The Importance of the Heart

All men everywhere desire communion with God.  That relationship is what we are made for -- Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in Thee (St. Augustine).  The problem is that we are distracted by the "restlessness" in us, and we don't know how to fill it up.

C.S.Lewis, in his work called The Abolition of Man, portrayed mankind as seeking to satisfy their restless hearts in either of two ways: cerebrally or viscerally.  He pictured "man" with his 'North' and 'South' regions of head and belly, with the "chest" in the center, as the seat of balance between the two regions.  For Lewis, modern people are increasingly becoming "men without chests" -- a process he warned would eventually lead to the abolition of mankind.  Both the head and the animal in us have the power to destroy mankind, but if anything, the head is the more evil and destructive.

A colleague of mine, raised by a brilliant scientist mother to be a militant atheist, was one of the most "restless" people I have ever met.  She searched and searched through her depression and oppression, through her anger and through her aggression.  But God -- no; she had been well taught that anyone who believes in God is stupid, unlearned, untaught.  She was visceral in her sufferings, but she was ruled by her head.  Of all the people I have ever known, she was the most determined to have no dealings with what Lewis calls "the chest," the heart, the soul.  One day, M. came to me thinking I could guide her to a course in comparative religions.  She was finally coming around to 'the God question,' and thought that comparative religions would shed some light on the truth she needed to embrace.  I shook my head; I knew it would be a complete waste of time to study comparative religions.  What M. needed was not more thinking, but some way into her heart.

The Song of Songs portrays our relationship with God as the loving communion of real persons:

Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest

is my lover among the young men.

I delight to sit in his shade,

and his fruit is sweet to my taste.

He has taken me into the banquet hall,

and his banner over me is love (2:3-4).

Anyone who has experienced a real and loving exchange with the living God of the bible does not need to keep searching for some other idea or experience.  It is no longer a matter of the head, but of the heart.  Finally, all the ways we sought to tame our restlessness fade into the distance.  For the first time in our lives, we experience rest, and balance.  Who would want to leave that rest to search for something else?

Until that time, religion is, as described by Isaiah the prophet, "do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there--- so that they will go and fall backward, be injured and snared and captured" (28:13).  The reason religion has become "do and do," according to Isaiah is that the people to whom He said, "This is the resting place, let the weary rest," and "this is the place of repose" would not listen.  They insisted on running after something else, even when they were told, "In repentence and rest is your salvation; in quietness and trust is your strength" (Is. 30: 15). 

Those who believe in the Word of the Lord and surrender to it in the heart, in their center, will discover in themselves what Isaiah described as the Joy of the Redeemed:

The desert and the parched land will be glad;

the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.

Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom;

it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy....

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened

and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

Then will the lame leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the dumb shout for joy.

Water will gush forth in the wilderness

and streams in the desert.

The burning sand will become a pool,

the thirsty ground bubbling springs.

In the haunts where jackals once lay,

grass and reeds and papyrus will grow....

Gladness and joy will overtake them,

and sorrow and sighing will flee away (35).

Whenever I see people in "sorrow and sighing," I so want to tell them that rest and delight, the soothing of the heart, cannot be found in either the head or the belly (the 'north' and 'south' of the human body), but only in the center.  The Bible is not a cerebral book; it is a book of the heart. Jesus told the scribes, "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you will find life, but you refuse to come to me that you might have life. 

That's pretty clear: we find life not by understanding religious truth, but by coming to the Source of Life, by allowing living water to bubble up in our deserts.  The integration of all our desires -- head, heart, and body-- does come once we surrender to the heart's desire for communion with God.  He does not want us to dismiss either the head or the physical body; He desires the fulfillment of us as humans fully alive.  But that fulfillment comes not by pursing every whim of the head or the body -- but by allowing the heart, the center, to integrate and fulfill all of our desires under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.