Soul Keeping

by John Ortberg

  We all have two worlds, an outer world that is visible and public and obvious, and an inner world that may be chaotic and dark or may be gloriously beautiful. In the end, the outer world fades. We are left with the inner world. It is what we will take with us. I am an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s glorious universe.

  “Do you regret anything?” someone asked him.

  “I regret the time I have wasted,” he answered.

  Huh?

  If there is any human being on the planet who has not wasted time, it is Dallas. I don’t think he’d know what a television was if one hit him on the head. He is either reading or teaching or doing ministry. Or doing bits of carpentry around their place in Box Canyon, or mentoring students, or praying. If Dallas is guilty of wasting time, the rest of us may as well sign up for vagrancy hell right now.

  But I think, maybe, this time I know what he means. “[Redeem] the time,” the apostle Paul said, “because the days are evil.” The language is exactly right, I heard Dallas say once. The reason our souls hunger so is that the life we could be living so far exceeds our strangest dreams. I had a friend once who knew when still a young man that he was going to die of cancer, except that the hospital made a mistake that happens only in movies. They told him he wasn’t going to die; he was going to live. And for an hour, for a day, he experienced a euphoria of gratitude beyond words. For those few hours, he got it right.

  I think Dallas said he regretted all the time he wasted, not because he compared himself to other more efficient people, but because he began to see what life could be.

  I remember a phrase I had heard from him years ago, about how all of us lost souls allow ourselves to live in worry and anger and self-importance and pettiness when life with God is all around us: Your time is already in the pawn shop of lost souls.

  I think Dallas wanted his time back.

  I watched him and thought of what a redeemed soul can be:

  • To be able to say yes or no without anxiety or duplicity

  • To speak with confidence and honesty

  • To be willing to disappoint anybody, yet ready to bless everybody

  • To have a mind filled with more noble thoughts than could ever be spoken

  • To share without thinking

  • To see without judging

  • To be so genuinely humble that each person I see would be an object of wonder

  • To love God

  A LITTLE SLICE OF HEAVEN

  The gospel, Dallas said once, means that this universe is a perfectly safe place for you to be.

  Huh?

  It means that the soul is simply not at risk. Not even from cancer. What else could Paul have meant when he said nothing can separate us from the love of God? Why else would Jesus have advised us not to worry?

  Nancy and I hug Dallas and Jane. Nancy promises to send a special recipe for corn bread and biscuits that Dallas will be allowed to eat — he is diabetic now. I smiled at this quiet act of defiance. The chemotherapy and other treatments may limit his diet but have no power over his hunger for foods a Missouri boy grew up on.

  Dallas sits in that house in Box Canyon and waits while his body goes through the slow death of chemo, and a little slice of heaven beams through that home, as it does through the most unlikely houses and huts and hovels around the planet.

  People visit. People call. People write.

  “We’re praying for you.”

  The life of the village depends on the health of the stream.

  The stream is your soul. And you are the Keeper.

  EPILOGUE

  Early on the morning of May 8, 2013, I got a phone call from Gary Black, a friend of Dallas and the family, telling me that Dallas Willard had died.

  My first thought was to remember what Dallas had said about how when he died he wondered if it would be awhile before he realized it. I wonder if anyone’s told him?

  I remembered the death of my father-in-law from pancreatic cancer. What an unpleasant way of death it is. Dallas was unfailingly kind and patient with those who cared for him in the end; it would have been hard to imagine him otherwise.

  Gary actually taped his conversation with Dallas during those final hours — What are you seeing? What is taking place? — as Dallas began what he spoke of as “the great transition.” I have never heard a recording like it. It’s like a conversation with a person who is about to cross over into a room that you cannot see and where you cannot go.

  Gary said that Dallas’s final words, in the midst of what was surely significant suffering, were, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Gary was the only person in the room at the time, but he said that Dallas was not talking to him.

  I’m not sure if anyone has told Dallas yet about his death, but it took three services here to say good-bye. One of them was at the little church he and Jane are a part of; a small service for family and friends. Another was a more public event at a larger venue. A third service was held at the school where Dallas has taught for almost five decades.

  At all of them the same observations were made of a life lived with such humility and wisdom and readiness-to-serve. All of them ask the same question, though not in so many words: “How did such a life happen?”

  Six months later, Nancy and I have lunch with a young couple. The husband had met Dallas a couple of times and had read his books. Even though they had only spoken a few times, this husband’s life was somehow changed by this one acquaintance. We are part of a secret society, friends of a common friend.

  The wife of this couple was pregnant: “Do you know if it’s a boy or girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “Have you picked out a name yet?”

  “Yes. We’re going to call him Dallas.”

  Life goes on. The world spins out another day. The mystery of human life and hope goes on. And here and there, the luminous light that shone out from a carpenter in Nazareth glimmers and flickers in the darkness. And we hope again for what life might become.

