Keeper Pile

"But Mom, where is my soul and what does it look like?" It is inevitable. If you are going to be discussing God and immortality with your child, the unanswerable question will arise. You can brush it off with the standard, "No one knows," or "It doesn't matter." Or you can have fun with it and ponder, with the help of your child's superior imagination, a soul that is so invisible to us and yet so beautiful and precious to our Creator.

The thing is, the way God sees souls is a lot different from the way we see people. If God were to sort souls out as a child sorts marbles or pebbles, none would go in the ugly pile He loves us all with agape that is absolutely unconditional. He also understands our inability to see each other this way and sent us a clear Gospel instruction on how to fix this blindness.

When Jesus brought up the story of the Good Samaritan, he really had the Jewish men around him buzzing. Not only was he challenging their lack of charity, but he was pointing out that sometimes we can learn from others whom we would ordinarily look down upon. The Samaritan, "scum" that he was, was the only man who followed his sense of natural law--that instinct for right and wrong-- and acted in a truly loving way to the beaten traveler.

Lessons in charity can come from any direction if we are open. Basically, we must look through the black or white, fat or skinny, addicted or clean, legal or alien, stable or struggling, mobile home park or ocean front condo dwelling, irritating lack of social skills or pompous self-righteousness and see every soul as bought at the same terrific price--the last drop of His Son's blood. Imagine, if you will, a parade of people that you have come across in your life, people you have judged on outward impression.

The overweight woman in front of you in the grocery line--did you superciliously not the junk food in her cart and congratulate yourself on your purchase of spinach and hummus? Did you forget that her soul is the same weight as yours? What about the Hispanic family enjoying a Sunday afternoon on the river next to your group. Did you grumble about their lack of ability to communicate in you language and wonder if they had green cards? Or did you ask yourself how you could be Jesus to them today? And your next door neighbor whom you seem to have nothing in common with, are you avoiding thinking about them, or praying for them?

God challenges us every day to see Jesus in our neighbor. The crafty Hebrew scholar, asking, "well who exactly is my neighbor," trying to find a loophole for indifference. Everyone is a neighbor. We learn much from Mother Teresa, that tiny little nun who had the guts to go full bore for Jesus. She dragged worm infested untouchable out of the gutter to take home and love until they died. She also turned a concerned eye to Americans and lectured us on our poverty of ignorance. Everyone ws equally important to her, because she knew all souls are all meant fo the keeper pile.