Month: March 2005

In February 2004, I accepted the request to be the Vestry representative on our search committee for a new rector, after the departure of our previous one.

Now, 13 months (and any number of doubtless-boring-to-the-point-of-tears posts here) I’m pleased to announce (as word has been given to me) that our nominated and selected candidate to be the next rector of our church has accepted the offer.

W00T!

He’s intelligent, energetic, has a dry sense of humor, an engaging speaking style, a focused conversational style, and I think he’s going to be a great rector for us for some years to come. He has a very nice wife, too. He has broad experience in starting congregations, running large congregations, dealing with congregations in crisis, and in non-profit management. I think he’s going to be a great fit.

He starts on Sunday, 1 May. I’m very much looking forward to it.

(And, no, I’m not mentioning his name here, yet, since I don’t want folks, upon searching for it after the announcement Sunday, to find this post as one of the top entries. Bad form, y’know? I’ll go into more detail next week, for those who are interested.)

Premise: The soul exists, the spiritual (arguably primary) expression of Who We Are. (If you aren’t willing to accept the premise, might as well skip on to the next post.)

There is clearly some connection, positing a soul (which I’ll stop caveating at this point, see above), between the soul and the personality we exhibit. I can imagine a system of metaphysics in which this isn’t the case, but let’s not.

In a traditional Christian cosmology (which is not necessarily, in this case, what I believe in, but never mind that), the soul is eternal, but, presumably, is of a different nature between, say, infants (or fetuses) and adults. Again, there’s a sense that as the mind progresses in development, so the soul grows in some way, too.

(If you go in for more of a reincarnational viewpoint, this connection works better, since you can have a soul that is related to the personality, but not necessarily tied to it, which is one of the reasons I lean that way in bull sessions on the subject, while realizing that I have no better idea of what’s actually going on than anyone else does.)

The Terri Schiavo case brings with it questions here, though, too. Presumably (see premise, above), Terri has a soul.

So, what’s going on with it, right now, working under the presumption that her mind has been essentially destroyed? If the mind is the expression of the soul via physical means (the brain/body), and the mind has been wiped out, we assume the soul is not, in turn, damaged.

Again, traditional view of the soul would have it that it still exists, a reflection of who she was, then, at the time her brain was so severely damaged. But what’s it doing? Does it know what’s going on. Is it lurking, ghost-like, over the proceedings? Is it trapped, silent and self-aware, in that immobile body? Or is it dormant, quiet, cut off until after death somehow brings us (back?) to awareness of the comic stuff we catch only glimpses of?

What does that imply in the Schiavo case, if anything? If the state of her soul is not in danger, does the decision by the courts, one way or the other, make any difference? Of course, we can’t measure or perceive the soul, so we use the biological proxy of life as our value (as well we should, since otherwise one can simply wish away any human horror by noting that souls weren’t actually harmed). But if the folks so eager to interfere in the Schiavo case really believe in her immortal soul, how does their perception of it affect or motivate their actions (we’ll make the further unprovable assumption that they are acting out of moral concerns, which some would consider as unlikely a premise as that at the top of this post).

And how, to extend the hypothesis, does that differ from the state of soul in our own bodies? Does it exist, awareness-wise, independently of us? Or does it rest dormant within us, unaware? What does that mean, and what implications does that have in our spiritual growth? As our mind fails, barely, or perceptably, or totally, with age, disease, or accident, we all face to varying degrees what Terri Schiavo faces. How does our perception of the soul, and our Purpose, and what the afterlife is like, affect how we want ourselves (or others) to be treated in those circumstances?

Drink several beers. Discuss.

Haven’t reported much back yet on this, since there’s No Official Word. The candidate met last Thursday night with the Vestry to get a better feel for us, ask us questions about the congregation and parish and our direction and where we see things going and how we expect to be working with the new rector and all that.

It’s funny, because on the one hand, one expect, it being a Religious Office, for there to be a Heavenly Choir, and Flock of Angels, and a Shaft of Godly Light suffusing everyone and making this all a Clear, Divinely-Inspired Mission.

On the other hand, God helps those that help themselves, and good, solid business/recruiting practices are and should be a natural part of this sort of thing. We are, in essence, hiring a new CEO from out of state, with the intent of bringing them in for a five year contract. The candidate, in turn, is looking at a position that will likely be the climax of their career, involving a move out of state, and all that entails. A major business decision for all concerned, and something that just holding hands and singing Kumbayah and trusting to the Lord would be … neglectful of the duty given us.

But the religion and faith bits are an important part of it as well. Lose sight of that, and we might as well be just a business. And we’re not.

It’s an uneasy balance, the sacred and the secular, in church matters. Get out of that balance, and things are liable to go seriously wrong.