Back to work people!
I am talking to you, student, tanned and rested, but on the cusp of syllabus shock.
I am talking to you, professor, dreading updating Canvas for your upcoming courses.
I am talking to you, administrators and staff, who’ve spent the summer compiling, analyzing and filing reports on reports, only to turn around and assess the reports on reports.
Regardless of the work we are called, hired or volunteered to do, as the fall semester approaches, we all share the same work: soul work.
Sure, the word soul is probably a bit overused. Soul. Soul food. Old soul. Body and soul. Lost soul. Heart and soul. Soul Train (look it up, kids).
Growing up in the ’70s, the music that stirred and stirs me still is classified by one simple word — soul. The first tape I bought after I installed an 8-track deck (look it up, kids) in my beat-up Mustang was by Marvin Gaye. To this day, I stop whatever I am doing when I hear his voice break through, “Mercy, mercy, me.” And then there is Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, The Isley Brothers, Diana Ross, and — well, the list goes on of musicians who knew how to summon things deep and soulish through a few words and fewer chords.
The word soul is tossed about as casually as polos at a contemporary worship service. Maybe soul is a bit overused, but we know it when we see it, are changed by it when we experience it, and we feel it when we sense it. Soul. Food has soul when it tastes like home. There is soul in art, literature, philosophy and physics. The dancer knows soul when the body gives shape to the air in rhythm and expression. A grandmother has soul, holding the tiny one who will carry her memory long after she is gone.
When I was younger, I thought life was about the right school, right major, right career, right income. It is not that at all. It is about soul work, and such work takes a lifetime, maybe longer. In the School of Theology, the soul is studied as a theological construct or a biblical notion. But soul at Mercer shows up across the disciplines, specialties and majors. Soul happens when suddenly, out of nowhere, something comes together for the student, and curiosity is ignited, a discovery is made, and a meaning is formed.
Soul work is a path of holiness that is less about how one feels and more about how one connects. The engineering student designing prosthetics is engaging the soul just as the legal scholar is discovering the art of advocating for justice. Soul work happens behind scalpels and scripture, with pupils and patients, and through mathematics and art.
Howard Thurmond is remembered to have said, “Do not ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is for you to come alive.”
That is what we do here at Mercer — students, staff, faculty and administrators alike — we live our soul out loud! So, now that it is back to school, let’s get to work.
“Mercy, mercy, me.”
