Soul For One

I was on the bus recently and noticed one of the ads. Actually, it wasn't an advertisement but a theological question to provoke self reflection. It asked the reader to think about the value of the "real" rewards of life as opposed to the physical possessions we seem to be obsessed with. The question it asked at the end was "What would you trade your soul for?" With nothing else to do on the bus, this got me thinking about the semantics of spirituality and life in general.

I couldn't tell you when exactly when my trade-in occurred but it probably wasn't for much more than a lemon lollipop, haircut and reaching second base. Suffice to say after many attempts at soul searching as a teenager and not "feeling" anything I decided to be blasphemous and leave the church. If I wasn't getting results then either I was doing something wrong or had already landed in some higher power's reject pile. One thing was for sure, I wasn't going to hang around and keep faking it, like so many others around me who were too chicken to reveal their true beliefs to themselves and their parents. If there was one thing I could do even if it broke my parents' hearts was to be honest and live on my own terms. Besides, I'm much too angry a person to be happy living the church life. Too many edges, too many sharp ones.

Anyway, back to the bus. So I was thinking who deals in souls should one want to make a trade for a car, career, toy, plastic boobies, etc.? Would it be God or the Devil with whom you pawn off yourself? And how would you ever get it back in the event that you repent and want to follow the path of the straight and narrow again? I'm also not sure if trading and selling are the same. If you could buy back/reclaim your soul would it really be yours or just a random one in stock? I was imagining a library-type system where the soul gets stored in a cubbyhole until its rightful owner comes back to get it. No? And how many souls do a person get anyway? I always assumed that they were one per being and making more than that would trivialize their importance in the otherworldly plane.

It's now clear to me that I should've asked these kinds of questions before I left the church if only for a greater understanding of the soul trading business. They should invent a soul detector you walk through to see if you've got one and how clean or dirty it is. But then if you didn't have one, what good would that do you? I don't know where mine is but still being an accepted member of society I'll just assume that whatever I've got is OK.

When the bus reached my stop I looked at that question one more time and got off. All I could think about was dinner.