Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart…
Loving from the heart seems like a no-brainer. Literally. Of
course we love with our hearts. That’s where all emotions are seated, right? Or
maybe the bowels, which is what the Hebrews used in this context. It seems to
me that other societies have used other body parts, possibly the liver,
certainly the brain, as the seat of emotion, but even Wikipedia is failing me
on this one.
In the immortal words of Dr. Temperance Brennan, of TV Bones fame, “The heart is nothing but a
pump.” True. However, I believe there’s good reason why humans have always
thought emotions, positive and negative, (love, hate, fear, anger, happiness,
sorrow, contentment, etc.), rise from body organs. There is a connection. Emotions make our blood pressure rise and drop,
increase and decrease heart rate, adrenaline, dopamine, and more. Feelings, to
put it more succinctly, are feelings.
The river overflowed its banks this week. I assume
it did so just to give me good subject matter for this devotion. Emotions are
scary for some of us. (I am one of them.) We have been raised so carefully to
believe in “mind over matter,” and being mature and rational and in control and
all that. We even name self-control as a gift of the Spirit. But the Greek word
used in Galatians 5:23 is egkrateia,
which means temperance. (Huh. Wonder what Bones would think about that?)
Temperance means the middle way. Not too hot, not
too cold. Not too controlled by emotion, and not too controlled by brain. The
river is essential to life, I want to say, when it’s contained within its
banks, wending its merry way, not too low, not too high. But my analogy suffers
a little when I think about the millions who depended for millennia on the
seasonal flooding of the Nile, for one example.
Is it okay to overflow once in a while? And what does that mean? Give way to emotion? Surely not…
Unless “give way” is taken literally. Make a way, or
a path, make allowance for feeling.
When the Baddeck River overflowed this week, I don’t
know if it caused harm or damage. I know it didn’t here, because there’s a nice
big swale between the house and the riverbank. Room for it to swell, and to go
back down again. A place for it to deposit, perhaps, all kinds of life-giving
nutrients for future growth in the meadows.
This devotional did not go in the direction I had
planned for it. I’m just saying.
Love God, others, self, from the heart. With the
full strength of emotions. Without doing harm.
What does that
mean?
No comments:
Post a Comment