Something About Soul

There is something about "soul" that grabs every human being. Soul moves a person beyond the intellect, beyond dignity, and beyond wondering what other people might think. Soul is what I think, what I feel, and what I am experiencing, while I am fighting and struggling this wilderness life.  When others stand by and observe, they too, are often moved into the world beyond - into they very heart of human existence.

I have often wondered what it is about Dave Matthews that I love so much.  Even when he is singing blasphemy (i.e., in the song What You Are or The Deed is Done), he is doing so with soul.  It is honest, transparent and moving.  It would be totally wrong at this point to correct what he is singing about - though correction is merited.  Soul demands an audience first, an instructor second (or fifth!).  For the most part we need to hear it before we instruct it.

Carl Ellis Jr., in Free At Last?, discusses the origins of soul in the African-American community.  I am deeply grateful for his insight because it helped me understand my own heart.  He helped me to understand why it is that I lack soul and why it is so uncommon for many in our communities to feel the depths of it.  Ellis writes,

The early masters, with few exceptions, had never intended that their slaves should become Christian.  However, this did not prevent the slaves from experiencing the power of the Word of God...Resistance to oppression is itself an expression of God's grace.  When a people are subjected to such oppression, they are driven inward, to the depths of the very humanity the oppression is trying to negate.  Any cultural expressions that emerge from such a suffering people will come from those human depths.  Other human beings who encounter these expressions will be affected at comparable depths.  This, I believe, is what LeRoi Jones meant when he described us as the "Blues People."  This cultural depth and the skills to express such depth are what is today popularly known as "soul."

It is because of these depths that the African-American church is very significant.  And it is because of the apparent lack of these depths that a lot of white churches are practically insignificant.  Theology mixed with oppression and suffering is powerful and authoritative as it commands the hearts of its audience.  It is not difficult to understand how theology worked out only over coffee lacks the power and authority mentioned above.  Theology with no "soul" often enters the mind where it is quickly forgotten or used as a means to gain one's own glory.

The African-American spirituals that were sung during the dark days of slavery where beams of meaningful light, filled with biblical eschatology, and pregnant with meaningful truth.  That is why I try to listen.  It is also why I long to worship with my brothers and sisters who are filled soul.