What The Soul Can Do

Reflections on Inheritance, Transmission, and What Passes Between Us

Who or what teaches us what to believe about the soul? Teachings abound — but without imagination, how do we form the intuition and faith required to survive absolute despair? This brings me to my main question: What else guides us toward an existential truth we can live by, specifically, what to believe about the soul? Our beliefs about the soul come not just from knowledge, but also from imaginative faculties such as intuition and motives we may not fully understand, and thus be unable to explain.

Grasping the nature of the soul requires drawing upon both knowledge and imagination.

I'll start by exploring my own experience in wondering about that which animates our human being - whether it’s merely “consciousness” or “soul,” each so difficult to fathom, there’s something there. To be too dogmatic, looking at any single source or personal conviction, is to deny the freedom and obligation we have to work it out on our own; the ultimate goal I’d think is to abide in life with a sense of peace and a framework for a rich life, here and now.

Since my days as a Catholic school kid, and later when I heard phrases like "the devil made me do it" or saw movies like The Exorcist, I've thought a lot about soul-related matters like spiritual inheritance, momentary possession, or a shared mystical resonance. What is this mystery passing into the next body, exerting unfathomable control?

As a Catholic kid, I was invited to choose a saint's name at Confirmation. This was done believing (via knowledge imparted by teachers) that my chosen patron, St. Catherine of Siena’s spirit, would guide me throughout life if I devoted myself to recalling her example at every opportunity. By the end of my life, perhaps someone might say I showed qualities of Catherine, and if I mirrored much of her goodness throughout my lifetime, some devout Catholics might even believe our souls had been entwined. This was the genesis of my fascination with the life of the soul, and with the idea of soul migration - how they move from one place to the next, into another person perhaps, and so on. Must we invite them? How might any spirit take over our bodily actions - or beliefs - for better or worse?

Much later, witnessing the deaths of my grandmother, mother, and sister enriched my perspective on the topic of the movement of souls or spirits. Their deaths came decades apart from one another. My response to each seemed to mirror something profound about our shared life experience that’s hard to describe. One example: My mother had had a difficult, unfulfilling life for many reasons. Being strong, even stoic, and available to Mom mattered deeply to me. This was not always easy, as my mother and I had shared a very difficult relationship. My mother had been treated harshly by her own mother, even cruelly - and this legacy had been passed through Mom to her daughters.

The moment of her last breath happened on a winter night a week before my birthday. She had been in hospice awhile, and no one expected her passing that night, so I, her firstborn, was alone with her. A few hours after the others had gone home to rest, my head close to hers as I held her hand, she let out a long, slow sigh. I waited for the next breath but it never came. I surprised myself then by weeping, wailing copiously like a little child. A nurse rushed in to comfort me and help with my own hyperventilation.  Understandable response, as she was my mother - and yet I felt I was also weeping on behalf of the beloved one next to me, she who never fully lamented, or paid much attention to herself, because she couldn’t. She had drowned in her own sorrow, we had watched her do this, and had been unable to save her. Mom’s last deep sigh sounded like relief, and release.

In fact, I tried to explain this to the nurse helping me. But I could not share what I actually felt. I’d had the sense that my suffering lifted her up, making her own voice heard, as if for the first time, through time and space. Odd, I guess, but I can’t explain otherwise.

What if, after death, souls could enter the bodies of others for a moment, a day, a week, or even a lifetime? I wonder if our souls sometimes get taken over by someone who needs to finish something. Is it possible to share parts of the soul? After all, we speak of "soulmates.”

I have long been moved by the story of Elisha and Elijah in Second Kings, where Elisha asks for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit when he is gone - and receives it. What made Elijah's spirit transmissible — and what in Elisha made him capable of receiving it?

I still don't know what happened in the room where my mother took her last breath, with me at her side as if I’d been chosen to be the final witness of her mortal life. Did Catherine of Siena, patron saint of nurses and Doctor of the Church of my innocent childhood, have anything to do with it? Did this mystical moment of "soul sharing" break a cycle of cruelty?

Something passed between us — or through us — that night. Maybe that's as close as I'll get to understanding what the soul is, and what it can do.