A Soul With Size

"By S-I-Z-E I mean the stature of [your] soul, the range and depth of [your] love, [your] capacity for relationships.  I  mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure.  I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness.  I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions.  I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature."

- Bernard Loomer

A Soul is Not a Thing

"I am a philosopher, let me tell you a great secret of life—a soul is not a thing, it is not something which stands untouched by the events of your life.  Your soul is the river of your life; it is the cumulative flow of your experience.  But what do we experience?  The world. Each other.  So your soul is the cumulative flow of all of your relationships with everything and everyone around you.  In a different image, we weave ourselves out of the threads of our relationships with everyone around us." 

- Robert Mesle, A Soul is Not a Thing: A Process Relational Wedding 

What is Fat Soul Philosophy?

All you really have to remember about Fat Soul Philosophy is that a fat soul is a beautiful soul.  In the process world view, God is the very Soul of the world, the ultimate instance of The Fat Soul, the One who lures us and all creation toward widening circles of Beauty. God yearns for beautiful relationships of earth and sky and people and turtles.  God yearns for us to know that we are all of a piece, all deeply interwoven and wholly beautiful in our differences.  

But aren't we afraid of losing ourselves in the process of widening our circles of empathy and understanding?   Fat Soul Philosophy would say that striving for a bigger soul does not diminish one’s own identity, uniqueness, or beauty; rather, it strengthens individual identity and uniqueness in the way a single color is brought to life in a painting by the splash of a contrasting color next to it.  

-- Patricia Adams Farmer, What is Fat Soul Philosophy?
See also her webpage: Fat Soul Fridays

Capacity for Loving Relationships

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness

Open-Mindedness

When Chuang Tzu was about to die,
His disciples began planning a grand funeral.

But Chuang Tzu said:
“I shall have heaven and earth for my coffin,
the sun and moon will be jade symbols
hanging by my side;
planets and constellations
will shine as jewels all around me,
and all beings will be present
as mourners at the wake.
What more is needed?
Everything is amply taken care of.”

But the disciples said:
“We fear that the crows and kites
will eat our Master.”

Chuang Tzu replied:
Well, above the ground I shall be eaten
by crows and kites,
And below the ground by ants and worms.
In either case I shall be eaten –
So why are you favoring the birds?”

Tolerance for Enriching Tensions

And as with anything that takes practice, sure, we are bound at times to fail at loving well.  But the good news is that life is a web of connections from which we couldn’t escape if we tried, and so a second chance is always right in front of us—in fact, we have the redemptive grace of a million second chances....See, life is lived and love is learned in the messiness of real-life relationships—whether in a first century church in Corinth fraught with division, or a twenty-first century church somewhere in the world, or the many learning labs that comprise the lives of us all.  

- Teri Daily, Love Made Gritty

Six Characteristics of a Wide Soul

If we unpack Loomer's paragraph we find that a fat soul has at least six characteristics:

1.  Capacity for Loving Relationships: A fat soul enjoys range and depth in its capacity for loving relationships, helping others to become freer in their diversity and uniqueness.  It is open-hearted.

2.  Open-Mindedness: A fat  soul can understand a variety of outlooks on life without feeling defensive and insecure.  It is open-minded.

3.  Openness to Complexity: A fat soul has the power to sustain complex relationships and enriching tensions.  It does not lapse into either-or thinking but is inclined toward both-and thinking.

4.  Tolerance for Enriching Tensions: A fat soul can live with enriching tensions without being overwhelmed.  It does not flee from constructive conflict.

5.  Personal Integrity: A fat soul does all this while maintaining a sense of integrity.  It sticks to its principles and enjoys a sense of individual freedom.

6.  Individuality: A fat soul does not lose its agency or self-creativity.  It celebrates diversity and delights in uniqueness, and it enjoys unique agency itself.

Personal Integrity

Openness to Complexity

Dear ones, I am thankful for you. & for the meadowlark who has chosen a nearby roof-ridge. For the compassionate flow of the cosmos continuing while we rest. The leading edges of storm fronts over the Pacific. For time befriended. Old growth Redwood forests & days spent among them. Coffee made by other hands. Spontaneous laughter & serious concentration of beloved children. For wooden building blocks. Pens. Paper. Eyeglasses. Maybe even for the sadnesses that tell us how deeply we stain one anothers' lives. Typewriters. Boots. Strangers and the neverbefore. Beethoven's terrible dedication to making, Alfred North Whitehead's, Judith Butler's, & the poets'. For the funny canned cranberry sauce that in a few hours will ride shotgun, a measly contribution to the most generous of feasts, but desired anyway. For breeze on bare skin & reaching to play our hair after illness. For gentlenesses of every kind.

-- Christina Hutchins, posted on Facebook, November 28, 2013, 

Individuality

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

-- Ann Sexton

---