I have just completed a course of New Testament studies that
has taken me five years in its latest incarnation. During this time,
interrupted by illnesses and events having as much to do with spirit as text, I
have finished a master’s degree and passed a test of my character. Or so I
think.
I learned a
great deal about the values and ideas of classical antiquity, for the sacred
scriptures are thousands of years old. And I was made to question my own
values. Things like honesty, loyalty, humility and perseverance proved
important.
Today we
know that the heart is a pump, moving blood around the body, and so mechanical.
It symbolises feeling or emotion, from hot-blooded passion to icy
broken-heartedness. Blood, naturally, both symbolises and is life, and when the
heart ceases to beat we die.
But for the
ancients, the heart symbolised mind, or thought, from the wicked mind of
violence to the righteous thoughts of the blessed. The heart is a storehouse of
memory; thinking happens in the heart, unless the heart is so hardened that a
person’s judgement and personal relationships are closed off, for the kind of
thinking done in the heart isn’t separate from feeling. Indeed, the thoughts of
the heart must be informed by feeling, most especially the feeling of reverence
towards God.
Why
undertake a course of study? To get a job, a ticket to work? If the subject has
no likelihood of future prospects, how then are you spending your time? I came
to the conclusion that cleansing the thoughts of the heart had something to do
with it.
The heart,
in this ancient sense, can become fouled like the bottom of a boat covered in
barnacles and seaweed. Our judgement can be clouded by regrets, uncompleted
actions, wrong turnings, bad decisions, and even worse, the arrogance of an
unrealistic sense of responsibility as if every matter in the universe needs to
be referred to us for improvement. And a heart that thinks no wrong of itself
is obviously out of touch with real life.
Study
forces you to clear out some debris. You have to refine ideas, to separate the
strands and make choices. You may learn both how much you can do, and how
little you can get by on. You may find friends in unexpected places, recover
from betrayals, be given second chances, get up to fight another day. You can
gather grains of wisdom.
Cleansing
the heart is a spiritual effort, informed by the spirit, leading to right
reverence and clear thinking. Study, then, isn’t a matter for the intellect
alone. Indeed, without love, we may say that study is empty, void at the heart.
And love is never lost.
I think we must inform the mind, or heart, as to our best
love, to love what is worthy,
lovely, and sacred, apart from mere advantage and overcoming
others. Look around
the world, and away from yourself: imagine in your heart, how much there is to
love.
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