The Body is Womb to the Soul

After a lot of reading and a lot of quiet time, I've started to put down in words how I feel about things. This is the first installment.

The Womb

“You do not have a soul.
You are a soul. You have a body.”
------C. S. Lewis

The body is the womb of the soul.
What could be simpler?
Death is the birthing of the soul.
Okay, maybe a little too simple.
But suppose we lived by that premise;
Would we put the care and well being of the soul
At the top of our list?

Or would we continue behavior detrimental to this growing being?
(e.g. War
e.g Insincerity
e.g. ignorance
e.g. Anger
e.g lack of compassion )

My actions affect the growth of my soul.
So I must continually ask,
“What are my intentions?”
Greed or Generosity?
Hate or Love?
Delusion or Wisdom?
Joy or Bitterness?

“What will be the effect of my actions?”
Even if well-intentioned, will I do harm or “further harm”?
Will I merely say what others want to hear?
Will I make promises that cannot be kept?

The task of this life---- and it can be a pleasant one -----
is to nurture and prepare the soul for the next step,
the birthing of the soul into a next reality.

Maybe reality is a multi-layered onion---
different existences sometimes intersecting.


What I love about “God” is god is not necessarily or always, but maybe sometimes, a person. God is life-source and life force. I live my life feeling that “heaven” is not a space that I might go to, but the unity and harmony that underlies and connects everything. Even Jesus states that the kingdom of heaven is inside us and among us. Heaven is among us now and evolving along with us.

I don’t live thinking a punishing hell awaits anyone, although detours along the soul’s journey----e.g. having to learn the same lessons over and over again--- could delay us, if our souls are not ready to continue.

Because we are all souls, and to the extent that we recognize each other as souls, we seem to share common instincts or spiritual drives. These are themes that have appeared throughout history in all forms of Literature, Art, and Music, as well as most religions:


We are aware that our bodies and “this life” are finite, but also sense that, as souls, we are infinite.

We feel a unity, a commonality, a bond, with the rest of creation. We feel we are “all in this together,” and try to treat each other as we would be treated. At the same time, we feel a separateness, an alienation from others. We feel we are “on our own.”

We feel a completeness, but also a “homesickness for a place we’ve never been.” We have a natural feeling of lost innocence and a drive to move forward to revisit that innocence.

These drives seem to be opposed to each other. What’s more, we usually feel these conflicting instincts at the same time.

At times, I feel more alienation than community, resentment and anger instead of generosity and good will. I keep working to balance things out.

I have not been too occupied with the details and dogmas of particular religious
groups. Frederick Buechner reminds us that the details don’t matter. Whether no one saw the Resurrection or a million did, whether the nativity happened one way or another, doesn’t matter… Christ is being resurrected everyday in each of us. He is being born everyday. Mary, and all of us, are being asked to bring Christ into the world everyday. Instead of looking backward and saying “How did this happen?”, it might be better to ask, “How is this happening now?”

As a missionary sister recently told me, “There’s The Old Testament and The New Testament, but just as important, there’s The Now Testament”.


Quite simply----and what could be simpler than a children’s song?------what I’ve been thinking about is in the song, “Happy Soul”, which I wrote for my grand-nephew and is posted below:

Happy Soul

A "children's song" for Andrew "Happy Soul" Martin

The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.



Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"To love it, and be glad to belong to it..."

“In every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity…
But the world around us is never one-sided. Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.

The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people----eternal life.
It is not possible to see how far another is on the way.

Therefore it seems to me that everything that exists is good---- death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary.

I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property, and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.”

----------------From "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse

40 Hours at St. Nicholas of Tolentine

photographs by Fr. Roger Corrales Diaz

"Our hearts are heavens
And our eyes are light-years deep,
Sounding Your will, Your peace, in its unbounded fathoms:
Oh balance all our turning orbits,
Upon the center and level of Your holy love:
Then lock our souls forever in the nucleus of its Law."


----Thomas Merton



[painting: Jasper Johns, "The Diver"]