Finding Soul Satisfaction

The soul, for many, is a topic deep and mysterious. Some like John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, consider the soul the most important part of who we are. Recently, Greg R. Taylor, who ministers at Garnett Church of Christ in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sat down with Ortberg to talk about his new book, Soul Keeping and how people can find soul-satisfaction.

Your new book, Soul Keeping, could be called Tuesdays with Dallas because Dallas Willard is featured so much. Why is the focus on the soul instead of on Dallas?

Actually, what happened was the book started to be about the soul, and Dallas kept creeping into it. It didn't start out to be about Dallas at all. I wanted to talk about the soul and the nature of the soul.

But I can't think about that stuff without thinking about Dallas, because he's so central to my development. Not just to understanding the soul, but to the life and well-being of my own soul. What I loved about him was the character of his soul. In writing or in preaching, it always helps if there's story and personhood and not just abstract truth.

By the end of the first chapter, I felt like weeping. I think it was because of what you said on page 23. You wrestled with questions about pastoring:

"Why is it so hard for me to love the actual people in my church? Why is that I know I want to love my children, but I seem to be driven to be a success—especially in a vocation that's supposedly calling people to die to their need to be successful? Why do I get jealous of other pastors who are more successful than I am? Why am I never satisfied? Why do I feel a deep, secret loneliness? Why is it that I have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and a master of divinity and work as a pastor and yet I'm not sure who I am?"

Well, it's so much a part of the story, at least for me and my relationship with Dallas. I'm drawn to him and I'm ashamed of myself. And I don't mean that in the morbid way. When you're around somebody who's farther down the road, it casts light on you.

When I first heard of him, I had read The Spirit of the Disciplines and it changed my life. I could tell you the seat on the plane where I was sitting when I read that book from Chicago to California.

I wanted to know more about him, so I wrote him a letter saying what the book had meant. It turned out he lived a few miles away from where I lived. After he died, I received from his daughter, Becky, a copy of the letter that I had written him over 25 years ago.

Dallas had a box—this is vintage Dallas—that he called "fond old treasures." Dallas used to write about treasuring, and how central treasuring is to being human, and how even a homeless person will carry pictures or a letter. We all keep treasures.

What was his sense of humor like?

Humor and joy are so important. I asked Dallas one time, when pastors end up in a ditch—sexual misconduct, money, or for whatever reason—how often is it because they were not leading a joyful life?

And he said, "Every single case." He has a famous statement in one of his books, "The failure to attain a deeply satisfying life always has the effect of making sin look good."

One of the things I loved about Dallas is he had this very sly sense of humor that would creep out. And part of why Dallas is difficult to read is he has a very precise definition for every word. Spirit is "unembodied personal power," beauty is "goodness made manifest to the senses," joy is "a pervasive sense of well-being."

So I was talking to him one time and he said, "Work is the creation of value." He was talking about how important play was, so I said, "What's the definition of play?" Without blinking, he said, "Play is the creation of unnecessary value."

Dallas impacted you in a very deep way in the relation of the soul to the family. Talk about how Dallas taught you to bless your daughter.

One of the deep needs of the soul is to bless. And it's a real important subject. Blessing is one of those words that's become tired, and it sounds real religious, but actually to bless is to will the good for somebody. And to curse somebody is to will bad into their lives.

We're exquisitely sensitive. If you're driving a car and somebody looks at you the wrong way you feel that deeply and you never get beyond that, it ruins your day.

So we need to give blessing and we need to receive blessing. We're inevitably, inescapably doing that in relationships all the time, because we're always willing the good for someone, or not liking them and willing the bad into them.

And especially that's true with our children. We need to will the good into them. People sometimes say that a parent—and pastors will often feel this—can never do any better than their child that's doing the worst. I think that's profoundly misguided.

I think it's often true, but I don't think that we're meant to live that way. Of course, God doesn't live that way. God loves everybody and God carries his love for the human race and is willing to suffer for us, but God is in his heart a joyful Being. If I'm not joyful depending on how my kids are doing, I put the pressure on them for my well-being, and that's not love.

One of the most important things for a pastor to learn is do not allow your well-being to rest on how well your child is doing, even spiritually. That gets into real deep soul work around, "But I wasn't perfect. How do I receive forgiveness for that?"

With our oldest daughter, Laura writes about this herself quite a lot now, from when she was little she experienced a lot of anxiety. If people met her, they would never guess that. She's like a duck where she is poised above the surface. She was the most mature person in our family when she was 10 years old by far, but under the surface, she was paddling furiously.

I remember when she was in second grade at a church camp-out, and people were talking about the beginning of school. She said, "I'm really nervous about school starting. I'm so anxious that sometimes I just can't eat." I remember thinking when she said that, "Isn't that kind of cute that she's been around adults, and so she's parroting what she hears adults say?"

I have a Ph.D. in psychology and I completely missed the intensity of anxiety in this little person that was in my charge. It was not until she was a senior in high school that I realized how intense and painful the battle with anxiety was for her. That was awful.

