“Let’s make a bow. Here, I’ll put my finger right there to hold the ribbon, and you tie the bow.”
“Okay,” she answered cautiously.
Slowly she reached for the slant-cut ends of red ribbon. Holding one between her right thumb and forefinger, the other end between her left thumb and forefinger, she stopped.
She appeared unsure of the next step. Latent muscle memory suggested to her that some time ago she could tie ribbons into bows. But she could not remember ever, actually, tying a bow. She looked at a finished product. She could not reverse-engineer the process of tying a bow (most of us could not do this either).
She watched a happy patient succeed. Her short term memory deteriorated, she could not watch a step and reproduce it.
“We’re not in a hurry,” I said to her.
“Thank you,” she said.
Continuing to grasp the ends of the ribbon, she slowly waved her hands circularly over the spot where my finger held the ribbon in place. Perhaps she hoped the movement might trigger a recollection. It did not help. She squinted. I suggested an alternative.
“How about if you hold the ribbon, and I’ll tie the bow?”
“That would be nice,” she responded.
She smiled because she could help. We tied a bow together and smiled together. I wondered if I was supposed to let her try again. I looked over to the program coordinator. She smiled and nodded. The point was to enjoy being together, not relearn kindergarten.
So we worked away quite happily, and with seven other Alzheimer’s patients we assembled 40 little bags of candy for a party. Each red and gold cellophane pouch held a caramel, some candy corn, and a chocolate kiss or two bound by a ribbon. We felt pride in the heap of packages in the middle of the table.
The stash would have been larger if we had not consumed our supplies. That was part of the plan, however. Our discomfiture in bow tying—she could not tie and I could not teach—dissolved as the candy melted in our mouths.
The family warned me; they thought he might be swearing. Still I wondered what his expletive meant.
The group moved to a different table. My job was to lead a “service.” I’d forgotten my Bible in my car and I cannot recite the 23rd Psalm without the text in front of me, so I asked the program coordinator if they had one. She dug through some drawers and hauled out a Bible as big as a sofa. I was glad for the King James. Modern idioms and unfamiliar cadences are not good news for old people with widely spaced brain cells.
Slowly and rhythmically I read a bit of Psalm 23.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not … ” I stopped precipitously before the last word. Timidly, a few said:
“Want.”
“Good job,” I said. They sat a little straighter.
“He maketh me to lie down in green … “
“Pastures!” they replied triumphantly. Even my bow gal clicked into the game.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the … “
“Still waters!” This time they remembered two words. I still need the text before my eyes. We continued in a great triumphal procession.
“And I shall dwell … “
“In the house of the Lord, forever!” The old voices rang like bells.
I leafed through the Bible looking for other passages that might ring a bell. Some fell flat. But it surprised me how many verses they could recite with simple cues.
Slowly, softly, and tenderly I sang a few hymns, some sang along, some hummed, no one looked bored. Tears formed.
The lady who could tie bows said: “I can play the piano!”
She could not tell you her address, the year or the day she was born, but she could play old hymns by memory. What a joy that was! The more she played the more we sang. By the end we felt warmed and loved and accomplished. And we felt the Spirit of God.
What did I see in this picture? People short of brain cells whose souls work just fine. Their brains incarcerate their souls.
The holistic/monistic school of theological anthropology tells us that body and soul are an indissoluble, indistinguishable thing. The view cuts across liberal and conservative theological boundaries. It makes sense to healthy, happy people, who, in the normal course of their lives don’t experience a dichotomy between their physical self and their spiritual self.
Indeed it is ideal to feel no separation. Healthy people do not feel separation in their bodies. They don’t feel their kidneys, or their blood, or their intestines as they work. Healthy people don’t even feel their bones as they go about their day. They feel themselves as whole beings. That’s the way it is supposed to be. When they sing a song they love, it moves their being; they feel it from head to toe; in their mind and in their heart.
In worship—trendy or traditional—we don’t stop and think, Here’s my soul worshiping; here’s my toes worshiping; here’s my mind worshiping. We worship as whole persons.
But how about disadvantaged persons? What if they can’t stand to sing? What if they can’t read the words? What if they can’t hear? Do their souls flunk because their bodies fail?
