This is the introduction to the many journal entries that will follow. This is your invitation to accompany me on a new journey.
Listen to the symphony. What do you hear? Do you hear the instruments? Or do you hear the music?
Now, what might I mean by asking you this? Of course you heard both the instruments and the music. But what were you listening to? Were you listening to how the musicians played their instruments? Or were you listening to the melody and the harmonies of the composition? Unless you studied music formally, you may not have thought about the musicians at all. And even if you did study music, your trained ear may have distracted you from simply enjoying the music. Is it possible, then, to listen to both the instruments and the music at the same time? I believe it is. A person can learn how to appreciate the intricacies of a work of art while simply enjoying it simultaneously. To do so, one must have a trained mind and a trained heart. Moreover, the heart and mind must work together. What you will then find is that your educated musical appreciation actually helps you to enjoy the music even more than you did before.
Is this not the way we're meant to approach all of life? To perceive the world with both our heart and mind is to embrace the fullness of reality. The world according to your mind may become cold and hollow. Likewise, the world according to your heart may become broken and painful. But with a balanced perspective, you can counter your discouraging thoughts with simple pleasures; and you can counter painful emotions by knowing and remembering that there is still good in the world. We know this, and we feel it, but it still remains a challenge. We are broken people. The heart and mind are not in harmony. How then can this problem be resolved? How are the heart and mind reconciled?
Heart and Mind
For the time being, it doesn't concern us to define these terms strictly. I appeal to your intuition. Your heart is where you feel emotions, where your passion lies. Your mind is where you think thoughts, where ideas take shape. A typical day in the life of a human usually involves some internal disagreement between the heart and mind. The conflict can be as simple as play vs. work, or it can be as deep as fear vs. certainty. By some miracle, they must either reconcile or reach a compromise. But even then, these resolutions are rarely consistent.
Furthermore, this internal discord between the heart and mind has been externally manifested into society, then into culture, and onward into history. You're probably already familiar with many of the variations: sentiment vs. practicality; imagination vs. observation; artistic vs. intellectual; nurture vs. nature; instinct vs. reason; feminine vs. masculine. How is harmony between the heart and mind possible?
Sacred and Secular
There are two fundamental approaches to this: the sacred and the secular. Here again, I appeal to your intuition to understand the difference. The sacred represents religion, although I mean this in a general way. Likewise, the secular generally represents the non-religious and perhaps scientific.
The sacred approach begins by acknowledging that both the heart and mind are flawed, and reconciliation is only possible when those flaws are fixed or removed. Sometimes the sacred perceives the self-conscious mind as impeding the heart's passions, and thus the sacred attempts to limit the role of the mind. Over-thinking is thought to produce worries that obstruct the heart of faith, where faith is understood as a blind, care-free, spiritual affirmation. This is an occasional fault in the sacred approach, because it seems to take for granted the logical, mental process necessary to arrive at such a doctrine. The Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer, expressing his own struggle with anti-intellectual church members, wrote this:
They felt that because I was interested in intellectual answers I must not be biblical. But this attitude represents a real poverty. It fails to understand that if Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. . . . It is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life. - Francis Schaeffer [1]
The secular approach reverses the sacred strategy but for a different reason. The secular asserts that the distinction between the heart and mind is an illusion, that the heart merely represents the unbridled whims of the mind. Therefore the secular emphasizes mental discipline as the means of overcoming the frenzy of the heart. To be clear, I am not entirely dismissing secular methodology. This would include modern medicine and other scientific advances that have very much eased the burdens of mankind. However, the secular approach also becomes faulty when it over-emphasizes biology as the source of the mind. This philosophy misconstrues many of the heart's concerns as distractions. So in attempting a purely secular remedy, the heart is under-valued. The late philosopher Roger Scruton describes the mischaracterization this way:
There is a widespread sense that social facts that were previously understood as part of "culture" are now to be explained as adaptations, and that, when we have so explained them, we have removed their aura, so to speak, deprived them of any independent hold on our beliefs and emotions, and reduced them to aspects of our biology. - Roger Scruton [2]
Thus in principle the sacred and the secular appear to be exponents of the heart and mind respectively, thus deepening the conflict. Where then can we begin to heal the mutually-inflicted wounds of the heart and mind, the sacred and the secular? I am here to contend that the sacred/secular divide begins to heal where the heart and mind both find insufficient words:
Beauty
Beauty is where the heart and mind meet, which is why neither of them have a proper answer for it. Try to define it logically, and you shift focus away from the profound awe of the experience. I do think there is a proper way to think about beauty, but the fact remains that thinking about beauty is not the same as experiencing it. Thus merely thinking about it does not reap the same benefits. Likewise, try to express it artistically, and you lose the reality of the experience. A photograph of mountains or a poem about a river never match the grandeur in beholding them yourself. The artistic expression is always lesser than the experience.