Several years later, we were together learning about blessing and how important it is to take that blessing of erring with somebody. Again, those aren't just words, they actually require the use of the will, where I'm with you and I look at you, so the body and the mind are involved. I'm thinking about you right now. Then I will good into your life. I will for God to bring joy, truthfulness, and peace into your mind, your shoulders that can get tense, and to your face. I will for that to happen and that's a blessing. It takes time and it's something we do as a whole person.

Part of what was going on in that moment, with my daughter, was to think about the years of missing her anxiety and my own preoccupation with myself. That's something that I have to deal with, with God, and with her, but now I get to bless her. That's a great healing for the soul, hers and mine.

Another lesson about family and the soul was focused on your wife. Dallas talked to you about honoring the soul of your spouse. What does that look like?

That gets to the need for distance in a marriage, the right kind of distance.

When we went to Chicago, and I was going on staff at Willow Creek, it was very much a joint decision, but it was a little more mine than hers. She would have been a little more apt to stay in California, and I had a little more leaning to go to Chicago. So when we went, Chicago was hard for her. She felt depressed, lonely, out of place, and sad.

I moved too fast trying to fix her—get connected, get involved, or by getting mad at her for not being OK. It took me a long time to realize, in that move, it's OK for me to be OK. The best gift that I could give to Nancy would be to say, "I'm actually OK. I really enjoy being here. I love you dearly. I understand that it's really tough. I want to give you the space to grieve. It's OK that this is really hard for you. I want to talk about that, as it's helpful. If you want to do any problem solving around it, I'm glad to do that, but I don't want to put the pressure on you of making you feel like you have to be OK for me to be OK." It took way longer for me to realize that than I wish it would have.

Are we soul keepers of other people's souls? Was there a point where you realized you're not a fixer of your wife or a fixer of your children but a helper with them to tend their own souls?

We are keepers of souls. The whole language around that is so wonderful. People used to talk about the cure of souls or talk about certain people being "curates," which is where all that comes from.

Soul is very deep language. It's irreplaceable language. It's interesting as a pastor when I say to my church sometimes just a statement like, "You have a soul," the congregation gets real quiet, because people, when they're still, know this to be true.

I sometimes think of the soul like a turtle that hides in the shell. You can't make it come out, but when it's still and safe, it will emerge.

One of the first things that happens in solitude is you realize you have a soul. That's part of the way of true solitude, to go away someplace where there's beauty and you want to be alone. This is so restorative because you realize your existence is way larger than your job at the church. Then you kind of have a place to stand.

You do that on a daily basis. You recommend not just doing a big sabbatical. You liked yourself better on sabbatical and you realized you need to come back and live that life daily.

On a sabbatical, I asked Dallas, "How do I help the church grow spiritually?" because I get frustrated by the church not growing spiritually. He looked at me, there was a long pause, always with Dallas a long pause, and then he said, "You must arrange your life so that you're experiencing deep joy, contentment, and confidence in your everyday life with God." I actually have that as a sign up in front of my door because it was so striking to me.

He didn't tell me here's the book to have the congregation read or the curriculum to have them follow or the prayer to have them pray. He started with me. I actually said, "I didn't ask about me. I asked about them." He said, "No, I know what you asked about, but the truth is, if you're a pastor, you will always reproduce your own life. Because the people who are closest to you, if they see a discrepancy between what you say and how you live, they know what you really believe is how you live. To believe something means to be ready to act as if it's true, so we never act in violation of our genuine beliefs."

The last question I want to ask is, what kind of stream-cleaning work—from a metaphor in your book—do pastors most need to do?

Because pastoral work involves other people, expectations, and perceptions, the practice that I think is the most helpful in pastoral work is solitude. For pastors to go away to a place where there's beauty and they love it, and to say that phrase, "I have a soul." To allow the truth about their soul to emerge, and to feel like when they go to solitude, they don't have to accomplish anything.

Don't bring a list of stuff, don't bring a book. Just be there, and discover they have a soul. They will find out, in solitude, the state of their soul. Is it hurried, anxious, or afraid? Is it tempted?

The other step that I would encourage for pastors is, cultivate a friend with whom you have no secrets. There's been a lot of research around what causes pastors to leave ministry, to burn out, and the single biggest factor is whether or not they have a friend before whom they have no secrets.

Often if you're at a church, that's where almost all your relational connections are. But you have a dual role there. You're their employer, if it's somebody that's on your staff. Or they're your employer if it's your senior pastor. Or if it's somebody who goes to the church, then you are their pastor. Those relationships complicate the transparency needed.

You need to have a relationship where there's absolutely no fetter or reservation, and you're able to communicate without any hiddenness, pretense, or disguise. "Here's what I am most ashamed of," to be able to confess that and then be loved. There's enormous power in that. And for any pastor who doesn't have that, they're going to be at risk.

Greg R. Taylor pastors at Garnett Church of Christ in Tulsa, Oklahoma.