Recently a question was asked at a Facebook group which I thought would be interesting to explore as we start the holiday season and begin to think about the new year: How do we grow our soul?
In this blog I want to share an article by author Dale Fincher addressing this very question; it is a long article but worth reading. At the end of the article I add some insights I gained through the process of writing my book, Heaven Is Not the Last Stop.
Getting Your Soul in Shape: Discipleship and Spiritual Formation, by Dale Fincher (http://www.soulation.org/articles/fledge_GettingYourSoulInShape.html)
“In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, our self-appointed hero finds a portrait of himself painted by his friend. Admiring his beauty in the painting, Dorian strikes a deal. Selling his soul in exchange for his permanent physical beauty, Dorian wishes his corrupt ways, aging, and destructive habits to mark the painting leaving him youthful and untainted.
The story unfolds of women won and betrayed, heartache, murder, and endless parties. He revisits his painting in the attic and finds the figure growing older, scowling, and ugly. As his life spirals, he remains remarkably youthful and handsome while the portrait grows more grotesque.
By the end, Dorian, so overtaken by the monster staring back at him in the painting, throws a dagger into the canvas. The servants hear a thud from the attic and rush upstairs to find a beautiful painting of their master, and a monster of a man on the floor, dead, with a dagger through his heart.
Oscar Wilde paints for us a picture of what it means to shape our souls. Like Dorian, we are constantly being formed or deformed. Like hiding a painting in the attic, we hide behind our pretty faces, sexy styling, smiles, cut muscles, charm, skills, moral talk, religious clichés, and even makeup. Meanwhile, our souls are taking new forms.
I often watch people walking down the street and imagine their souls striding on the inside. If I could see their souls what would they look like? Are they towering heroes or hunched monsters? Are they like Orcs or Elves? Are they everlasting splendors or eternal horrors?
Most people are aware of their souls in some way. We want to be better people. For example, we often put on music to silence the uncomfortable inner noise or shift our mood. We look for books and inspiration to give us high-octane passion that will fix behaviors and habits, hoping for speedy change, a “microwavable” instant spirituality.
But when I try to change, I find it’s easy to improve superficial things, like dressing nicer or working on my table manners. But this does not change who I am at core and often, my Sunday-morning inspiration fizzles out mid-week. One Christian self-help book recommended dressing up when you leave the house to feel better about yourself and show others you respect them, too. Perhaps this will help a little, but intentionally dressing nicely doesn’t change our hearts. It’s like fresh paint on a car when the engine is dying. Or as Jesus said, it’s like a whitewashed tomb. It’s Dorian’s problem all over again.
Truth is, no matter what we wear, we know we are not as mature, honest, kind or responsible as we could be. We let others down. We mask how we really feel. We get discouraged. We’re lazy about growing. We’re fearful of the future.
Jesus said simply, “By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matt 7:20). How we live, how we think, how we navigate, celebrate, grieve in life are fruit that reveal the kind of soul we have. Dorian hid his painting rather well in the story. But we aren’t as clever as he; most of us reveal fragments of our souls, wherever we go, unaware others can see it. Psychologists call these our “blind-spots.”
The kind of soul we have right now is not an accident. Our souls have been shaped like play-dough for many years, depending on several things. For starters, all of us arrived on this blue planet, born under the rule of the “god of this world” into families that already struggled with broken souls. We inherit family dysfunction of different degrees. This means our souls get shaped by our families and our own distrust in God’s love. We further deform our souls when we think we must always fix ourselves without God’s good help.
As we grow, we choose more intentionally what will shape our souls. Our music, our reading, our friends, our past times, our movies all form or deform our inner selves. Everything we see, taste, read, experience and watch shapes us. How we sift (or not sift) faith and culture-political speeches, media ads, long hours of mediocre television, pastors and Sunday School teachers, friends, hearsay, and ideas that simply pop into our heads-also shapes us.
How we acquire taste for quality or first food, for music that deepens us, for friendships that elevate us also weaves into our souls. Or whether we work hard to live life with deeper spiritual insight. Or if we avoid change by keeping close friends who refuse to grow or listen only to people who agree with us, or avoiding good books with excuses like, “That’s too deep,” when the pages start asking life-changing questions that make us uncomfortable.
And, some, in a delusion to escape dangerous exposure to outside influences, remain sheltered. Yet this also shapes our souls, making us weak and just as out of touch with a healthy soul as living the “the ways of the world.” The quiet man who attends weekly church, like Lars in Lars and the Real Girl, but lives in protected isolation from work to home to church may have a small soul, formed by pain and ignoring love and growth, as poorly shaped as the town drunk or the embezzling businessman.
