Taking Care Of Our Soul
One of the many things God can do that we can’t is to create something out of nothing. Sure, we imagine that we’re creating things—a chef who creates a great recipe, a writer who creates an epic novel, a musician who thinks up amazing melodies from the top of his head—but all these things are not really creations in the true sense of the word. When we create a pizza for dinner, we’re making it out of pizza dough, tomato sauce and mozzarella. If we don’t have the ingredients, then we won’t be making pizza for dinner. God, on the other hand, created an entire universe filled with an almost infinite number of creatures, not out of things that already existed, but entirely out of nothing whatsoever.
When we “create” something, it’s always out of something else, but we still call our humble efforts “creations”. These so-called creative acts derive their nature, by extension, from the creative power of God. Our Lord said something similar when he told us that human fathers derive their nature as “father” from the divine Paternity of God the Father. “Call no man on earth ‘father’,“ he said. Because human fathers are only a reflection of God the Father and his relationship with the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son. Human fathers, and mothers do not create their sons and daughters out of nothing. Parents may look at their children with pride and say to themselves, “I made that little human being.” And in a sense they did. But like the humble pizza, the human bodies that parents create are made out of ingredients that already exist within their own bodies. When we mix these ingredients, they come together to form a new little person.
What we often neglect is that this purely animalistic reproductive system could never produce an immortal soul without the direct intervention of God. Our new little creation has an immortal soul, and that didn’t come from us but from God himself, infusing the body we made with a very special creation all his own, something created out of nothing by God the Father.
So all of us, it turns out, are not merely children of our parents. We are children of God. We have a biological father from whom we derived our body, and a Father in heaven from whom we received our immortal soul. The body our biological father gave us will die, but the soul infused by God will live forever. We owe so much to our parents, just for the fact that without them we wouldn’t exist. But how much more do we owe to God—without God we would be mere animals, without reason or self-awareness, and who would cease to exist the second our mortal span is over.
Parents, or at least good parents, take very good care of their children. Mothers in particular, whose specific job it is to nurture, guide, and protect their children, are renowned even in the animal kingdom (think of mama bears) for the great care they take to make sure their offspring don’t fall into harm’s way. It’s the basic principle of our own imperfect human parenting skills, and one which is imbedded in our nature. Imagine then, how much more the infinite divine love of our Father in heaven seeks to nurture, guide and protect us, body and soul! It’s an awe-inspiring thought that should bring us to our knees in thanksgiving and adoration, and inspire us to avoid offending God at all costs.
Most importantly, at least as far as our own good is concerned, we should take care of our souls. The first and foremost reason for this is, as we’ve seen, because our soul is our greatest gift from the God who loves us. We should take care of and treasure this gift, if for no other reason, than because of the infinite love with which it was bestowed upon us. But being human, with our own self-interest at heart, there’s another reason of course why we should take care of our souls. Not just because of the Giver, God, who is all-good and deserving of all our love, but because our souls are far more important than our bodies and we should therefore fear, above all, the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. In comparison with our obligation to love God, the motive of our self-interested desire for our own salvation should seem a distant second; nevertheless, it’s an effective motivation to take care of our souls.
We should behave like good parents towards our soul, treating it with the utmost care as we would a fragile infant. Because our souls are fragile. They can die very easily. All it takes is a single mortal sin, a few seconds perhaps enjoying a forbidden desire, or even more easily, by neglecting something we should do. It’s so very easy for our souls to fall from the state of grace. Just one mortal sin—it’s called mortal because it kills the soul And once our soul is dead, where are we then? If we still cling to God’s love, we feel terrible, knowing we are no longer eligible to enter heaven and enjoy eternal life with him. We know that if we don’t do anything about it, we’re doomed! Hopefully, we immediately fall on our knees and tell God we’re sorry, making an act of perfect contrition solely because we know we’ve offended our loving Father. We rush to the confessional at the first opportunity, where, by the grace of God, we are forgiven for the terrible thing we’ve done. When our soul is hurt, when our relationship with our Father in heaven is damaged, we make sure we beg God to heal it.
Today’s Gospel is about stewardship. We are meant to take care of the things for which we’re responsible. And of all those things, it’s not the material possessions that matter, it’s not even our children who are the most important (no matter how much we love them). It’s our own soul that matters most, and we must not sacrifice that soul for any reason, not even for the sake of another. We can’t sacrifice our own soul to save the soul of someone else—to sacrifice our own soul means to commit a mortal sin! And we may never do something evil in order to gain some good. Because the evil we commit is an evil against God, an infinite offence, and nothing on this earth is infinite, nothing can compare with the horror of offending the infinite Creator of all. If we could only see God for what he is, we would realize this instantly. If we could only know his love for us, we would never sin, not even to save the soul of our neighbor. Mercifully, though, God gave us a soul that is frail and which can easily be damaged. This helps to keep us out of trouble, forcing us to be ever mindful how easily we may lose our salvation.
You might be asking yourself though, isn’t it selfish to act out of this fear? Isn’t it wrong to do good only for the selfish reason of seeking the reward of heaven and avoiding the punishment of hell? The answer is, quite frankly, yes, it’s certainly not the best reason. But the psalms tell us that “the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom,” and this same Fear of the Lord is one of the gifts of the Holy Ghost. In today’s Gospel, our blessed Lord seems to confirm this in a new way. He seems to be saying, ‘yes, go ahead and be motivated by these selfish fears of eternal damnation.’ His actual words are, “Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness”—heed your selfish fears in other words, “that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” God loves us so much that he wants us to be united with him in heaven, even if we get there by placing our own interests first. After all, he knows that in the end, we’re loving ourselves really out of love for him. In fact we’re being good stewards, simply taking care of the souls he created for us. Oh, the depths of the wisdom of God, who created our soul the way it is, frail and fragile, for this very reason, so we’d take better care of it and keep it safe.