Soul Food
My 6 year old granddaughter, Effie, asked me the other day what a soul was and for the life of me I could not figure out how to explain it to her. Have you ever tried to describe a soul to someone? I was raised Catholic and as far back as I can remember I have always known what a soul is. I could not remember how the nuns from my old schools defined a soul to us. So, I told my little Effie what my father always used to tell me when I asked him a hard question,
“I don’t have time to answer that.” Then I went home and did my research.
The Oxford Dictionary defines a soul as “the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.” Collins Dictionary defines soul as “the part of you that consists of your mind, character, thoughts and feelings.” And good ole Wikipedia: “The soul . . . an immaterial aspect or essence of a living being that is believed to be able to survive physical death.” All of these definitions are intriguing but still left me at a loss as to how to explain it to a six year old.
It was a homeless person who gave me my first glimpse of a soul. I was teaching in San Francisco and every night at the end of my class when I left the building the same homeless woman would approach me. I have had contact with a lot of homeless people but she was different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Because of some bad experiences with homeless people in our neighborhood I have had a somewhat negative feeling about homeless people which I know is wrong and if there is a God I will probably end up in a homeless shelter before I die. This woman however I truly felt for. I didn’t have much money at the time and hardly ever carried any with me but I would always take the left over food from the class and bring it to her. She was always very thankful. On one particular evening when I came downstairs she was waiting as usual. On this evening I could see in her eyes that she was sick. She looked flush and feverish and obviously did not feel well. I asked if she was ok and she said “I’m just so sick. If I just had a bed to sleep in one night I might be able to get better.” I couldn’t think fast enough. I didn’t have enough money in my purse to pay for a hotel room. I wanted very much to do something but all I could do was give her the food I had and be on my way. On the way home I went over and over all of the things I could have done. I could have taken her to a hotel and paid for it with my credit card. I could have taken her home and nursed her back to health. And then as I was driving and chastising myself for not acting quickly to help this poor woman it hit me like a ton of bricks. This is going to sound really weird and when I think back to this it even sounds weird to me. But all of a sudden, I knew --- KNEW!! this woman had been Jesus in the flesh. It was so clear to me and for the first time in my life I understood when Mother Teresa says “Everyone is Jesus.” I felt like someone was shining a light on me showing me this and wanting me to fully understand that “Everyone is Jesus” because just as sure as I am that you are you, I am certain that this woman was Jesus. I also believed that I had let Jesus down by not helping him in some way that evening. That I had been tested, if you will, and had failed. But the really interesting thing about this test that I failed was that I didn’t feel bad about failing, I just felt that even though I failed by not helping her in some way, I had learned what Jesus wanted me to learn. I got it! I finally understood.
I know that all of that sounds a bit off the religious zealot deep end which we already know I am not. But looking back let me tell you what I believe. I believe that there is some higher power, someone or something, or some force that controls this world. Maybe it’s just Karma, maybe it’s the Star Wars Force, maybe it’s a God who takes a form that is beyond our imagination so we imagine him/her in human form, maybe it’s Mother Nature. And this force lives in each and every one of us, our soul perhaps. Maybe our soul could also be called Jesus. Maybe what I saw that night was someone’s very soul. Maybe that night for whatever reason I reached a level of consciousness that gave me a peek into the deep spiritual side of another human. Maybe this raised consciousness is what people like Mother Teresa live in all the time and so it is all very clear to them. I believe that this force that’s greater than us affects everything we do. But it comes from within and when we pray we aren’t tapping into some man in a white robe in the heavens, we are communicating with our soul and the souls of those we love, dead or alive as well as the forces of nature and the universe. And that’s where we find our comfort and our answers.
But back to explaining this to little Effie. I told her that inside of everyone is a special place. I told her to picture a little piece of a rainbow inside of her (because she LOVES rainbows) It isn’t something we can actually see with our eyes but we can feel it. We feel it whenever we do something good and we feel it whenever we help someone and we feel it when we need comfort and no one else is around to comfort us. And when our body dies, our soul, this little rainbow inside of us, lives on.
She looked at me as she tried to reconcile this with what she already knew about the world. Then she asked “But if your soul doesn’t die, where does it go?”
“I don’t have time to answer that” I said.