Excerpt from Swallowed by Life
7. Anybody in
There?
One day a neurosurgeon that often
makes the determination of brain death sat down in the hospital lobby with me
and began talking about the soul. Still clothed in the green scrubs and fabric
shoe covers from a recently completed surgery, he shared that he recently lost
his father.
“It was the first time I’ve ever come that
close to death personally,” he said. “I believe in an afterlife, and it was a
much more peaceful experience than I had supposed. Although my father had
cancer and had been sick for a long time, my dad died so quickly. One minute he
was there, and the next minute he was gone. The shell where he lived was all
that was left.”
We went on to discuss spiritual things and
how they relate to the intricacies of the brain.
“I
believe the brain is the residence of the soul, and when a person is brain
dead, the soul has gone on to its reward,” the neurosurgeon explained.
The soul’s residence can be debated. We
often think the soul resides in our chest area near the heart, partly because
of how the heart responds to emotion, but also because the Bible mentions so
many things about the heart. A few of these are a “pure heart,” “believing
heart,” “unrepentant heart,” “imagining heart,” “stubborn heart,” “grieving
heart,” “loving heart,” and “joyful heart.”
Despite
even many more examples, I don’t believe scripture speaks of our heart as a
flesh-and-blood organ, but the “heart of us.” Like an apple core where the
seeds are. Or a watermelon’s sweet heart that has no seeds. More accurately,
our heart is the center of who we are.
Many Bible scholars define the soul as the
residence of our mind, will, and emotions. That certainly describes the center
of who we are and gives some credence to the idea that the soul’s residence is
in the brain.
Copyright Ada Brownell 2011
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