Psyche

         The idea keeps coming back. I wrote about it a long time ago, but decided it’s time to refresh it.

It all started with Matthew 10:28: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” The Greek word for “soul” in this verse is “psyche.”

So I ask myself, “how can someone destroy the soul?” At the same time I was thinking about heirlooms and junk. For example, I have a little statue of St. Anthony, maybe six inches high, that belonged to my Dad. He used to take it with him when he was on the road for the telephone company, staying overnight in various houses. One landlady used to turn its face to the wall during the day when he was away. He would turn it back at night. That story made the statue into an heirloom. When I am gone, no one will know the story. The statue might become junk.

An heirloom is junk with a story attached.

Gehenna. A valley on the southern edge of ancient Jerusalem, a site for human sacrifices, and, I thought (perhaps mistakenly) the Jerusalem landfill. Landfills are where junk goes.

My body is a bunch of chemicals with a story attached. When I die, my body will revert to its chemicals. Will my story survive? If both my corpse and my story were to go to the landfill, I would really be lost. That is what “destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” could mean.

As I continued to read the Gospels, in Greek, every time I came across the word “psyche” I would substitute “story.” It works almost every time. The English translations usually translate “psyche” as “soul” or “life.” Whoever wants to preserve his or her life (psyche) will lose it. Donald Trump is trying to preserve the story of himself as a genius businessman. He is losing the story.

 

Story

Stories are hugely important in understanding human lives. But the first thing to realize about stories of human beings is that the story of any person can be told in different ways. We often tell our own story in ways that are more negative than other people tell it. We so often “put ourselves down.”

One of the oldest concepts in social psychology goes back to George Herbert Mead, who was writing early in the 1900s. Every introductory sociology text I ever used mentioned his name. He said the self is composed of the “I” and the “me.” The “me” is the part of the self that other people define and that I accept as part of my own idea of who I am. The “I” is a part of the self that is not under the control of others. I think of the “I” and the “me” as stories that I tell about myself and stories that other people tell about me. The self is composed of stories.

Social psychologists like the term “self.” Suppose I say that the “self” is the “soul.” If the self is composed of stories, that would mean that my soul is composed of stories. Since there are many versions of my story, I conclude that my real story, my soul, is the story that God tells about me.

God is the great Story-collector and Story-preserver.

The Final Judgment is God telling everyone’s story in the most loving way possible. Purgatory is like a South African Truth and Reconciliation meeting: I listen to you tell your story of what I did to you, and you listen to the story of why I did the thing that hurt you. Then we cry together.

And heaven is my getting to hear your story, and the stories of every person I have ever met. But why stop there? Heaven is my getting to hear the story of every person that has ever lived. That will take a while, but eternity can handle it.

But then, as we share stories, we make new stories. It will never end.

 

Idols

We attach stories to other people. In fact, we cannot tell the definitive story of another person, and we sometimes learn that the person we have been dealing with for years is not the person we thought they were. We have to keep learning. Even people in a marriage have to keep learning, because we never exhaust the stories we can learn about people we love.

But we attach stories to objects too. Sometimes we name objects. Bomber pilots in World War II named their planes—“Enola Gay” was the name of the B-29 plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Mechanically-inclined people refer to their cars as “she.” The car starts making unusual noises and we say “she’s acting up today.” My Dad used to say “Machines talk. You just have to listen to them, and they will tell you when something is wrong.”

An idol is an object with a story attached. Idolatry is the story, not the object. An idol to which people sacrifice other human beings is evil because the story behind the behavior is evil. The story says “when we don’t sacrifice people this way, the crops quit growing.”

 

Angels and devils

I like to think of an angel as a story that somehow sneaks into my mind and causes me to do something good. Sometimes the experience is so powerful that it feels as though some kind of personal force is behind the experience. Someone led me to do this.

A couple of years ago I foolishly put my eyeglasses on the roof of the car when I was leaving a church where I had just presided at Mass. When I arrived home, twenty minutes later, I took off my sunglasses and realized why my vision wasn’t so good during the drive home. No eyeglasses under the sunglasses! I despaired. What was the chance that I could find the eyeglasses? They could be anywhere between Quincy and Palmyra, fifteen miles across the Mississippi, almost certainly crushed on the road.

I resolved to do the responsible thing and try, no matter how hopeless the outcome, so I drove back to the church and searched the parking space by the church. No glasses. Resigned, I left the parking area and turned back onto the nearby street. Something caught my eye as I turned. Could it be the glasses? No, no chance, but maybe I should check anyway. I stopped the car, walked back, and there were the glasses, lying on the street, unharmed. What made me stop and look? It was almost as though someone or something told me to stop. An angel.

We have similar experiences with devils. “Something made me do it.” The cartoon picture of the devil whispering over the shoulder is not so far from the experience. Demonic possession is when I have accepted a false story about who I am and why I am doing bad things.

We float in stories, whirling around us, pushing us here and there.

 

What is a story?

I once got into a discussion with a friend who teaches English. We discussed the question “what is a word?”

We can say a word is a sound, but an object can be identified by several sounds. I call it a house. You call it a casa. Neither sound would mean anything if there were not a community of human beings who had together linked a specific sound to a specific idea. The real word floats between the members of the language community that uses it. A sound linked to an idea. What is an idea? An idea is a story. I see a table and my mind recalls stories of how the table is used.

I cannot observe a word. I can observe the physical sound, and I can observe the people who make the sound and listen to the sound, but the word is not the sound. It is something floating between the people. I say it is “spiritual.” A story is a spiritual event.

Philosophers back in the 1600s used to mock religious people. “Have you ever weighed a soul?” “Where is the soul located in the body?” The soul isn’t located in the body. I can’t weigh it because it is a story. It is floating between myself and other people and God.

 

The resurrection of the body

The Apostles’ Creed has us pray “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The scriptural basis for this is Luke’s description of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples after the resurrection, when he asks for a piece of fish and eats it.

People say life after death will be timeless, an eternal NOW. I can’t buy that. When you say “body,” you say space and time. I believe that God preserves all our stories, and will re-unite my story with a body in a way that eye has not seen nor ear heard. The reason I believe this is not only that the Creed says it, but because God has put love into space and time, and I cannot believe that the God who lets us experience love will defraud us of that experience by dropping us into eternal storylessness. God is love, and the one who experiences love experiences God. What else do we need to know?

 

This can’t be right . . .

Maybe what I have written cannot stand up against professional critique. But Mead’s “I” and “me” are pretty simplistic, and they have held up for a hundred years. So I foolishly throw out these ideas. I’m too old and lazy to face the critique. Maybe the ideas will inspire some further development. It’s been fun to think about them.