We are Spiritual Beings

I’m not this hair / I’m not this skin. / I am the soul / That lives within. ~Rumi, Persian Mystic Poet, (1207-1273)

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French philosopher, Jesuit priest (1881-1955)

In Plain Words to Children (c.1876) by English Anglican bishop and author, William Walsham How, ((1823-1997), you may find another similar perspective:

“What a wonderful thing the soul is, children! You cannot see it; you cannot hear it; you cannot touch it. Yet you know it is there. You do not want any proof that you have a soul. You are as sure of that as that you have a body. It tells you itself.

‘Now I think I am wrong, after all, in saying that you have a soul. Ought I not to say, you are a soul? Is not the soul really yourself? In truth, my children, it is the soul that has a body, not the body that has a soul; for the soul is surely greater than the body, and will last when the body is laid aside in death.”

Another wonderful arrangement of words on these thoughts is from Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister, George MacDonald (1824-1905),

“Never tell a child ‘you have a soul’. Teach him, ‘you are a soul; you have a temporary body.’ As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is the temporary clothing of our soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations.”

British author, lay theologian, and university scholar and teacher, C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) has often been credited for writing something similar to MacDonald, probably because Lewis looked upon MacDonald as a spiritual father and referred to the great Scotsman as “his master”, (although MacDonald died before Lewis was aware of him). Even if this writing or thought does sound very much like what Lewis would write, it supposedly can’t actually be found in any of his own writings.

These thoughts, these beliefs, for me: this “knowingness”- inspire me:

“. . . yet my primary reason for making art . . . is to remind both myself and the viewer that we have -that we are– souls.” ~Connie Seabourn