Pastoral experience in hospital pre-op units provides abundant evidence for the existence of the soul. I first saw this evidence in Birmingham years ago, when someone we knew and loved was having to go into the operating room twice the same day, because the first "pass" that morning had failed. The situation was in fact do-or-die, and I had never before seen the look of fear which had come over the patient's face as she was being prepared for her second procedure.

Then another time, in Washington, as the gurney was being wheeled out to surgery, a kind of fluttering look of complete panic and "We Gotta Get Out of this Place"- NOW came over a man I knew. The inward person, i.e., the soul, was in absolute but completely failing revolt over what the outward person, i.e., his body, was being forced to endure.

This is not dualism. It's empiricism. There is a body and there is a soul, and the two will part -- the connection between them be dissolved -- at the point of death.

My podcast considers that supreme and also sublime moment of dissolution. Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross comes into it. Humphrey Bogart and Lizbeth Scott come into it. And The Love Unlimited Orchestra comes into it.

Please don't end up like Marley. Many do! End up like St. Paul, leaning on the Everlasting Arms. LUV U!