Several years before I retired from Missouri State University in 2005, I was so caught up in an active academic career, involved in campus life, community activities, professional activities, and serving in the Army Reserve that I felt like my very soul was at risk. Somewhere between completing a terminal degree (1977) and retiring from Missouri State University (2005), my soul seemed to have gone missing or was so shriveled I could not find it. Souls need attention, special feeding and watering, to flourish. I suspect that I am not the only person to come to this realization.
You might not think it possible for people to lose their souls, but Jesus thought so. “What is the profit,” he said, “in gaining the world and losing your soul” (Mark 8:36). Charles Dickens also thought so, and in his novel (A Christmas Carol) portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge as a soulless man, who rediscovers his soul at the end of the novel. “Soul” is the essence of being truly human—a quality always pushing us, come hell or high water, toward moral excellence. A man or a woman with no soul has lost the qualitative edge of being human, of keeping life in balance and everything in perspective—in other words, “losing yourself to gain the world” (Luke 9:25) distorts perspective and throws life into serious imbalance. Clearly Scrooge was disoriented. He had fed his soul so much material “stuff” that he had lost touch with humanity—particularly his humanity. In my case, somewhat like Bob Cratchit, I sat in a tiny windowless office cluttered with neglected professional projects (real soul food by the way), and fed my soul unimaginative papers by incurious students, but in the grand scheme of things virtually irrelevant. Souls cannot survive on such an unbalanced diet.
Can governments lose their souls? Certainly, they can. Government at every level involves people who set a tone for the administration and carry out its policies. National socialism in Hitler’s Germany, at best, was government without conscience or humanity, and its systematic massacre of Jews and other eastern Europeans clearly qualifies it as soulless. The same is true of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government, for attempting to annihilate its own citizens, the Kurds. In our own country, the suppressive disfranchisement (and worse!) of black citizens in the deep south for over one hundred years can only be explained by the shriveled souls of white citizens. And what should we say about attempts in various states to eliminate budgetary support for our most vulnerable citizens—the mentally ill, disabled, children, and the elderly? At best, it is not an action that anyone would confuse with moral excellence. And Mr. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” by congress? The Congressional Budget Office estimates that its passage may cause some 10 million American citizens to lose their health insurance by 2034, with some $900 billion in cuts to Medicare. Only shriveled souls could be pleased at such an inhumane result.1
Can a church lose its soul? You wouldn’t think so, but in my religious tradition it has been happening for some time now. For the sake of what some in the tradition regard as “right” theology, Southern Baptist intolerants dismantled a fellowship of, more or less, independent cooperating churches. They centralized their authority and have been, since 1985, purging the denomination of diversity. Shortening the borders of the tent and shallow thinking make for better control but do not encourage the development of healthy souls.
Without a healthy soul, we will never find our way to the moral high road, or as Paul put it, to the more excellent way (1 Cor 12:3–13:13). Without soul one is condemned to sit among the mattresses of the dead (a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens, The Man on the Dump). Allowing a soul to shrivel away is bad enough. Being unaware of the loss altogether is a crisis of epic proportions!2
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University
2This essay, reedited and updated in part, was first published in the newspaper, the Springfield News Leader, Springfield, MO, before 2009, and republished in my book, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest? American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Cascade, 2009), 34-35.
