One who lives long encounters two applied meanings of old – old and aged. When I retired from the administration of a college, I was perceived as entering the old generation – point of retirement. That is fairly easy to accept in that the pleasure of retirement and freedom from some duties dilutes the inner feeling of being out of it in the business world. There is loss of authority, and general awareness that one’s word is not as meaningful in active life as it once was. Then in the course of events, I was needed for about ten years in the business lives of my sons. Not on strict hours, I was given duty in the part of the business which I was expected to manage. On the close of these opportunities, and my wife’s death, I was invited to join administration with a friend in California, so I traveled back and forth for about six years. That assignment ended and I returned to the address chosen twenty years earlier for retirement. I was then 85 years of age, but quite active in the context of my life. Then the aged (very old) began. That is marked by the feeling that everyone is gracious to do for you and expect little of you – except that you do not complain. It was marked by my decline in hearing acuity and precision of sight, added to the out of it assumptions of others. One falls into a silence that did not apply in earlier years. There are other factors in the very old context. For example, your family is concerned about you driving a car. If one acquiesces or is forced to it at this stage, he or she may be relegated to second childhood. Someone steps up to monitor your life.
All this leads me to the matter of the soul. The soul never grows old. It is ageless, but is affected by host aging. A child is not aware of the soul – but becomes aware of the mystery of human life, factored into the soul. The person does best who recognizes that the body is something the soul wears. That body will ultimately be cast off as a garment well or poorly worn. Because it is not dependent upon the body for survival, the soul plays its own game. It influences the life/body it occupies and is influenced by it. The soul (self) can be shriveled and wizened, or it can be cultivated and enlarged. It is both a possessor and possessed. If God through Christ is invited, there is a sense of habitation – of Christ in you, the hope of glory. Soul awareness emerges in the child, helping the innocent/guilty to faith for responsibility. That soul never leaves until body death. It never dies in the same meaning that the body dies, which is to cease to exist except in the elements of the body that harbored it. A body is dust and to dust returns.
Those who keep their souls to body interests tend to develop a soulish life. It has self-interest in it. It interprets life in a different context than the soul that harbors God. It distorts the factors of life. It is the place where control gives way to ill habits, to animal drives, to addictive behavior. It is what Scripture dubs as heart longing. We may feel the physical hearts that beat in our breasts may be the residence of the soul, even though registration is in the brain. This complexity boggles the mind, but appears as sensible explanation to the person of faith. God provides the living soul. If invited he resides there for the individual person. If not, the ultimate end for the person is loss of all. I am now well past ninety years of age, the very old, and getting a kick out of my own control to that day when control of my life will be in my children’s hands – but not yet. My soul is as it has always been, above time, but enhanced by choices made along time’s way, all of which were useful if admitted of God, to whom I committed myself nearly eighty years ago. One can go into the sunset to the Son-rise in Christ for the immortal life of the soul-being.
If I joined a group of persons who had just read this Page, and we engaged in discussion about the narrative of the soul, I would quickly admit that some other interpretation might well fit the biblical references to the context of our conversation. Presently there is a school of thought that there is only the body and that all this spiritual overlay of persons of faith is untrue, fruitless speculation. My response would be sympathetic but, for me, my understanding generated from biblical references and the satisfaction of faith is that for the Christian, there is an indwelling of Christ and that appears to relate to soul. Whatever there may be for the Christian there is something related to Christ’s presence experience. Scripture affirms there is spirituality and physicality in us, each with its own legitimate characteristics. We can live both. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020