Soul Signal

By Kelli Scott, Soul Signal

I’ve drove the funeral coach more Sundays than I can rightly count anymore, and stood graveside for more strangers than most preachers ever will. That’s part of what I do, alongside the radio show and the TikTok videos and all the rest of it. Somebody’s got to carry the casket the last mile and say some words over a hole in the ground, and more times than not, that somebody’s me.

Standing at the edge of a grave, you hear the same question from the family, over and over. Where do you think she’s at now. Is he watching over us. Did any part of him carry on. Folks want to know what happens after. I’ve heard that question asked a thousand different ways, and I understand it, because I’ve asked it myself plenty of times, out loud and in the quiet both.

But there’s a question hardly nobody ever asks at a graveside, and it’s the one that’s been sitting with me lately. Not where do we go after. Where were we before.

Before you were born. Before your mama ever felt you kick. Before there was a body to hang your name on. Were you anything at all. Or did you just switch on the day you drew your first breath, like a light with no bulb in it till somebody screwed one in.

A Blessing Hardly Anybody Preaches On

There’s a saying in the Gospel of Thomas that answers that question straight out, and I never once heard it preached on in all my years in church, and I sat through a lot of years of church.

Saying number nineteen goes like this. “Blessed is he who existed before he came into being.”

Read that slow, because it’ll slide right past you if you don’t. It ain’t blessing somebody for being born. It’s blessing somebody for existing before that. Before the coming into being. Before the body, before the breath, before the birth certificate. Something was already there, and whatever that something was, Jesus is calling it blessed.

That flat out don’t match up with what most of us got taught. Most of us got told a soul starts fresh, a clean slate the day you’re born, and whatever you are is whatever you build from there forward. This saying is telling a different story altogether. There was a you before there was a you to see in a mirror. Something old, wearing a brand new body.

What “Existed” Is Really Carrying

I want to slow down on the word “existed” in that verse, because I don’t believe it means what we usually mean when we say a rock exists or a chair exists. This gospel comes down to us in Coptic, translated most likely from an older Greek behind it, and the sense of that word ain’t just “was setting around somewhere.” It’s closer to being real, being whole, having your own true nature already settled, before you ever showed up here wearing skin.

Think of it this way. A seed already carries the whole tree folded up inside it before it ever breaks ground. Nobody planted a scrap of nothing and just hoped a tree might show up eventually. The oak was already in there, whole, waiting on dirt and rain and time to unfold it. This saying is telling you the same thing about your own self. Whatever you really are, down under the name on your driver’s license, wasn’t invented the day you were born. It was already whole. Being born was just the unfolding of it.

The Feeling I Never Had Words For Till Now

I’ve felt that a few times in my life and never had the words to put to it till I sat with this saying.

I remember holding my first grandbaby, fresh out of the hospital, hardly a day old, and looking down into that little face and feeling something I couldn’t explain to anybody standing in the room with me. It wasn’t the feeling of meeting somebody brand new. It was closer to recognizing somebody. Like I’d known that particular soul from somewhere, long before that particular body ever got made. I chalked it up at the time to a grandaddy just being soft in the heart, and maybe that’s all it was. But this saying makes me wonder if I was onto something truer than I knew.

I’ve felt a little of that same thing standing in the mountains where I was raised, too. A certain ridge line, a certain smell of woodsmoke on a cold morning, and something in me settles that goes back further than my own memory can reach. Like I ain’t discovering the mountains. Like some part of me already knew them.

Maybe you’ve felt that too. A place you’d never been that felt like coming home the first time you set foot in it. A person you just met who felt like you’d known them your whole life, or longer than your whole life. A feeling, quick and gone before you can hold onto it, that you’re older than the years on your birth certificate say you are.

Why the Institution Never Touched This One

I’ll tell you plain why I never heard a sermon preached on saying nineteen in all my years, including four years deep in formation studying to be a deacon for the Roman Catholic Church. If a soul already existed, whole and blessed, before it was ever born, then the church ain’t the one handing that soul its worth. The church can’t be the one doling out blessedness a little at a time through sacraments and rules and robes, if the blessedness was already there, settled, before any of that ever got built.

That’s a hard pill for an institution to swallow. An institution needs you needing it. It needs you standing outside a locked door hoping somebody with a key will let you in. But this saying tells you there ain’t no locked door. You showed up already blessed. Already whole. The Divine light in you wasn’t lit at your baptism. It was already burning before you ever got here, and the baptism, at best, was just somebody pointing a finger at a fire that was already going.

What This Changes If You Let It

I ain’t going to stand here and tell you I’ve got this all figured out, because I don’t. I don’t know exactly where a soul sets before it’s born, or what shape that existence takes, or whether we’re talking about something that traveled a long road to get here or something that’s simply outside of time altogether, watching time from someplace time can’t touch. I’ve studied on it a good while and I still don’t have it pinned down neat.

But I know what it changes in a man, just to consider it. It changes the way you carry yourself. If you’re blessed before you were ever born, then you didn’t earn your worth by being good enough at church, or successful enough at work, or approved of enough by your own family. You showed up blessed. Whatever comes after, whatever you do with the years you’re given, that’s just what you do with a blessing you already had walking in the door.

I think about the folks I’ve stood graveside for, and the families asking where their loved one’s gone off to now. I still don’t have a tidy answer for that one. But I’ve started asking myself the other half of the question too, standing right there at the edge of that same hole in the ground. Where was this soul before it ever got here. And if the answer is anyplace at all, then maybe the dirt ain’t the end of the road, nor the beginning of it either. Maybe it’s just one turn in a whole lot longer path.

So here’s what I want to ask you plain. Have you ever felt like you recognized something, or somebody, or someplace, that you’d never actually laid eyes on before this life. A feeling of coming home to a place you never been. I’d love to hear about it in the comments, or find me over where I tell the shorter version of these stories, and let’s talk about what part of you might’ve been here a whole lot longer than your years on this earth would say.

Kelli Scott

Soul Signal