Head and Heart: Blend Both and then Use Your Hands to Act

Last updated on: April 11, 2016 at 7:44 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Head and Heart: Blend Both and then Use Your Hands to Act 2016-04-11T19:44:46-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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The good person heals both heart and head.

Whether you watch the movie Metropolis or read Republic or simply sit with the Psalms, recall that you can be wounded in your heart or your head. Both wounds matter. God designed both your heart and your head to give you direction and being disabled either place is dangerous.

Take time to get better. We cannot live by head knowledge alone or be sustained as whole souls merely by our heart.

Let’s briefly define terms. I am using “head” as shorthand for the rational faculty. The “head” uses facts, the tools of logic, and reasonable speculation to make sense of the world. The heart takes experiences and emotions and uses them to give us wisdom. The head and heart always are in tension in this broken world. The head and heart both know what should be and are wounded by the failings around us.

A cult or error is as likely to begin with intellectualism as with too much feeling. A person grabs a truth and runs it into the ground in ways that a sound heart would prevent. Ugliness of attitude is a tip off that the heart is wounded and powerless. The man or woman who can only use the head will become narrow and nasty, though often the narrowness will claim to be intellectual openness.

“We have no toleration for intolerance,” becomes an excuse for the most bigoted dismissal of contrary opinions.

Ugly talk is not plain talk. The sneer or the condescending dismissal of those not in the know is more hateful than a put down. Open anger has health to it, but there is no possible charity in the snob’s sneer, because the humiliation would be denied.

A healthy heart takes emotions, judges which are healthy, and compares them to life experiences. An emotionally healthy person can sometimes see emotionally beyond the facts. These “hunches” or “intuitions” are a kind of genius that checks the intellectual like. Pascal understood the power of the heart to see truth that the unbalanced intellect alone could never grasp.

Sadly, the heart is also tricky and deceitful if the intellect is unheeded. Some people know their feelings and are highly intuitive, but if they over rely on this wonderful trait, they can end up in insane corners. “I just know,” can become an excuse for intellectual laziness and a subtle snobbery of those with a high emotional intelligence. Emotional abuse is at least as devastating as intellectual snobbery.

Nothing is so good that it cannot be abused. Even a balanced person, one who heeds heart and head, must live in a community so that service, the work of the hands, can keep isolation from choking the soul.

All of this is obvious, but too little honored. Smart people intellectualize every problem. Deep souls turn every problem emotional. No passion can meet an intellectual question, just as no intellectual argument can answer a yearning heart. The failure of the intellectual to appreciate the emotionally mature or the emotionally mature to appreciate the intellectual is a chief problem in American life. We segregate with those like we are and learn to despise those without our gifts.

Our empty heads cannot be filled by our overflowing hearts and our heads cannot grind out enough truths to heal a broken heart. Oddly, if you get the need for this balance, you may find yourself the loneliest one of all: too intellectual for the passionate, too passionate for the intellectual. Yet for all this virtue, moderation can become a new excuse to sneer. “We are moderate,” we cry and so hope our loneliness can be assuaged by moral superiority.

And no, it cannot. We need community and without it . . . a place for our hands to work together. . . even a balanced head and heart will perish and become unbalanced in loneliness. It is for this reason that a healthy community, like a school, must balance the head and the heart in a community of willing hands. Integrity of ministry will result from this balance and only from this balance.

May our hearts be healed from the harshness of our age and our heads be redeemed from the folly of our times.

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