  The soul waits.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book is a soulish thing. It is physical — dots of ink and paper from old trees — and yet it feeds our minds and moves our wills. We read with our bodies; with our wills we choose to have our thoughts guided by the words of another person. Books connect us with ourselves and with others — and perhaps with God.

  This has been a book of particularly deep connections for me. I am grateful to my editor, John Sloan, and to our partner, Lyn Cryderman, for effort and contributions that have gone far beyond what is normally associated with an editor. Without Lyn’s diligence, this book simply could not have happened. And it marks a milestone with a team of folks from Zondervan across the years who have been a family of support and nurture, for whom I will always be grateful.

  Gary Moon is a treasured friend who has been generous with his thoughts and wisdom, and also made available the background about Dallas Willard’s life and thought. Mark Nelson and Tremper Longman III are two scholars from Westmont College who provided helpful resources from the fields of philosophy and Old Testament studies. Agents Sealy and Curtis Yates are a joy to work with. Glenn Lucke and the Docent team provided research that was amazingly comprehensive and deep. I am enormously grateful to the church I serve, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, for making it possible to have time to write and for the opportunity to work with Linda Barker, who helps make life and ministry possible in a thousand joyful ways. Rick Blackmon and Brad Wright and the SoulPulse team have helped flesh out what the “with God” life looks like. Patty and Eff Martin have helped make the dream of the Willard Center a reality, and its contributions are only beginning. Jane Willard and Becky Willard Heatley are fellow board members from whom I have learned much.

  Laura Kathleen Ortberg Turner was a constant source of suggestion and encouragement. My wife, Nancy, is a treasure of energy and feedback and attitude and companionship that is a part of every word and thought.

  For Dallas, I am
one of countless people who find it impossible to express in words the nature or magnitude of the debt owed. His thinking has shaped me far more than anyone else’s thinking, and his life has shaped me far more than his thinking. “Let no debt remain outstanding,” the apostle Paul wrote, “except the continuing debt to love one another.” It is a debt that I will joyfully and gratefully be unable to repay as long as I live.

  BIBLE VERSIONS

  Scripture quotations marked ESV come from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations marked KJV come from the King James Version of the Bible.

  Scripture quotations marked NASB come from the New American Standard Bible. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

  Scripture quotations marked TLB are taken from The Living Bible. Copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations marked WEB come from the World English Bible.

  SOURCES

  Prologue

  9: Keeper of the Stream: This is a version of a story told by Peter Marshall in a sermon. Beyond his story, there was a book written in 1952 called Keeper of the Stream about a man named Frank Sawyer who worked to beautify the river Avon. He died on the river Avon, an old man, in 1980.

  Introduction

  13: I have been to Box Canyon many times; some of these historical details are from Tracey Kaplan, “Once-Remote Box Canyon Being Pried Open,” Los Angeles Times (March 19, 1989).

  19: private world: Gordon MacDonald, Ordering Your Private World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984). More about this in Chapter 8.

  CHAPTER 1: The Soul Nobody Knows

  23: “Most people, at most times”: Mark Baker and Stewart Goetz, The Soul Hypothesis (New York: Continuum Books, 2011), 100.

  23: It’s the word that won’t go away: One of the primary reasons that the word soul is used less and less is the unpopularity of “dualism.” The word dualism itself is loaded and complex; in one paper N. T. Wright lists ten different forms of dualism from theological to eschatological to moral and beyond. (http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_SCP_MindSpiritSoulBody.htm)

  Belief in the soul is generally associated with “substance dualism,” the notion that spiritual — or unembodied personal power — actually exists and can be a causal force in our world.

  One of the most common objections to dualism in contemporary (and much Christian) thought is that it often includes the idea (frequently associated with Plato) that matter is inferior to the realm of the spirit, and this leads to a devaluing of the body or of sexuality in ways that contradict the goodness of God’s creation. Any form of dualism that fails to uphold the goodness of matter as God-created would fall short of biblical thought.

  Another objection is that dualism seems increasingly unlikely as science (especially neuroscience) continues to tell us more about the workings of the human body (particularly the brain).

  For the purposes of this book, my main concern is with those views of human life that argue that human beings are “nothing but” jiggling atoms or tissues and nerve endings (a view sometimes called “nothing buttery,” and more often called “reductionism” because of the claim that understanding and explaining human existence can be reduced to the level of biology or chemistry). I think the most important aspect of “soul language” is that it affirms human beings as moral agents, with the capacity for free choice and therefore accountability, who will be resurrected by God and therefore are created for an eternal existence in his great universe. Christian thinkers such as Nancey Murphy, who advocates what she calls “non-reductionist materialism,” would not tend to use the word soul and would disagree with dualism, but would still hold to this robust view of personhood that is part of classical Christianity. (For her view, see Whatever Happened to the Soul? Edited by Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998]).

  For contemporary defenses of the traditional notion of the soul and of dualism, see Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), or John Cooper’s excellent Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). I find their arguments compelling. Clearly, simply being a theist commits one to some form of dualism (God himself does not have a body). I’m not sure that trying to maintain a non-reductionist view of personhood in a cosmos created by an immaterial God will buy much extra scientific credibility with those who are skeptical about dualism in general.

