Sometimes it seems as if we’re inventing the idea that our true self lives deep inside our soul. Secular society dismisses the notion as “new age talk” or ”that Buddhist stuff.”
Surprise, surprise! “You formed my innermost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. … I am fearfully and wonderfully made. … My soul knows that very well” (Psalm 139:13-14).
Norman Fischer, past abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, writes: “The Psalms are a fundamental text of Western Judeo-Christian spirituality, perhaps the most fundamental. They are chanted daily in Christian and Jewish services and they contain all the theology of the Old and the New Testament. For three thousand years Western peoples have been contemplating these poems, resonating emotionally their deepest feeling for life through them” (Opening to you: Zen-inspired translations of the Psalms. 2002, Viking, p.xv-xvi).
“Nobody knows what the soul is,” says the poet Mary Oliver; “it comes and goes / like the wind over the water.” Parker J. Palmer notes that “philosophers haggle about what to call the core of our humanity, but I am not a stickler for precision. Thomas Merton called it the true self. Buddhists call it original nature or big self. Quakers call it the inner teacher or the inner light. Hasidic Jews call it a spark of the divine. Humanists call it identity and integrity. In popular parlance people often call it soul” (A hidden wholeness: the journey toward an undivided life. 2004, Jossey-Bass, p.33).
image: www.istockphoto.com
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