“Have a heart,” is what we say to the traffic warden as he, with malicious grin and calculated manner, slaps a ticket on our windscreen despite the fact that we’ve only parked on a double yellow line for five seconds to pick up an elderly aunt. It’s an interesting expression by which we mean that the grinning embodiment of evil clad in yellow peaked cap ought to display some human emotion. But why the heart?
It was the Greeks who believed that the heart was the house of our emotions. After all, when we fall in love, get involved in a heated argument, face our fear, or cry our eyes out, that rather large muscle in our chest starts beating like a woodpecker after 100 cups of Nescafé. No wonder the Greeks thought that this is where our feelings are kept. The brain, however, the Greeks didn’t understand at all, and so put its presence down as something to do with temperature regulation. In this age of MRI-scans and other electro-magnetic imaging techniques, we can see emotions flash across the surface of the brain, so we can be sure that our hearts are doing a perfectly good job of pushing blood around the body and not pushing out waves of sadness just because the goldfish has passed away.
We might say that our tormenting traffic-warden was ruled by his head rather than by his heart, mechanically doing an unpopular but necessary job in an age when people’s selfishness have made it necessary for double yellow lines to be painted to indicate that stopping would inconvenience many others. Others are said to be ruled by their hearts and guided by where their thoughts and feelings take them, like environmental protesters marching to make a faceless organisation hear their cry of anger at the pollution they are causing. Yet some are ruled too far by their hearts and become effective terrorists, endangering the lives of scientists testing drugs on animals.
Action based on feelings without thinking can be very destructive. In this day and age where many of us are tempted to indulge ourselves with all kinds of luxury kitchens, holidays, sofas, toilet-paper to make ourselves feel more comfortable, we think not of the consequences of the effects on others around us. If scientists are right about global warming being cause by human beings (and there still is some doubt) then it is mainly through the lack of consideration on our part to consider the impact of our wants on the environment. Our prisons are over-crowded because the Government feels that it has to make laws in order to force people into being less anti-social, but who is telling us what it means to be social?
Actions based on thought without feeling produce similarly destructive results. Communism was, and in fact is, a perfectly respectable idea but which has effectively been proven not to work in practice. This did not stop Stalin from enforcing his understanding of Communism on Eastern Europe, and many still bear the scars of that today. Oliver Cromwell forced his own ideas of Christianity on the people of mid 17th Century for what he believed to be the common good. He went so far as to abolish Christmas and other festivities because they did not fit in with his system of beliefs. We may believe whole-heartedly in a theory but if we want to try and implement it, then we have to take into account people as they are: neither Stalinist-Communism nor Cromwellian Puritanism did so.
It is clear that love truly requires the use of head and heart, of thought and emotion. Think on I Corinthians xiii. The loveless know-it-all is nothing because he fails to see the import of human beings for what they truly are in the sight of God. Without love, there suddenly appears something which the loveless know-it-all does not know, and so he ceases to be what he believes himself to be. A loveless know-it-all submits himself to nothing rather than the cage of his own reason, and as a result destroys himself utterly.
So how should we use our heads and our hearts? Well, in his letter to the Roman Christians, St Paul tells us:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans xii)By not being conformed to the world, we should refuse to separate the rule of our lives into thoughts and feelings which lead to pride and over-indulgence in this rather individualistic and liberal society in which we find ourselves, but sacrifice their use to God and let Him rule us rather than hearts and minds.
We are to transform ourselves by the renewing of our minds. Now this does not mean that we should be dropping everything for the latest fashion like women priests and bongo drums. St James reminds us that we are not to be blown about by the latest theological theory. But St Paul means that in order to be renewed, we need to go back to the Source – to God Himself, so that what He created He can also renew in His ways. We need renewing because we continue to stray, but the Lord Jesus spoke about the Living Water that will spring up from within us. This Living Water is again from the One True God who is humble and loving enough to make His dwelling within each of us. It is He who will help our hearts and minds work in harmony to worship Him, and love those around us.
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