Late Night Musings

July 23, 2007 – Early Morning Musing

Jet lag, or maybe just a stubborn circadian rhythm ... who knows whose time zone my body is in. I am waking up at 1:00 a.m. here, after only a few hours of sleep. I think that puts me at 6:00 a.m. Malaysian time, so I guess my body is still on Kuala Lumpur time. So what does one do at 1:00 a.m., ponder … until 3:00 a.m., and then get up, make a cup of tea and do some typing.

So, last night before I turned in a happened to read a C.S. Lewis quote that Dylan had posted on his dresser. It read, “We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body.” Maybe the reason I woke up is that my mind just couldn’t let that one go.

“We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body.” I wonder, is the essence of the world’s religions and the writing of its great teachers an attempt to address this statement? “We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body.”

In our world, especially the western world, so much of our energy, our time, our resources are spent on addressing the needs and pleasures of our physical bodies. Meanwhile our souls waste away, as surely as the physical body wastes away from lack of nutrition. Our concern for the body’s needs is not bad and has resulted in the development of many helpful and meaningful social supports programs. But, at the end of the day when we find ourselves as individuals and society spending more and more time, energy, and resources to ameliorate the needs of our bodies maybe that is an invitation to consider both for ourselves and our societies the essence of what religion and teachers have long challenged us about, the care and feeding of the soul (and I am sure that last phrase is plagiarizing one of those thinkers).

Maybe that is what one of those great teachers was trying to get across to us when he talked so often about worrying less about our physical needs and desires. Rather, he passionately entreated his followers to focus on the care and feeding of their souls.

Why am I in Africa? In some future treatise I will come back to this more fully, but the essence of why is because this is where I need to be to learn the lessons God has for me at this time. Maybe this is one of those lessons, one I need to grasp in a deeper way: whatever my role, here or elsewhere, I need to remember that life is more than a body, it is soul.

~ Benno ~