  24: Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), 20.

  24: “If Daffy Duck were”: Jeffrey Boyd, Soul Psychology (Colorado Springs: Soul Research Institute, 1994), 59.

  25: Soul weighs twenty-one grams: Les Parrott, You’re Stronger Than You Think (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2012), 116.

  25: Owen Flanagan: Baker and Goetz, The Soul Hypothesis, 100.

  25: Patricia: Boyd, Soul Psychology, 203ff.

  26: “The only thing I can depend on”: Ibid., 203.

  26: W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (reprint, Healdburg, CA: Eucalyptus Press, 2013).

  27: William Pollard, The Soul of the Firm (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000).

  27: Moulton is known to be the anonymous subject of the poem “The New Wife and the Old” by John Greenleaf Whittier.

  27: eBay policy: http://www.businessinsider.com/soul-listing-policy-ebay-2012-7

  28: Plato believed that souls were re-incarnated: Steward Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 12.

  28: Augustine said that maybe souls preexist: Ibid., 44 – 45.

  28: “Now there are some things”: Thornton Wilder, Our Town (New York: Harper & Row, 1938), 87 – 88.

  29: Walking Corpse Syndrome: G.E. Berrios & R. Luque, “Cotard’s Delusion or Syndrome: A Conceptual History,” Comprehensive Psychiatry 36:3 (May – June 1995): 218 – 23.

  29: Clifford Nass, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).

  30: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), 32.

  30: Edmund Hess: cited in Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, 32.

  30: John McCain: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2007/10/16/mccain-sees-something-in-putins-eyes/

  30: “soulful work” movement: www.soulfulwork.net

  31: cost to save a soul: The New York Times (October 9, 1911), section 7.

  31: “I don’t deserve a soul”: Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 21.

  31: “If a child is born”: Jeffrey Boyd, “One’s Self-Concept and Biblical Theology,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40:2 (June 1997): 223.

  CHAPTER 2: What Is the Soul?

  35: “The LORD God formed man”: Genesis 2:7 KJV.

  35: “What is running your life”: Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2012), 199.

  37: “The mind of sinful man”: Romans 8:6 NIV 1984.

  39: “And we were all in the ship”: Acts 27:37 KJV.

  39: Leonard Cohen: cited in Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 1.

  40: “What does it profit”: Mark 8:36 ESV.

  41: Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness, 2.

  41: “When we catch sight”: Ibid.

  42: “Treatment of the psyche”: Sigmund Freud, quoted in Jeffrey Boyd, Reclaiming the Soul (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1996), 6.

  42: Journal of the American Medical Association: “The Rising Cost of Modernity,” cited in The New York Times (December 9, 1992), 8.

  42: Martin Seligman, The Optimistic Child (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 25ff.

  43: “I mean, when you sing”: Scott Flaherty: John Colapinto, “Giving Voice,” The New Yorker (March 4, 2013), 50.

  44: “Though you ha
ve not”: 1 Peter 1:8 – 9 NIV.

  44: Horatio Spafford: “It Is Well with My Soul,” 1873.

  CHAPTER 3: A Soul-Challenged World

  48: Ray Romano: Parrott, You’re Stronger Than You Think, 17.

  50: Parable of the Sower: Mark 4:1 – 20.

  52: Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 1.

  52: “As the deer”: Psalm 42:1, 5, 7.

  54: “My soul is downcast”: Psalm 42:6, 7.

  54: “I will speak out”: Job 7:11.

  54: “I will make my dwelling”: Leviticus 26:11 – 12 NASB.

  54: “A voice from heaven”: Matthew 3:17; 12:18, my translation.

  55: Yuppie: adapted from Matthew 19:16 – 22; Luke 18:18 – 23; Mark 10:17 – 22.

  CHAPTER 4: Lost Souls

  62: “You desire truth”: Psalm 51:6, my translation.

  62: “There are sinful desires”: 1 Peter 2:11, my translation.

  62: “Bless the LORD”: Psalm 103:1 KJV, emphasis mine.

  63: “What is the most important”: Mark 12:28, 30, my translation.

  63: “The divided life”: Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness, 20.

  66: “in my inner being”: Romans 7:22 – 23.

  66: “The spirit is willing”: Matthew 26:41.

  CHAPTER 5: Sin and the Soul

  67: Chloé sunglasses study: Wray Herbert, “Faking It,” Scientific American Mind (August 23, 2010), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faking-it

  68: “Here is a trustworthy”: 1 Timothy 1:15.

  68: John Stott, Guard the Truth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), 53.

  68: “Neural Consequences of Religious Belief on Self-Referential Processing,” Social Neuroscience 3:1 (2008): 1 – 15, doi:10.1080/17470910701469681

  69: Jeff Schwartz: personal communication.

  69: “Dear friends”: 1 Peter 2:11.

  69: Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).

  70: “the godlessness”: Romans 1:18.