On The Subject of Souls…
January 17, 2018
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
~Mark 8: 36
Frequenters of the pages of this blog will know that I am distinctly non-religious. I attempt to make this into neutral territory, so that we may all come together and discuss things and share stories without battles being fought over who believes in which God, or Gods, or gods, or what have ye. It’s a policy I intend to continue and enforce as I continue my career.
That having been said, I was at one time highly religious. I was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Or Mormons, which is far easier to say and to write. It was an interesting phase of my life, one which came during my formative teen years.
I look back now and realize that although the Church and I will never be able to reconcile our differences, it gave me a lot of things that I wouldn’t otherwise have. One of which is a deep and abiding love of the lessons and wisdom the Bible and other religious documents are attempting to share without treating them as actual historical records.
The quote above is one such example. I reflect on it often, and from it I always reclaim the same message: do not lose who you are in what you do.
It’s not a complicated message. It doesn’t require a graduate thesis to understand what it’s asking of us, but so often we (I) forget the lessons that this powerful statement has to share. What do we gain, if by sacrificing all that we have and all that we love, we obtain that which we desire?
Do we reach a point where the cost of our ambition has become such that we are no longer the person we were when we started?
Is there some threshold that once crossed cannot be regained? I think of this more than ever with my son growing as he is. He’s become a regular spit-fire, and while that means his future is bright, it also means that my life is quite miserable at the moment.
You see, as I put him in timeout for hitting me when I told him it was bedtime, I realized that there are men and women who would abandon their lives as they had lived them to escape the hard moments. There are those who tally up the broken friendships, the broken promises, and consider the cost worthwhile. So they leave, not for any faults of the child who knows no better, but because their own emotions cannot grow any further to adapt to their situation.
Some of these men and women achieve the ambition which drove them to their decisions. I wonder about this sometimes, when my brain is whispering at me in its best Grima Wormtongue impression, and I think that it would be better to burn all of my life to the ground and start over with nothing.
Then I picture my sons face. Grown. Confused. Wanting nothing more than an explanation for what I’ve done. And he is right to demand it. And he would not be the only one.
I imagine what the reactions of those men and women who I esteem and respect would be. What it would be like to try and explain to these people who value family, integrity, and hard work that my son wasn’t worth my time. That what I want to do with my life was more important than loving my son and raising him to be a good man. I see the dismissal in their eyes. The hatred those looks would contain at such naked hedonism.
There are no easy outs to get what I want from my life. I’ve chosen to dedicate myself to something that is at once profoundly simple and endlessly complex. I wish to make things. What man or woman worthy of respect would look at me, a man willing to cast aside his greatest creation for his own ambitions, and see anything worth their time?
That’s what that verse means. That is what I sometimes forget. That is what I so desperately need to remember. No shortcuts. No substitutions. I must work. I must grow. I must love, and guide, and nurture. All of those things cost. All of them will hurt. Yet I must endure, lest I lose everything that it once meant to be myself. Then I will have truly died, even though my body goes on living. I will have sacrificed my soul for things I could’ve obtained anyway, if only I had been willing to lose myself in the work.
No one respects that.
Respectfully,
Justin