Art
But we should not then devalue art, because art is where the heart and mind exchange words for beauty, hoping the other will understand. Sometimes art causes words to multiply indefinitely to no avail; at other times art allows the heart and mind to trade words to their mutual satisfaction. And there are so many kinds of art, that the heart and mind can rarely become apathetic for too long. Music, painting, architecture, theatre, sculpture, photography, cinema: all these artforms and more are where we explore beauty.
Story
But there is one artform that transcends all the others because it came first, and all other artforms proceeded from it: Storytelling. This is true in both sacred and secular worldviews. Sacred worldviews begin with origin stories, with gods who devise tales. Secular worldviews begin with primitive man scrawling stories across cave walls. Story is important for this reason: story invokes causality. Ancient mythologies sought to explain the cause of the world; modern mythologies seek the same. The practicality of story in art is nearly self-explanatory. If you have trouble understanding a work of music, painting, sculpture, or dance, what do you ask for? The story. The cause. The reason. The myth. There are expressions in the simpler artforms that find their best commentary only in the telling of a story. C.S. Lewis wrote:
In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. - C.S. Lewis [3]
Therefore the heart and mind embodied as the opposing forces of the sacred and secular find their hard-earned and long-awaited harmony by the virtue of pursuing beauty, then by the solemnity of contemplating art, and finally in the discovery and retelling of mythology. Beauty is the mystery that inspires the questions; art is where the heart and mind propose their answers; story formulates the hypothesis. Stories reveal causes and thus motivations, thereby testing the motivations of the heart and mind. The heart and mind can reconcile only when their motivations align with the only possible true story, because only the one true story can best inform and inspire their proper motivations. What you need then is the one true story that satisfies and motivates both the heart and mind. As G.K. Chesterton wrote:
That is the reason why the myths and the philosophers were at war until Christ came. . . . [Christianity] met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story. - G.K. Chesterton [4]
The True Myth
Now here is where I must apologize. I love a long story, but unfortunately I have just skipped over a very long story that I believe you also would love. It is the story of why Christianity is the true story that the heart and mind seek to retell in harmony. It's a long story worth telling, but that is what these journals of mine are for. Christianity is the ultimate explanatory mythology that satisfies both sacred and secular questions. For one it affirms the intricate, impeccable design of the physical world, and for the other it satisfies the longings of the heart. It allows beauty to remain the beautiful mystery of the glory of God, it is the creation that rejoices in the sub-creations of art, and it is the Story to which all other stories hearken. In the words of J.R.R. Tolkien:
But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men - and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused. - J.R.R. Tolkien [5]
This fusion of legend and history is a story that explains why our hearts and minds first came into conflict, but it also offers us the hope of a true happy ending, where both heart and mind are forever redeemed and restored. The Christ-figure was a legend long before and after the true Christ actually stepped down into history itself. As C.S. Lewis said:
What became Fact was a Myth, . . . It carries with it into the world of Fact all the properties of a myth. . . . We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "Pagan Christs": they ought to be there--it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. - C.S. Lewis [3]
Once the Christ had arrived, He said to a poor woman:
The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. - Jesus, John 4:23-24
In this, Jesus beckons to our heart and mind. He has invited us to seek and find Him with a right heart; and He has invited us to truly know Him and His story with a right mind. He invites us to have our heart and mind reconciled in His truth and love. I personally have only begun to see the faintest glimmers of God's glory in the beauty of the world and in the art of the beings made in His image. Nevertheless, I invite you to come along and behold with me. In Christ, we can hear both the musicians and the music. I invite you to enjoy the true Symphony and its Composer in all the intricacy and inspiration of His holy music. I invite you to participate with me in the one true Story.
I invite you into the True Myth.
I invite you to enter the VeriMyth.
1. Francis Schaeffer: Art and the Bible (InterVarsity Press, 2006.) pg. 16 2. Roger Scruton: The Soul of the World (Princeton, 2014) pg. 2 3. C.S. Lewis: "Myth Became Fact," God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 2014) pgs. 57, 59-60 4. G.K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man (Ignatius Press, 2008) pgs. 247-248
5. J.R.R. Tolkien: On Fairy-Stories, (Harper Collins, 2008) pg. 78 New King James Version Bible
Music by Hannah Parrott from Musicbed: www.musicbed.com/songs?artists=hannah-parrott
except Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, by Johann Sebastian Bach
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