alive." These two words are interchangeable.
For Aristotle, the question of the immortality of the human soul is not raised, even though he declares that the intellect, which is one of the soul's specific powers, is immortal because it is immaterial. However, when Christian theologians consider the immortality of the human soul, they must also affirm the resurrection of the body, because the imagina-tion is a necessary...condition for the exercise of human conceptual thought.
From the purely philosophical as opposed to the theological point of view, the most that can be said is that the immortality of the human soul is possible, but its actuality cannot be philosophically demonstrated.
Spirit
This word is generally used in everyday speech by persons who cannot tell you in positive terms what they mean by it. If you ask for a synonym, they cannot give it to you. They have only a vague idea of what they are referring to.
Philosophically, the only precise meaning of the words "spirit" and "spiritual" is negative, not positive. What is spiritual is immaterial. God (if He exists) is spiritual; angels (if they exist) are spirits; and if we say of the human intellect-the intellect, not the soul-that it is a spiritual power, we are only saying that it is immaterial.
Let me start off by reading a couple of lines from the dialogue between Henry and myself to give you the flavor of the project so far:
Henry: One need look no further than the soul for purpose in one's life, but I find it is very hard to characterize the process whereby the soul works in our lives. Perhaps it is the basis upon which our essential satisfaction or dissatisfaction is determined. Put differently, the soul is that which we are satisfied with when we are satisfied in the deepest possible sense; and that which we are troubled with when we are deeply troubled; and consists of those dictates themselves that we strive most essentially to conform to in our lives. My quest in this discussion is, if anything, to reconcile our deepest feelings and our truest thoughts. It's in such a reconciliation that I think the soul is to be found.
Peter: We need to be careful about confusing thoughts and feelings. [I was referring to mystical experiences when I said that] It's one thing to have thoughts about one's connections with the cosmos; it's quite another to feel, or experience, that one is connected to the cosmos. I have had lots of such thoughts, but never any such feelings or experiences. I think that thoughts are a manifestation of the mind, not of the soul. I can observe and reflect on my own thoughts; but I don't think I can do this with my own-or anyone else's-soul. One of the qualities of soul seems to be that it itself is in principle unobservable and "unexperiencable." It may be the seat of a special sort of self-consciousness, but I don't think it can be directly conscious of, or aware of, itself.
The soul may be something that dies when we die. Can't tell. I'm not sure that it matters. But it doesn't change the experiential fact that there is something special about us, both as humans and as individual persons. Whether it perishes with our molecules, or is immortal, it is nevertheless what we are interested in improving when we engage in activities for the sake of our "spiritual growth."
Let me open Phase II of the Soul Project by posing three questions. Since I'm a philosopher, and not a poet, you'll see my biases in these questions, but you'll also see that I think that the role of the poet (or the artist, or the musician, or the filmmaker) is equal to that of the philosopher in pursuit of the soul. I think it's very much a joint venture.
Question 1: Does it matter whether there is an immaterial, supernatural part of us that separates from the body and survives it at death? Does this really matter? Wouldn't we still have "soul" questions-at least UU's-even if we found out that our entire being turned to dust at death? I've already indicated that I think it does not matter. I think that the ancient and hoary philosophical dispute which Adler referred to as the "mind-body problem" is-at least for the present-undecidable. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the controversy (which may take many more years to come), we still want to become better, more satisfied people-whether our soul outlasts our body, or not.
Question 2: Does it matter whether we use language loosely when speaking about the soul? Does it matter whether we use "soul" roughly synonymously with words like "emotion," and "passion"?
It certainly makes sense to speak of using the term "soul" poetically, with all the attendant shadings and ambiguities of meaning-in fact this is probably an important part of becoming "soulFUL." As Henry said in our first joint Soul Project service, "some aspects of the soul can only be approached in a figurative and analogical way.")
On the other hand, the process of understanding requires a more precise use of words. If we use "soul" synonymously with "emotions," or "passions," we lose the ability to talk about those aspects of the human soul that may transcend passions and emotions.
Question 3: Is it possible to know, or perceive, one's own soul? I suspect not. I suspect that if we can know anything at all of our own souls, it can ONLY be through the reflections of ourselves that we receive in relationship with those few people who truly know us best.
I have begun thinking about this aspect of soul using the term "eye" as a metaphor-in two different ways-one like the eye with which we see, and one like the eye of the storm. The one thing our eye cannot see is itself. Everything else-even most parts of our own body-it can look at directly. But it can observe itself ONLY in the reflection of a mirror. I think our closest relationships act like that mirror, although even with the people closest to us, there are often many distortions.
In a tropical storm, there is a single point around which all of the winds revolve-we call it the eye of the storm. We know we are in the eye when all is quiet and still. If we likened the aggregate of thoughts and emotions and events in our lives to the winds of the storm, then perhaps the soul would be that quiet center around which it all revolves. And perhaps, just as meteorologists can locate the eye of the storm by tracking the vector and velocity of the winds, maybe we can begin to detect the quality of our souls by observing all of the events and patterns in our lives and deconstructing them to their common source. I only wonder.
These are three questions that I have. You may not share them. Or you may have other questions of your own that you would like to explore. Carrying out that exploration together is what I would like to see us do in Phase II of the Soul Project. If you have ideas, develop them into a service. Or speak to someone on the worship committee.
Let me finish by mentioning two books that I would like to read and do future services on:
The Great Soul Trial, by John G. Fuller. Published in 1969, it's about a prospector who, when he died in 1949, left a sizable fortune with the stipulation that it be used solely for conducting scientific research concerning whether there is a soul that leaves the human body at death. The book recounts the Arizona trial that was conducted to determine who would be the beneficiary of that bequest.
The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, by James Hillman. Joan Bradshaw gave me this book at least three years ago, and I've been wanting to get at it ever since! It's recent, written in 1996, and, as I understand it, explores how the difficulties in our lives provide clues to the paths that would ultimately be most satisfying for us.
Please use the next five minutes or so to meditate on your own thoughts about the soul, to the accompaniment of Frederic Chopin:
From the Book of Common Prayer:
The Lord bless and keep you.
The Lord make his face to shine upon you,
and be gracious unto you.
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you,
and give you peace, this day, and forever more.