Souls at All

Sometimes I just have to wonder.

Consider my two most recent patients. The first is a young woman, barely twenty. The father of her child found out that she had moved on to another boy, and so he quietly followed her one night. When he saw them coming out of his house, he ran over her with his car. He crushed her spleen, caused massive internal bleeding, and broke her neck. More specifically, he caused an atlantoaxial dissociation, which is a fracture at the very top of the spinal column. It’s what we call “functional decapitation” because, while the head is still attached, it has been severed from the rest of the body. These patients don’t do well.

Another young woman – this one just over twenty – got into a fight with her boyfriend. He simply pulled a gun and shot her in the neck. The bullet managed to blow apart her esophagus and trachea on its way to implanting in her back muscles. The five-hour surgery is an indication of how long her path to recovery will be.

And when I hear stories of my friend’s ensuing custody battle, I hurt – and get sick – on a totally different level. Anger, betrayal, deceit, manipulation…words whose meanings are so painful that even typing them unnerves me.

These days, I find myself spending much less time wondering about the eternal destination of our souls, and more time asking if we have souls at all.

The world changes when you start actually entering the idea that we are soul-less, purposeful-less, utterly useless creatures here for our own devices and desires. This world sucks. I hate it. I hate living in a place full of soulless creatures.

One of my favorite places in Philadelphia is the garden outside the Rodin museum. At the entrance to the museum stands his impressive masterpiece “The Gates of Hell.” Standing over twenty feet high, it depicts humankind’s ultimate condemnation. It’s inspired, in part, by Dante’s description of the gates of hell in his Divine Comedy, with the famous inscription “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

But I know I have a soul. If not, then what am I feeling, and why is it so powerful? I’ve seen in so many others, and I know (think?) I’ve felt it in my own self. I don’t think it’s just my wishful thinking. As Annie Dillard writes in her essay An Expedition to the Pole, “What are the chances that God finds our failed impersonation of human dignity adorable? Or is he fooled? What odds do you give me?”

And maybe that’s just it. Maybe we do have souls, we’re just really, really bad at knowing how to use them. And as depressing as it may be to realize we’re not quite as good as life as we may think, at least – at least – we have hope.

And that is good enough for me for now.