Soul Assessor
“How much is it going to cost?” I ask, expectantly. She looks hard into my eyes, as if she is examining the tiniest parts of my iris. “I think you might be able to afford it, but it will cost you dearly.”
This whole adventure started one day, when I was contemplating my soul. I hadn’t figured out if I thought I actually had one. In my contemplations I had to wonder if I had one, and where it was. Was it in my chest, with my heart, or in my breath? In my head, nestled between my hippocampus and my amygdala?
I googled it, and an advertisement popped up on the right hand side that caught my attention: “Soul assessments: honest appraisal of the cost of finding, retrieving, and analyzing one’s soul. www.soulassessments.com”
I clicked on the link, and all there was a single physical address: 137 Purgatory Way, New Orleans, LA 70165
As it happened, I was headed to New Orleans that next month, so I decided to check it out in a spare moment. It took forever to find Purgatory Way, it turned out to be this tiny alleyway that never got cleaned or swept. There were dilapidated buildings on both sides of the alley, and the door to #137 was tucked into a little corner, as the alley turned in a different direction.
I was quite doubtful about this, but there was a small, rusty “open” sign swinging on the doorknob, and I could see a light inside. I held my breath, and opened the door. As the door opened, a bell rang loudly, and surprised me. I heard shuffling, then clear, brisk steps from the back. A tall woman with mocha skin, grey dreadlocks and striking green eyes emerged. She saw me, and a broad smile came across her face. You must be 66.152.196.45, welcome! I was shocked. How could she possibly connect the address of my computer with my visit? “Um, yeah, but how do you know that?” “I’m the soul assessor, remember?” she replied, a bit diffidently.
I decided to suspend my disbelief for a bit longer, and hear what she had to say. “OK, so you know some about me – but I don’t know anything about you. What qualifies you to be a soul assessor?”
She laughed, her head flung back, large, loud bellows of laughter escaped her mouth as if I had just told the funniest joke ever. I decided I was getting more skeptical. “You want to know whether you have a soul, what it’s worthiness is, and you want to know what God sees in it, don’t you?” She looked me in the eye, deeply for the first time. “Not only that, you want to know where it is. And no, it’s not in between your hippocampus and your amygdala.”