Care of the Soul:
A Guide for Cultivating
Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

By Thomas Moore
338 pages, Harper Perennial, 2016 (25th Anniversary Edition)

Reviewed by Ted Streuli, June 7, 2020

Blame Frank McGloin.

I asked if he'd read Thomas Moore's "Care of the Soul." He hadn't. And by the time I'd finished telling him about it I'd written a review.

"Care of the Soul" was Moore's seminal work. His writing style is challenging until you become accustomed to it, but after a couple of chapters, it ceases to be problematic. He argues, in my woefully inadequate summation, that those unaccountable urges we feel are manifestations of our souls speaking to us, telling us what they need. That made sense to me when I considered the ocean; Moore says that the place where you feel immediately at peace, at home, is the place that satisfies your soul. I started paying attention; I liked the ocean, of course. I grew up in San Francisco staring at it through my living room window.

But thanks to Moore I realized that much of the pull to the ocean was that as soon as I smelled a little salty air, heard a seagull cry and a wave crash, all became right in my world. I started using that. When I was a reporter in Galveston, if things were getting too hairy, I'd take my laptop to the seawall and stand there in front of the water and write my story. The catharsis was nearly instantaneous.

Moore contends that act is caring for the soul, and the ensuing comfort is the reward offered by the soul's satisfaction.

Born in 1940, Moore spent 13 years at the prep seminary of the Servites, a Roman Catholic lay order where he studied philosophy and music. He left just short of his ordination as a priest and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from Chicago's DePaul University, a Master of Arts degree in musicology from the University of Michigan, a Master of Arts degree in theology from the University of Windsor, Ontario, and in 1975, a Doctor of Philosophy degree in religion from Syracuse University. He tried teaching, but when he was denied tenure at Southern Methodist University, he launched a psychotherapy practice and turned to writing.

Lucky us.

In "Care of the Soul," Moore gives us a new, holistic way to see ourselves. He says the Renaissance position that the soul makes us human may be turned upside down as well: When we are most fully human, we are granted greater access to the soul.

Moore also writes about the balance, the yin and yang, that our souls carry both a light and dark side. His main point is that we should recognize and acknowledge both.

“Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies," he wrote. "The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.”

He encourages us to be artists no matter our professions, to practice our art in the kitchen, in a home studio, or as we make household repairs as a means of caring for our souls. He shows us that everything we do, everything we are is connected, that our dreams are as real as our work and our hobbies as important as a bout of depression.

“One day I would like to make up my own DSM-111 with a list of ‘disorders’ I have seen in my practice," Moore wrote. "For example, I would want to include the diagnosis 'psychological modernism,' an uncritical acceptance of the values of the modern world. It includes blind faith in technology, inordinate attachment to material gadgets and conveniences, uncritical acceptance of the march of scientific progress, devotion to the electronic media, and a life-style dictated by advertising.”

In "Care of the Soul," which was so successful that a 25th-anniversary edition was published in 2016, we find a practical explanation of the spiritual and the psychological, the driving forces that make us who we are and who we aren't. The intersection of all those manifestations leads me to the seashore, to take photographs, to write, and to hide out at Starbuck's with a mystery novel.

Through "Care of the Soul," Moore will lead you to a better understanding of, well, you.