Graduation Day: On Cleansing the Thoughts of the Heart

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.