Who Made You? God Made You! Why Did He Make You? Because He Loves You.
The above notion was something I had to memorize in case the archbishop were to call on me during my Confirmation ceremony. He never did. And the questions he threw were truly “softball” anyway.
No one in my class seemed to question this statement — 2nd graders generally didn’t question much when a nun was in the front of the room. But I couldn’t help but wonder for years and years how could God love me if I didn’t yet exist to love?
Oddly, this little tidbit from my catechism class in 2nd grade rings truer than ever in my head as I consider strongly the possibility that there is no such thing as an individual human soul.
The elimination of the notion of an individual human soul removes a problem that causes friction between science and religion. It also creates a totality of existence that ties together eastern and western philosophies, that explains pain and suffering, that gives the entire exercise that is life a deeper meaning than ever to me. It makes a discussion of sin possible and much clearer. I lack the confidence that I can express this notion clearly, so bear with me.
In my catechism class, and in Catholic school science class in the 1960s — Ah! The truly “Camelot” days of folk masses and all that post-Vatican II revelry — we were taught that evolution was okay to believe under one condition: At the point where the first human was born, God breathed a soul into him or her.
This is very poetic, and it helped Father Joyce explain to us the heirarchy of corporeal existence. Kind of like the beginning of the old Ben Casey show (if you don’t remember it, you’re too young), Father Joyce would draw a diagram on the chalkboard that started at the bottom working it’s way up. When he was done, it looked something like this:
God
Priests/Nuns
Celibate Persons
Married Persons
Apes
Animals
Plants
Minerals
Of course, this was a pitch to join the priesthood, climb the ladder of Catholic success, and be a hopeless grumpy drunk like Father Joyce, but, you get the picture. Only the three immediately beneath “God” have a soul. The rest are metaphysically s.o.l. Of course, this notion of a soul being breathed into the first human is problematic at the start. Does that mean that a soulless animal gave birth to and raised the first 46-chromosome homo sapien with a soul? How did that work? I’ll bet they had some family issues, huh? Did that person mate with another soulless animal? Is the soul gene recessive or dominant?
Okay, I’m being flip, but you get the point. I liked that my church was being accommodating to science, but when I broke this down, it made no sense whatsoever. The shoehorning of the notion of an individual human soul spontaneously showing up at a point where our frontal lobe was ripe enough, and our thumbs opposing enough, is just darned silly.
This argument about who gets a soul and when does more than create a problem for those of us who believe in evolution and God. It also underscores arguments on all sides regarding abortion, birth control, stem cell research, euthanasia, and other seemingly intractable disputes of our times. Then there are claims that heinous acts are committed by “soulless” people: folks look at Charles Manson and say that his eyes look like he doesn’t have a soul.
Imagine, John-Lennon-style if, just for a moment, the human soul did not exist at all?
Well, a metaphysical problem arises for me in the face of my not having my own custom-fit human soul. The problem is that I know I am of deeper stuff than biology and reason. I know because of my recovery, which was the presence of God in my life loud an clear, existing in a moment, changing everything. I wrote in a post a few years ago that “I got a soul that day.” Interesting that I used that terminology, but, I would use different wording today. Today, I would say that I heard the Godliness within me that day for the first time. I heard God that day because my body ached so badly, my remorse was so great, my sense of hopelessness and death was so present, Cathy ceased to exist. In that moment, only God could be heard. Cathy was dead, in a way. I heard God for the first time because my addictive biology and habitually flawed rationalizations broke down sufficiently to let me hear.
The key here is that my addictive biology and habitually flawed rationalizations were clearly what stood in the way all those years. In other words, the nature of my human life was a corporeal one. But not with a sense of duality (corporeal bad/spiritual good). Rather, biology and thought, at all levels of existence (apologies to Father Joyce) are the stuff of human life.
With that in mind — the health of my body and my thoughts — I know now that my responsibility in this existence is to bring to visible life the love of God that was so beside itself with abundance that the big bang could not help but happen. Imagine containing a love so great that you just had to bust open the gates of existence and create the universe? The seas could not help but form, the flowers cannot help but blossom, and we cannot help but be the messy, wonderful, awful, beautiful people we all are. And through all this, God finally had a glorious mirror to see the wonders of limitless love. That am us.
I’m arguing here to shift the way of thinking about how God lives on this earth. Rather than looking at biology and reason as an obstacle to Godliness, rather than looking at the things of this world as desire and temptation, what if we think of the entire thing as an inevitable and perfect symphony of God’s love? Those of us who are mentally capable would be drawn to help those who are not. We would all feel connected as a single spirit of God, not saving our own soul’s ass from being “left behind,” but no longer leaving behind, in a very real sense, those among us who hunger, who suffer, who cause pain because their biology and reasoning don’t function as ours do.
Connectedness as a single bio-spiritual organism that is God, means we care for the environment. There is no need to argue with how biological life came to be, because at every stage of evolution, God was within every being, even when our knuckles were dragging. We stop projecting our own illusion of individual reality onto a fertilized egg, and a woman can make a choice based on husbanding the realities of human existence. We accept that sometimes folks want to leave this place because the physical pain is simply too much and the biology is failing. We stop projecting evil and moral meaning onto those whose mental illness makes them act in ways we find uncomfortable — instead, we do what we can to make their lives comfortable since they may lack the biological (not spiritual) ability to do so. We choose domain over our reproduction as it is within our control as biological beings. We regard those who do evil as those whose biologies prevent them from hearing God, not as hopelessly soul-dead people going to hell. Without the diabolical projections, we are free and clear of mind work to create a world where maybe their needs can be addressed at an earlier time in their lives, and cycles of addiction, abuse, and pain can be prevented. We stop shutting our eyes to the ugly because even the ugly is of God.
The notion of “self” gives way to the notion of a single point of subjectivity that is God’s. We resort to the spreading of God’s grace and love in the limited time we have, not because we should, but because it is simply inevitable if we let go of our individual soul and embrace instead the substance of God within us all.
And that’s how that catechism question now makes sense to me.
