It takes three things to attain a sense of
significant being:
God
A Soul
And a Moment.
And the three are always here.

(Abraham J. Heschel, Insecurity of Freedom, 84)

There is a word that has made a comeback the last dozen years or so. Maybe you’ve noticed. It is a word we grew up with but paid little attention to, probably because as “big” as it was, we didn’t really understand what it meant. Like the plain, gangly, shy girl we saw everyday who sat in the back of the class and one day moved away without our much noticing or caring and then suddenly reappeared at the ten year reunion looking radiant, self-assured, and anything but plain, this word makes a graceful and eye-catching homecoming. The word is soul.

In the past when we thought of the soul, we tended to think of it as distinguished from the body or as something mysterious inside us, maybe due east of our spleen. More nebulous and less representational than the heart, it would outlast the material body because it was immortal and intimately related to God. In the mind of children (and the Church had a way of keeping us children), it was a bit like a white bed linen that we tried to keep clean. We learned sin put black marks on the soul like grease stains on a sheet. The sacraments, especially confession, a firm resolve to sin no more, a few Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s, were the spiritual detergent that served to wash away the stains and make it whiter than snow once again. A clean sheet was pleasing to God and made it easier to sleep at night.

What we now know is that Sister Mary Bodacious Dunn, right off the boat “ó Éirinn,” bless her heart, had most of it all wrong. “’Soul’ is not a thing,” writes Thomas Moore, “but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.” Aelred Squire says, “[The human person] does not have a soul, [but] is a soul.” Soul refers to our essence, to that which is most essential about us. It indicates that at its heart human being is necessarily significant being. But because that which is most essential about us is that we are created in the image and likeness of God, and because the significance of our life resides in the fabulous fact that we were created solely to be human targets of divine love, we have a difficult time accepting our true essence. And that which is not gracefully received cannot be gratefully lived.

Not only is the soul not a thing, it is not an object that comes to us as a completed, finished product maintains Alan Jones in his book Soul Making. Rather, to say that we are souls means that we are animated, alive, always growing and moving, and being moved. Soul making is the life-long process of transformation whereby Love evokes love. Against all resistance or disbelief or the sense of unworthiness, we come to know ourselves as the beloved of God. Then, graced by God, we respond in ever new ways to this indescribably delicious, too-good-to-be-true good news. Soul making, says Jones, is the process of believing that we are lovable and loved and then the graceful response to the utter gratuity and lavishness of that personal divine love.

That we are not finished products is both our burden and our blessing as human beings. It is what makes us dynamic and not static beings. Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us, “Being human is a surprise, not a foregone conclusion.” Soul refers both to who we truly are and to who we are in the process of becoming. At one and the same time, it signals our divine source, our innate preciousness and potential, and our ability and obligation to reciprocate. Humans experience the fullness of being by offering gratitude to God and by extending compassionate care to others. In this way, by the grace of God, we become soulful people.