I’d like to spend a few posts this week reflecting on Curt Thompson’s The Soul of Desire, a book I mostly read while in Tennessee this summer.  I’d like to start with a few quotes and three points of to connect.

The first point to connect concerns God.  We’ll call that point “communion.”  Christians believe that the Triune God is knowable, that He has revealed Himself, and that He even dwells in us through the Presence of the Spirit.

The second point to connect concerns others.  We’ll call that point “community.”  Christians believe that we are called to live in fellowship with others through our churches, families, neighborhoods, and more.  We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves (the Old Testament and Jesus) and to outdo one another in love (Paul).

The third and final point to connect concerns ourselves.  We’ll call that point “the soul.”  Not quite the self, which might better name the individuals that we each construct over time.  At the very least, “soul” reminds us that there is more to us than flesh and blood, that there are deeper parts of us than momentary manifestations of emotions and moods.  The soul is the “understory” where all of the deep work happens.

So: communion with God, community with others, and something vital about ourselves we’ll call the soul.  These are the points of connection that Thompson writes about in The Soul of Desire.  They connect and are interconnected on a deep level, so much that Thompson asserts that

… our awareness of being known by God is measured by the degree to which we are known by each other.

Something that Thompson does well, and that helps his ideas resonate with me, is his setting the work of God in the lives of people in the context of the Christian idea of the new creation: that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation and what God makes new in Christ is forever.  This points to the well-worn idea that the kingdom of God is “now and not yet.”  Or, in Thompson’s more psychological terms:

Believing in Jesus, in the way John’s Gospel describes the notion of what it means to “believe,” necessarily puts us on a new path.  The hard part is that we take our old brains with us.

And so there’s the tension of old and new creation, of dueling kingdoms, the struggle between the flesh and the Spirit and its impact on our souls, our communion with God, and our community with others.  But we are not without hope, and that is a good thing.  And while the “solutions” presented The Soul of Desire aren’t necessarily practical (or fully possible) for most of us, there are some helpful tool within that are worth exploring.  Next time we’ll look at the four S’s.  Then we’ll look briefly at Thompson’s four questions.  We might also take a quick look at the place of beauty in Thompson’s thinking, too.