Fat Souls
Being truly human means we come to peace with our shadows, shortcomings and the hard work of becoming. We learn to integrate and transcend, recognizing that we can grow and mature ...
My friend, Trevor and I discuss our conversation with Activist and Non-violence equipper, Rivera Sun. A View from the Balcony segment on So What? Big Ideas and why they Matter Podcast. On Youtube or wherever you get your favourite Podcasts
May 9 my friends Tori E. Owens and Jonathan Foster sit down for a conversation with Liz Charlotte Grant. Should be a fascinating listen: Malformed pillars in evangelicalism. Link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/26528
In her book Fat Souls. A Philosophy of S-I-Z-E (2016), Patricia Adams-Farmer launches from a big idea of Bernard Loomer (1912-1985). Loomer would often begin his lectures with the question:
"How big is your soul?"
In his essay entitled "S-I-Z-E is the Measure," Loomer explains:
"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."
The best example of a Fat Soul might be God, the soul of the world. God, as a truly Fat Soul, "lures us and all creation to widening circles of Beauty." The idea that God is profoundly relational and longs for genuinely beautiful, love-inspired relationships and interconnected wholeness.
Adams-Farmer helps land this for us by sharing a nugget from Madeline, a fictional character from her Fat Souls Friday:
"A beautiful soul is a large soul, one that can overcome the smallness and pettiness of our human condition. A really fat soul can welcome diverse people, ideas, and ways of being in the world without feeling threatened. A fat soul experiences the intensity of life in its fullness, even the painful side of life, and knows there is something still bigger."
I am reminded, as we grow and mature, we leave some things behind to move into the next stage. This is part of the birth, death, and new life rhythm. Another way to think about this is we include and transcend. Some of the small, ill-fitting ideas and practices we leave behind, while we include the best of what we leave behind as we grow towards more wholeness. These experiences, (even the painful ones) are recycled and redeemed, forming the substance for our ongoing becoming. In Love, nothing is wasted.
Being truly human means we come to peace with our shadows, shortcomings and the hard work of becoming. We learn to integrate and transcend recognizing that we can grow and mature without losing what is truly unique and wonderful about us. Nothing truly genuine and beautiful is really ever lost.
As I am given to say, "It's direction, not perfection (tip of the hat to John Wimber). As I have written in Becoming Love, our lives are very much our being on its way to more being. I think that this lived becoming (Love) is how we cultivate our Fat Souls.
How fat is your soul?
But what are we to make of this idea of Soul in the context of Fat Souls?
Patricia Adams-Farmer shares an insight from Process thinker Robert Mesle from his work entitled "A Soul is Not a Thing: A Process Relational Wedding." Mesle writes:
"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."
"Your soul is the river of your life." The cumulative flow of your experiences." Let’s take a minute and sit with this.
(pondering)
The River of Life and the confluence of all your experiences of and in the world, with each other, its share of joys and sorrows, victories and failures and loss.
(pondering, yes, again)
Employing Mesle’s metaphor, we weave the tapestry of our souls through the threads of these relationships and experiences. As I type this, I reflect on my journey. I think of some threads of fine linen and silk together with ratty old juke strands, binder twine, and barbed wire kind-of-threads that have been woven into this tapestry that is me.
There have been times I have wondered how these could possibly make for a lovely tapestry of my Soul. It is here that I reflect on the ideas of Viktor Frankl. The one that revisits me most in the barbed wire moments of life; he reminds us that we are never completely powerless, for, in every situation, we can choose how we are going to respond to each situation. This choice might be to just survive. It might be to choose to forgive, to heal, to make whole. It might be the choice to get back up and limp onward.
Be it a Herculean effort, tenacious obstinance or the sigh of consent, our power to choose how we respond to all of life gives shape to the tapestry we weave together with God. Frankl points to something like a Fat Soul for the capacity to choose well.
“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.” - Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
I think many of the best, heroic kinds of choices we make, responding to the most well-being that’s possible, helps us integrate the juke, binder twine and barbed wire into the tapestry of our Soul towards redeeming beauty – that even that which was meant for our destruction can be reshaped to squeeze every ounce of good possible from it. This is what love does.
Genuine beauty is seen in the context of the whole of a life - the good, bad and ugly - lived in the divine milieu of Love. It is not the exclusion of the painful but its inclusion and eventual redemption.
As we practice seeing our soul (whole self) as the confluence / threads of all our relationships with the world, each other, God, and with ourselves; our agency to include, transform and transcend while we stretch towards self-giving LOVE, this is a recipe for a very lovely Fat Soul.
Sola Caritas,
𝞃Michael
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ORTcon 2025. In Wyoming's breathtaking Grand Teton mountains, ORTCON25 gathers scholars, leaders, pastors, and activists to explore a variety of topics from an Open and Relational Theological perspective. The conference provides workshops, lectures, and social activities to deepen relationships and present new ways of imagining God and the universe.
A great lineup of speakers, including Thomas Jay Oord, Anna Case-Winters and Brian McLaren. Also, some of my favourites include Jonathan Foster, Michael Brennan, Melissa Stewart, Tori Owens, John Pohl, Shaleen Kendrick, and Chris Hanson.
Oh yes: "Nothing truly genuine and beautiful is really ever lost." Thankful for that.