If the soul and the body are the same thing, then a sick body should make for sick spirituality and a healthy body should make for healthy spirituality. Likewise, spiritually healthy people should all have healthy bodies and spiritually sick people should all have sick bodies. But as life clearly teaches, physical health and spiritual health are two very different things.
Very often the healthiest bodies are spiritually self-centered and the healthiest spirits are enveloped in deteriorating bodies.
Many healthy people think that people with Alzheimer’s are boring, or scary, or as good as dead—unless the person happens to be their grandfather. In which case, if you ask them if their grandfather has a soul, most people will instinctively answer yes.
The soul is an engine. It is the spiritual center from which the self emerges as the will to live. Almighty God is “I Am that I Am,” and made in his image we are little “i am’s.” We use the verb to be in the first person singular constantly in our simple, normal speech patterns.
We say, “I am hungry.” The phrase sounds self-centered, or it sounds like the desire to eat and survive.
We say, “I am able.” We may be bragging, taking responsibility, or asserting ability.
“I am not able,” may be frank self-appraisal, the refusal to work, or one more confession that our dust devolves toward the grave.
To say, “I am not able, but Christ is able, and in Him I am able,” expresses the mystery of the gospel, the power of ministry, the hope we share, and an ultimate fear of life’s penultimate end. “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16).
Max’s camouflaged soul
Max, an old Dutch dairyman, made few concessions in life to the demands of ease. Nevertheless, he hunted and fished and after he retired he played a mean game of golf. As his pastor, to be asked to an all-family dinner of children and grandchildren was an honor and joy. There was sure to be much laughter and horseplay.
Unfortunately, in his late sixties Max suffered a series of strokes and bleeds in his brain, which left him bedridden, blind, and mentally incompetent. One of the most pragmatic men I ever knew became delusional. He told everyone he was a colonel in the army—though he had never been in the military. And though he’d been as conservative as a fossil bed—he was now taking helicopter rides to the Great Wall of China with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda.
At first he loved the Communion we served him in the convalescent hospital. But after more bleeds he didn’t seem to know what it was.
At one point his family told me that they had heard him say something like “God the Father Almighty” over and over. The family warned me because they thought he might be swearing. In Max’s state it wouldn’t be unusual. Still I wondered what his expletive meant.
The next time I visited Max he growled out agnostically, “God the Father Almighty.”
So I said, “I believe in … “
“God the Father Almighty,” he said calmly.
“Maker,” I countered.
“Of heaven and earth,” he responded.
Thus, we recited the Apostle’s Creed together. By the end he was weeping and my eyes weren’t all that dry either.
For a few minutes we conversed in a normal way. He remembered who he was, who I was, and where we were. He seemed to enjoy the encounter, but I think it also made him feel sad. The touch with reality reminded him of his present condition, and naturally, he didn’t like that.
In subsequent visits, sometimes we connected and sometimes we did not. He continued to have slight strokes and bleeds. He slept more.
After 20 years of visitation with infirm people, I am quite sure that people we normally call “out of it” have emotional ups and downs like we do. Sometimes we want a pastoral visit. Sometimes we want to be left alone.
In places like nursing homes with little privacy and much loneliness, sometimes visits soothe and sometimes they invade.
Unconscious and delusional patients can’t tell us to go away. That’s why I always ask infirm people if they want me to read Scripture and pray. I look for the slightest clues for “Yes” or “No.” If I sense hesitancy from them, I politely refrain. If I cannot tell anything, I read and pray, but briefly. It is not their responsibility to desire my ministry. It is my responsibility to find out if they want me there.
Sometimes Max desired my presence and other times he didn’t.
Connecting on a deeper level
We can’t see the soul. But we can see the soul at work. We can see the ground of our being in the field of our life. In some ways, it’s easier to distinguish the soul when the body and mind are damaged.
To minister to normal, healthy people, we need to differentiate what really matters to them amid the fluff and stuff of their lives. We need to distinguish the negligible from the nonnegotiable. It’s a field-ground issue. How can you see the particular camouflaged in the general?
In the river valleys of Montana, just about Mother’s Day, morel mushrooms pop up through dead cottonwood leaves in moist, shady places. Deer love them!
These delectable and exotic mushrooms are easy to distinguish from their deadly relatives. They look far different from the ones that grow in your lawn. But they are devilishly difficult to distinguish from the decaying forest fall in which they spawn.
