The Welcome Wagon’s meaning of soul

The Welcome To The Welcome Wagon album - by The Welcome Wagon - was famously produced by Sufjan Stevens. It’s arguably the only contemporary liturgical album that the masses got to hear about in 2008. And The Welcome Wagon, equally famously, comprises the Reverend Thomas Vito Aiuto and his wife Monique; born in Michigan, the former agnostic studied Theology at Princeton and is now senior pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church. Not quite your usual background, then – and to continue, Monique was raised on a farm and has been previously employed as a craftmaker for Martha Stewart.

It’s a different spin then that the Reverend Vito Aiuto offers to our soul series… and here’s what he had to offer:

“The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that “then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.

“In Sacred Scripture the term “soul” often refers to human life or the entire human person. But “soul” also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: “soul” signifies the spiritual principle in man.

“The human body shares in the dignity of “the image of God”: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:

“Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honour since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.

- from The Catechism of the Catholic Church

Tomorrow’s meaning of soul comes from Laura Izibor.

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