Council for Health and Human Service Ministries

Word and Deed: Thoughts on Faith-Based Leadership

Ten Soulful Nuggets

Maintaining an awareness of your mental, physical, and spiritual needs during the busy holiday season will help keep you centered as you're engaged in activities with family and friends. As the season unfurls, be mindful to cultivate the things that help you to maintain some balance and peace. Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul - A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, provides nourishing nuggets to remind us of the need to tend to the soul:

  1. When you look closely at the image of soulfulness, you see that it is tied to life in all its particulars—good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart.
  2. Cultivation of the soul implies a lifelong husbanding of raw materials. Farmers cultivate their fields; all of us cultivate our souls.
  3. We can cultivate, tend, enjoy, and participate in the things of the soul, but we can't outwit it or manage it or shape it to the designs of a willful ego.
  4. Care of the soul is inspiring.
  5. Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life, quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.
  6. Care of the soul is a continuous process that concerns itself not so much with "fixing" a central flaw as with attending to the small details of everyday life as well as to major decisions and changes.
  7. Tending the things around us and becoming sensitive to the importance of home, daily schedule, and maybe even the clothes we wear, are ways of caring for the soul.
  8. In care of the soul, we ourselves have both the task and the pleasure of organizing and shaping our lives for the good of the soul.
  9. "Soul" is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.
  10. One who cares for the soul becomes someone at ease with idiosyncrasies and the unexpected.

Shirley Nelson

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