A friend of mine can spot a morel at a hundred yards in a total eclipse. He’s been picking them for years. When we go out together, I pick a few, he shares with me, and then he goes out later to fill his freezer.
However, if a light spring snow blesses the season, and we arrive after the snow melts off the conical delicacies but before it leaves the ground, even I can fill a five-gallon bucket with the precious fungi. When the color and texture of the ground are suppressed, the mushrooms are easy to see.
Seeing the soul is a similar field-ground issue. To see the soul, we must distinguish it from the physical and mental life surrounding it. With the physical and mental life suppressed, the soul is easier to see.
That’s at least one reason why many pastors find calling on the sick to be simpler than calling on the healthy. When the outer life is wasting away, the existence and the necessity of the inner life are far more obvious to both pastor and parishioner.
What does it mean for the mental life to be suppressed so that the soul becomes more obvious? Aren’t the mental life and the soul the same? Consistent with our approach to the question of seeing the soul, we ask, Can mentally ill people have healthy souls? Does a schizophrenic person have a real, human soul? Does a person who suffers from chronic depression have a fully human soul?
Of course they have a fully human soul. Their mental life is suppressed or altered, not their soul.
Consider what happens when a parishioner experiences anxiety (a temporary mental disturbance) due to the onset of a dread disease in themselves or a loved one, or a major financial crisis, or a dramatic change in life. We see the pain, the fear, perhaps the depression. But we also see the opportunity.
Every pastor knows that the happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise individual may be nearly impervious to discussing the things of God. Their mental and physical life is thriving and full. But catch the same person in a time of crisis, and they may be more open than ever to things of the spirit.
What is not readily apparent is that the soul-concerns of a high-flying CEO are the same as the Alzheimer’s patient. The failure to close a big deal is not different from the failure to tie a bow, because tying a bow is a big deal to an Alzheimer’s patient.
We have confused age, gender, racial, socioeconomic, personality, and professional distinctions with the essence of being human. Yet our real essence is seen in the soul, not in the soul’s wardrobe.
We may process the circumstances of our world differently, but to see this process at work is to see the soul—at its best and at its worst—in service to God and in rebellion against God. We glimpse the joy of honest accomplishment and the fear of the loss of competency, the peace of love and the angst of strife, the humble acceptance of the righteousness of God and proud assertion of selfish control. That’s where the soul becomes visible.
Healthy soul searching
What this means, in the most practical terms, is that you may not have to wait for the focused CEO or the rip-roarin’ cowboy to hit life-bottom to minister Christ to the depths of their soul.
The best training for ministering to happy, healthy, thriving humans of all generations, all racial and ethnic groups, is to minister to unhappy, sick, depressed people.
To learn how to minister to people who can think only of themselves, learn to minister to people who can’t remember their own name. To understand the stroke victim is to understand the football star, the only difference is the field.
How can this be? Old Max is living the football star’s greatest fear. To know the football player’s greatest fear, get to know the man living the football player’s worst nightmare. And if you can see God’s grace and salvation in that fearful place—then you can point to God in the hopes and fears of healthy men and women.
Of course, visiting old Max stretches us to the limit, too. Because in facing him, we face our own fears and we know our own soul. Ultimately, we don’t have to make great distinctions between the life of a football star and the life of a hallucinating, catheterized old man. It comes down to knowing that we both share similar joys and fears: “All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Eccl. 3:20, NRSV).
The soul we see in the old woman unable to tie a bow, is also the soul of a young girl tying bows in her hair before her first dance. The soul of a diapered, deranged man growling fragments of the Apostle’s Creed is also the soul of the boy learning it first in Dutch. And the soul of a man hanging on a cross crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is also the soul of the boy stumping the elders in the Temple.
The deepest soul-hopes and soul-fears of our everyday, healthy parishioners do not stray far from these poles. These touchstones for the gospel exist in every one of us.
Of course, in and of ourselves we can no more create a soul connection between a person and Christ than a hallucinating old man can recite the Apostle’s Creed or a woman sans brain cells can tie a bow.
But with Christ cuing us, we can speak the Word of true witness and place our finger on the ribbon, while he ties the bow.
David Hansen is pastor of Kenwood Baptist Church 8341 Kenwood Road Cincinnati OH 45236
Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
