Two Takes on the Soul

My brain craves connections. When I read, listen to music, and observe art, my brain often plays tag with information its previously stored. Case in point: the soul.

While traveling over the last few days, I dived into Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, a book that’s been sitting on my nightstand since September. Here are Bell’s thoughts on being a Christian:

Being a Christian is not cutting yourself off from real life; it is entering into it more fully. It is not failing to go deeper; it is going deeper than ever. It is a journey into the heart of how things really are. What is it that makes you feel alive? What is it that makes your soul soar? (91)

Enter “A Wagner Matinee”, a short story by Willa Cather.

In teaching literature this year, I find myself analyzing the characters in a new way, as if they truly are human. I find Bell’s comment about being alive so relevant to Aunt Georgiana.

Aunt Georgiana has given up a great many things to start a new life with her husband on the Nebraskan frontier and decades later she returns to her home in Boston. It is here where her soul is revived by the decadent music she herself once played and was forced to relinquish in moving out West.

Clarke, her nephew, makes the following observation on seeing his aunt react to a Wagner matinee.

“It never really dies, then, the soul? It withers to the outward eye only, like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again.”

Aunt Georgiana’s repressed longings sprung to life with one stoke of the conductor’s baton, and ours can be resurrected with one healing touch of living water. May you, too, embrace it, walk towards it, and wade deeper into it.