Advent, Adventure and Soul
The word 'Advent' means 'The Coming' with a sense of ‘The Happening’. But 'Adventure' means something that comes to take us on a risky venture. The Soul is the life principle in a human being that forms and moves intellectually and volitionally (by free will not just by instinct) the body.
The Soul is a Spirit created by God out of nothing and is made for a specific body. The Soul is to be the immortal form of a particular mortal body set within time and space. The soul is the form of the body but the body is the matter of the soul which specifies the individuality of that soul and is unique to it – they are made for one another. It is for this reason that there cannot be reincarnation of a soul into any other body. Thus, the Coming of a soul occurs at conception for it is created by God out of nothing at this point and is thrown into an Adventure in a specific body that will be specified by the time and place in which it will live, move and have its being. It will thereby have a history that will climax in being opened out to eternity and it is this that will make it the story of a human person! Although the soul is the form of the body, the soul outlives the mortal body when death comes to separate soul from that body. However, this soul and therefore YOU, will also outlive the earth, the stars, the galaxies and the universe!
Our Lord Jesus is the first born from the dead and brings into being a new creation, but He will come again to judge the living and the dead which we call the 2nd Coming. At the Second Coming there will be the General Resurrection from the Dead when the Blessed will find that their immortal souls will be reunited to their own resurrected bodies which are now made immortal, impassable, indestructible and glorious like Christ’s Glorified Body! But this final Resurrection of both the Blessed and the Damned will pivot on what you and I choose to be and to do in space and time in our specific mortal bodies!
It is vital to know that though the body comes from our parents, the soul is created out of nothing by God at the very moment of conception, to inform, animate and move a body uniquely fitted for it. It is from this moment of conception that a soul moves into being, time, space and materiality and sets sail on the great hazard of an adventure of Being and Becoming! An adventure in space and time, but experienced as history, in which on all sides the embodied soul is beset by risks, dangers, threats and temptations to it’s physical, it’s emotional, it’s intellectual, it’s moral and it’s spiritual life as it seeks to grow up to eternity! It is for this reason that Jesus Comes to bring us into the state of Grace.
The greatest hazard for mankind has arisen in our times in the systemic attack on the very notion, nature and existence of the soul in education, media, politics, popular culture and pseudo-science. When a man, a woman, a youth or a child is cut off from even knowing that there is a soul then life becomes the life of a sleep walker who is walking in ever growing darkness which is at first bewitching as a dream but steadily grows into a nightmare of an unholy horror. Their stories and their lives are hollowed out by the denial of the soul and, as a result, their lives are filled with untrammelled appetites and crashing waves of emotion that overwhelm mind and reason till it is as horizontalized as a corpse. Thus, they stumble in a dark downward plunging depression of directionless-ness that is the consequence of a life lived without any vertical and eternal compass and they become curved in on themselves with no eternal horizon till they truly become The Walking Dead, stumbling aimlessly around in time and space and finally lost for all eternity!
It is only the shock of death and the consequential after-shock that such a person discovers that though his or her body died, HE or SHE did not! For they find that their souls are standing in the eternal hall of the King of kings, a hall of judgment, where everything is now revealed fully and completely and where there is nowhere to hide!
What can be worse than to wake-up on the other side of death to the eternal truth that you were made to live forever but instead you had lived a life purely on the basis of a belief that death was oblivion and that you had no immortal soul? In otherwords, you abandoned the adventure of soul-making to follow the crowd, the herd, the mob, what everyone else was doing…because you thought there was safety in numbers!
A shocking realisation that all through one’s life there were rumours, people, teachings, signs and evidence that bespoke of the reality that every human being had an immortal soul but which you had chosen to ignore, dismiss and even ridicule because that is what everybody else was doing. Like a Lemming you had followed the crowd over the cliff…to perdition!
