Listening to One’s Heart and Mind: The Key to a Life of Balance and Wholeness

I have been wondering all through these years in my teaching philosophy on how to provide an effective working synthesis between Immanuel Kant’s insistence of a disciplined intellectual life governed by reason and Soren Kierkegaard’s equally valid assertion for a flowing, spontaneous and emotive life ruled by the heart. Last Sunday, I happened to attend Holy Eucharist at a small Anglican mission chapel, and I was so fascinated by the message of the hymn we sang in response to the priest’s homily. The hymn somehow provided me with a workable and practical synthesis to the Kantian-Kierkegaardian dilemma that I have been reflecting all throughout my teaching life in philosophy. The lyrics of the hymn entitled, “Our Life in God” is neither theologically sophisticated nor philosophically profound; but its stark yet astute simplicity carries with it a normative rule in finding a still center to our diffused and scattered life. The rule towards finding meaning in life is to attain balance between the intellectual demands of our mind and the emotive tug of our heart. The lines in the stanza of the above-mentioned Anglican hymn that touched me immensely are as follows:

“Our life in God is seamless whole.
Whatever divided parts of life you have,
Unite it in the Balance of Love.
Knowing and Acting do not cut asunder.
Creed and Life are not disjointed.
Love the Lord God with both Mind and Heart.”
(Quoted directly from Hymn # 268, “Our Life in God”; from The Supplemental Hymn of the Anglican Communion)

“There it is”!—I said to myself. There in that short stanza is the solution to my Kantian-Kierkegaardian conundrum that I have been carrying all through these years! The message of the hymn is so ordinarily simple, and yet those simple ideas are often times the most important points we always miss-out. The hymn says that our life in God should be “seamless whole”. It means that our life must be lived-out consistently and holistically. Yet we often painfully see that our life is disjointed, scattered, confused and diffused—in our own brutal Tagalog language, “paikot-ikot at sabog ang buhay natin dito sa mundong ibabaw!” This “pagiging-sabog” can also be seen in our spiritual life: we can either be strictly rationalist believers or decidedly sentimentalist believers. Those who are Kantians in their spirituality are those whose faith is based solely on intellectual theological assumptions which leave one’s spirit cold, dry, parched, and emotionless. On the other hand, those who are spiritually Kierkegaardian in their approach to God are those who bask themselves in ecstatic and sentimental feelings of oneness with God without giving a critical or serious look at the reasons for their belief. This separation between Kantian intellectualism and Kierkegaardian emotivism, or this unnecessary division between mind and heart effectively causes an existential discontinuity not just in our own individual spiritual life but in the way how we see other people just as well. Kantian intellectuals often stoop down on ecstatic charismatic believers, deriding them as naive, hysterical and superstitious. The Kierkegaardian sentimentalists retaliate strongly against Kantians by saying that an intellectual faith is just an upper-lipped “religion of the head”, “a bookish religion” that does not elevate the spirit and does nothing to edify the cries and longings of the heart.

I personally like the way how the second and third line of the hymn put it: “Whatever divided parts of life you have, unite it in the Balance of Love.” The hymn says that it is Love that unites the disparate, diffused, scattered and confused aspects of our frail lives. It is Love that provides balance to both extremes of dry intellectualism and wild sentimentalism. It is in the Balance of Love where mind and heart finds its middle ground. Even the Gospels exhort us to provide this balance between our intellectual life and emotional life: that no one should rule at the expense of the other. Remember the Gospel passage exhorting us to love God with our whole heart and with our whole mind (in St. Luke 10:27). God wants us to love Him with our whole being—mind and heart included. In the Gospel, it is Love that bridges the great divide between mind and heart. In this connection, I would like to quote at length the Rev. Martin Luther’s poignant statement with regards to what authentic worship is all about: “It is in our worship where head and heart must go together—mind clasping the heart, heart embracing the mind. In worship, we must understand with our mind God’s instruction for our righteousness and piety; and all along, our heart is likewise bubbling-up and welling-up its praise to God for this undeserved mercy of allowing us to meet Him at His Table, though unworthy we may be” (Sermon 56, Collected Works of the Reverend Martin Luther, pp. 341.). I believe that these words of the Rev. Martin Luther are still very relevant for all of us believers in One God.

It is Love that bridges all our separateness and divisions in both our individual and collective lives. The Gospels strongly mandate us to “love God with all of our heart and with all of our mind—with our whole being (St. Matthew 22:37)”. True spirituality does not mean becoming moron and gullible by shutting-off our rational and critical faculties of understanding. The above hymn further says: “Knowing and Acting do not cut asunder. Creed and Life are not disjointed. Love the Lord God with both mind and heart.” Balanced and holistic spirituality means knowing God and loving Him with my whole person—my mind, heart, spirit, and will. It also means that my faith and my love for God do not only consist of intellectually knowing him but in acting-out or living-out my faith in the midst of the world—by sincerely practicing my faith to the outside world so that those around me will likewise experience the Love of God, with me and through me as the vessel (though unworthy) of His unbounded and unconditional love. May it be so. Amen, a thousand times Amen!