The Head and the Heart
The Head and the Heart
“’Goodbye,” said the fox. ’It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’” The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Last week I was talking with a friend who said he had lived and taught in Korea for several years. He told me about the Korean way of expressing understanding of an idea or situation. In Korea, a person will physically gesture to their heart, not their head, and say, “ We understand!” Wow! In one intuitive word and gesture they integrate knowledge of the heart as well as the head.
Since the Age of Enlightenment and René Descartes’ famous Cogito ergo sum pronouncement, (I think, therefore I am) all religious / spiritual belief and thought have been subjected to the rigors of scientific analysis. We forgot that the origin and meaning of the word ‘belief’ is not an intellectual assertion; the word derives from the old English and German words for love, or to hold dear, to have confidence in. It is not about scientific facts! It was an enormous relief to me when I first learned that saying “I believe” in the creed was not an intellectual declaration but much more about that which I gave my heart to. I was no longer stuck in a binary dilemma. Doors opened to studying and learning from many wonderful, wise sources.
There’s an unfortunate misunderstanding and assumption that ‘religious’ people don’t have or shouldn’t have questions and doubts! Around the age of 10 years old, human beings begin to experience doubt; children start to question their parents’ judgements and everything else too! These doubts will and should continue for the rest of life: Faith and Doubt exist inseparably as twins.
Doubt, when it is actively and courageously engaged, is the seedbed of creativity. Without doubt we’d have no curiosity, no challenge to go deeper and explore further: We’d be stuck in a world of juvenile thinking! Instead, we dare to follow our hearts and intuitions and learn how to translate deep and received wisdom from other times into the language and understanding of our contemporary world.
I’m grateful to belong to a church that dares to explore the tensions between faith and doubt, between past and present, that allows for knowledge of the heart as well as of the head.