One book I was able to finish before starting my summer mainland trip was Curt Thompson’s Anatomy of the Soul.  I did not intend to read his The Soul of Desire this summer, too, but it’s what I found myself reading during my time in Tennessee.

Taken with something like Fountain of Salvation by Fred Sanders, it’s hopefully a little obvious that I’m thinking about the nature of God and the nature of humanity, with a highly “personal” slant on both.  What does it mean for God to be triune: Father, Son, and Spirit?  And what does it mean to be made in His image and brought into relationship with Him?  And then, ultimately, what does it mean to be drawn into relationship with others?  I think these questions define “the understory” of every human life, really.

Thompson’s The Soul of Desire has a lot in common with the recent work of Andrew Root (When Church Stops Working and Evangelism in an Age of Despair), it’s just that Thompson starts with the individual and moves quickly to the communal.  Both writers want us to think about what it means to sit with someone else, what it means to discern the work of God in the life of a person trying to make sense of the mess of life.  Root’s approach is more organic; Thompson’s is more organized and (for lack of a better term) psychologized.  Thompson also starts with a nice nod to Smith’s You Are What You Love and about mankind’s nature to want, to desire (thus the book’s title).  A quote from early in The Soul of Desire:

What I really long for, it turns out, is for God to show up and compete (if indeed I am created to long for him like I long for nothing else as an expression of being loved by and loving him).I want him to appear in an embodied way in my life now (not just two thousand years or so ago) and give me a genuine experience that will persuade me to want him more than anything else.

It’s awkward, but there’s a part of it that rings true when it comes to our expectations of God.

Next week I’ll be spending two or three posts on some specifics from Thompson’s book.  I liked it a lot, much more than Anatomy of the Soul.  And while I don’t know how practical or possible Thompson’s ideas are for most of us, I do think he’s onto something (or many things) that we could all learn about how we relate to God and to one another.