It’s not like only uber-spiritual people engage in soul formation. Michelle Obama, Lady Gaga and Venus Williams are as engaged in forming their souls as much as the Dalai Lama, Pope Benedict and you and me.
A good, well-formed soul, open to truth at all costs-the kind Jesus invited us to have-is not easy to acquire.
But the easy way ends up harder in the end. Like eating cotton candy, it’s fun at the start. But if candy is your regular food, you invite aches and pains, illness, and bad teeth. We aren’t made to have a fluffy and thin cotton candy soul. And we were not made to float through life paying little heed to our soul’s formation.
Spiritual formation or soul formation are words today that capture what is happening to all of us-to our souls-as we make life’s passage. With all these influences pressing in on us, unavoidable, our bigger question is in what shape am I to be formed? How can I be more appropriately human?
In Biblical terms, this idea is called many things: transformation Rom 12:2, fashioned into new creatures 2 Cor 5:17, “be like Christ [the Messiah]” Rom 8:29, 2 Cor 3:18.
We cannot BE Christ [the Messiah]. We cannot be the king of the whole world, the very Son of God, the all-powerful one who has all-authority in heaven and earth. But the Scripture tells us to be like him. Why him?
Because he is the last Adam, the only fully human example we have. To be like him is to see the world the way he does, to form a healthy soul that sprouts love naturally, to be at peace with God-whom we can know in daily friendship-knowing he is leading at our front and watching our back. To be like him is to be appropriately human, fully yourself, in your own unique personality, abilities, and relationships, pure and holy.
How can our soul formation make us more human? That is, how can we become more like the Messiah? Jesus’ method was through education and imitation, using the gift of his power and presence, so that we take proper shape. In Jesus words, we are to be “disciples” of him.
A disciple is a student. Under a teacher’s tutelage, the student learns and grows and his or her soul takes shape. We note this happening when we spent a day with someone we admire. We learn their habits, how they eat, how they talk about things. The parts we admire, we take on ourselves, at first, as imitation. We learn a better away to approach life. We learn to see the world through their eyes. By the end of the day, our soul is shaped a little by the time we spent with them.
In the near past, the word “discipleship” has been twisted to mean behavior modification (like wearing nice clothes in public) or abstaining from social taboos, like alcohol, short skirts, and movies. This deadened the power in the word “discipleship”, missing the point of holiness and leading to Dorian’s hypocrisy. In fact, you can abstain from wine, short skirts, movies and still have a warped, small, law-ensnared soul. We need to bring life back into discipleship. Thinking of discipleship as “soul formation” sharpens our focus on the work to be done at the root, the health of our souls-the root that produces pure fruit.
As a student of Jesus, two questions are most important to form our souls: What do I think about God? What does God think about me? When the answer is love, our souls are forming in the proper directions and everything else that is good and holy will be built on that.
Love invites us. Love accepts us for who we are and insists we grow great souls. Love gives us safety to work out bad habits, a lab to let everything hang out so we can examine the parts of our soul that need work.
Fear is the opposite of love. Fear keeps our souls hidden, even from ourselves, so we cannot have the safe space to examine ourselves, seek input from others, and become better people like Jesus. Fear tries to manufacture fruit without changing the soul’s root. And fear will often attack soul formation because of the courage it requires to expose a lifetime of hiding.
As we learn a flourishing human life from Jesus, we invite others to join us. In Coffee Shop Conversations, we talk about “discipleship” as “inviting others into the life you enjoy with Jesus.” Healthy-souled people want health for others. Truly loving people invite others to be loving people.
This makes sense in light of the free life Jesus offers. If we enjoy our lives with Jesus, then we’re not trying to make converts to our “Christian club,” we are not concerned about numbers of those we changed, nor worried about fixing someone’s name on the heavenly roster. We’re inviting others as Jesus did-into a fuller life.
As our souls grow wider and deeper, as we become more fully human, we qualify to invite others to pull up a desk next to us in the classroom of life, for our Teacher is speaking.”
We can instinctively and consistently express the fruits of the spirit (love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance.) only to the extent that we have consciously and persistently developed our capacity to do so. We have become experts at “spiritual bypassing - using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.” Growth itself is unconscious, but we need to consciously and persistently provide the favorable conditions for growth, and this means continuous “effort, struggle, conflict, faith, determination, love, loyalty, and progress.” The time that we spend exploring what these words mean to us in our personal lives and also exploring the framework for growing our souls which The Urantia Book provides us, is time well spent. If we want to take living the religion of Jesus to the next level on our planet, we must be willing to develop new habits of thinking and being; we must be willing to cut through spiritual bypassing, and be willing to move out of our comfort zones. This means personal work and is by no means an easy or short-term task; it is, however, a worwhile and fulfilling one. The last part of my book Heaven Is Not the Last Stop devotes an entire section to this topic.
