Day 9
Weak but Wonderful
But here is the great surprise: God has given the human person, the weak creature, a wonderful dignity: he has made him a little less than the angels or, as the original Hebrew can be translated, a little less than a god.
— St. John Paul II, Psalms and Canticles
Thorns can choke the growth of the good seed of God’s grace, but shallow, rocky soil can wither it altogether. Jesus warned us of this, too. He used the analogy of bad soil that impedes a seed from putting down deep roots. Under the scorching sun, the plant simply withers and dies, because its shallow roots fail to find the moisture it needs for life under harsh conditions. The image describes the sentimental Christian, whose faith only goes as deep as his or her feelings:
“The seed sown on rocky ground is the one who hears the word and receives it at once with joy. But he has no root and lasts only for a time. When some tribulation or persecution comes because of the word, he immediately falls away.” (Matthew 13:20–21)
Feelings, emotions, sentiments, and moods, along with psychic and biological drives, passions, and needs, make up an essential dimension of human experience. When Jesus commands his followers to love him with all their soul, he is referring to this wonderful, confusing, rewarding, and troubling dimension. If we fail to integrate this human richness into our loving relationship with God, sooner or later it will trip us up, and our desire for God and a deeper communion with him will wither away.
In the Old Testament, for example, King David failed to integrate healthily a natural and passionate attraction he felt toward a woman who was married to another man. This failure led him into the destructive moral chaos of adultery and murder. In the New Testament, we see how St. Peter’s natural and understandable emotional fears, improperly acknowledged and channeled, led him to commit the most shameful deed of his life when he denied that he even knew Jesus (see Matthew 26:69–75).
The two-thousand-year tradition of Christian thought and experience has produced a deep, nuanced, and accurate understanding of these various facets of the human person. Becoming more aware of them frees us to be more intentional and effective in our journey toward spiritual maturity.
X-Ray of a Soul
Soul can be a confusing word. People often ask whether their dog has a soul. The answer often comes back as a simple no, which is disappointing, because people really want their loyal, beloved pets to be with them in heaven. But how can a dog get to heaven if it doesn’t have a soul? We will set aside for now the theological question of whether pets join us in heaven; suffice it to say that if you need the accompaniment of a beloved pet in order to be absolutely, completely, infinitely happy (that’s what life is like in heaven), you will not lack that pet.
Philosophically, though, we can give a better answer to the question of whether dogs have souls. Yes, they do have souls, but their souls are different than the human soul. Specifically, the soul is the principle of life in a living being. Anything alive, then, has a soul. But the different forms of life will have souls with different characteristics. Plants have nutritive souls that allow them to grow and reproduce, but without the power of locomotion. Animals have what are called sensitive souls. These add new powers to the nutritive souls, especially the powers of locomotion and sensory perception. These powers allow the more complex animal species (dolphins, for example, are more complex than spiders) to experience certain degrees of emotion, sense memory, and sense knowledge.
Human beings have rational souls, with the even greater additional powers of intellect and will, abstract thinking and free choice. These are spiritual powers shared in a certain way with the angels and with God himself. This is one reason why the Bible speaks of God having created the human person in the image of God: “in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). These spiritual powers that go with personhood, integrally united to the other nutritive and sensitive powers still present in the human soul, are the root of human dignity. They show us why it is morally okay to kill a bothersome mosquito, but not a bothersome toddler.
Problems with the Soul
Those basic philosophical distinctions have been challenged in modern and post-modern times. Biologists have discovered so many varieties of life that were completely unknown to previous eras, for example, that the distinctions between vegetative and locomotive, or between sentient and nutritive, are much more fluid. Viruses, bacteria, extremophile — where do they all fit into the continuum between simple plant and complex animal? It’s not always easy to tell.
Post-modern secularists also question the distinction between spiritual and non-spiritual souls. Many of them argue that what used to be considered spiritual is really just epiphenomenal, just an excretion of predetermined material and biological processes. According to this point of view, the human soul is no more spiritual, and therefore possesses no more dignity, than any other animal soul. The difference between a human being and a dolphin, therefore, is only a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.
These challenges to the Christian vision of the human person can be and have been met and overcome by Christian philosophers, scientists, and apologists. And their arguments simply reinforce the basic tenets of our faith, the basic truths revealed by God, that the human soul is unique among the many creatures of the visible universe, and uniquely valued and addressed by God.
The Beloved Soul
Before we love at all, we are loved, infinitely and intimately, utterly and unconditionally, passionately and personally, by God. This must be the starting place for our reflection on what it means to love God with all our soul. Every component of our humanity is included in this love God has for us. The greatest proof of this astounding truth came with the Incarnation, when God himself took on human nature, becoming fully and truly man in Jesus Christ. Never again can we doubt that every aspect of the human condition, even though tangled and distorted by sin, is fundamentally good, and that God wants to redeem it all.
We have to consciously give ourselves permission, so to speak, to accept this truth. Otherwise, the difficult and often painful process of allowing God’s grace to bring order and healing to the dizzying complexity of our souls may spark discouragement or resentment.
The Catechism announces our fundamental dignity and belovedness loud and clear:
Of all visible creatures only man is “able to know and love his creator.” He is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,” and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity. (CCC, 356)
In his inaugural homily, Pope Benedict XVI expressed the same truth with even more gusto:
We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.
Questions for Personal Reflection or Group Discussion
What idea in this reflection struck you most and why?
When you consider the truth that God loves you personally and infinitely, how deeply does it resonate? Is there something in you that sometimes resists accepting that truth?
How much do your emotional ups and downs affect the firmness of your faith? Do you only pray when you feel like it? Do you only forgive and show kindness when you are in a good mood? How often do bad moods and emotional low tides lead you to say and do things you later regret?
In spite of our weakness and brokenness, God loves us without limit. Jesus once told St. Faustina that even if she had on her soul all the sins of the world, in comparison with his mercy they would be nothing more than a drop of water thrown into a blazing furnace.
What will you do today to express your faith in your true, God-given dignity and that of every human person?
- I will take a break to stop and smell the roses (to enjoy one of the simple, healthy pleasures of life), and I will thank God for that blessing.
- I will pray sincerely for a person that I have given up on.
- I will engage in sincere conversation with someone that I normally wouldn’t talk to.
- (Write your own resolution) I will
Concluding Prayer
O Lord, our Lord,
how awesome is your name through all the earth!
I will sing of your majesty above the heavens
with the mouths of babes and infants.
You have established a bulwark against your foes,
to silence enemy and avenger.
When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars that you set in place —
What is man that you are mindful of him,
and a son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him little less than a god,
crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him rule over the works of your hands,
put all things at his feet:
All sheep and oxen,
even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
and whatever swims the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
how awesome is your name through all the earth!
— Psalm 8
