The HEART - A rabbit trail of thoughts

The Heart – A Rabbit Trail of Thoughts


This morning in my quiet time (I still don’t know what to call that time when I read the Bible, pray, and read devotional books!) I read a passage in Spiritual Classics by Augustine on the divided heart.

“Often, too, reflection upon the things we need for carrying on this life injures the eye of our spirit and bedims it; and for the most part it divides our heart, so that in the things which to all appearances we do rightly in our relations with our fellow men, we actually fail to do them with the intention the Lord demands, that is , not because we love them, but merely because we wish to obtain some advantage from them in view of the needs of the present life. But we ought to do good to them motivated by their eternal welfare, not by some temporal concern of our own. May God, therefore, incline our heart to His testimonies and not to gain. For the end of the commandment is charity from a pure heart, a good conscience, and an unfeigned faith. He who looks after the interests of a brother with a view to his own needs in this life, certainly is not acting in a spirit of love; for he is not looking after the interests of one whom he ought to love as he loves himself, but after his own; or rather, not even after his own, since he is thus making his heart a divided heart and so preventing himself from seeing God, in the vision of whom alone is certain and lasting blessedness.”

That passage certainly packs a punch, actually many punches. One thing that hit me as I read it were the phrases dealing with a divided heart. A couple of weeks ago, at the cabin, I meditated on Ps. 86 and it talks about a divided heart (or rather an undivided heart).

Ps 86:11-12 “Teach me your way, O Lord,
and I will walk in your truth;
give me an undivided heart,
that I may fear your name.
I will praise you, O Lord my God, with all my heart;
I will glorify your name forever.

Which led my mind to some poems by George Herbert. If you’ve never read George Herbert, I recommend him. He was a man who gave up power and influence to be a country parson. His spiritual struggles and insights are open for all in his poetry. But I digress… here are some excerpts that came to mind this morning.

From “The Sinner”

“…The spirit and good extract of my heart
Comes to about the many hundredth part.
Yet, Lord, restore thine image, hear my call:
And though my hard heart scarce to thee can groan,
Remember that thou once didst write in stone.”

And from “The Altar”

“…A heart alone
Is such a stone
As nothing but
Thy power doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy name:…”

So I thought about the heart and I looked up the Hebrew word used for “heart” in Ps. 86. It is used over 800 times in the OT! Sometimes it seems to mean the literal blood-pumping organ, but more often it means something else… the center, the middle of something… our innermost person? The part of us that is eternal? And I’ve thought about how we use that word heart even today… “the heart of the matter.”

One place I read said that the heart is often thought to be synonym for the mind. But I don’t like that because the mind can be affected (as in injured, or chemically affected) at times and I refuse to believe that the heart of that person is changed too. Though I think the heart can affect the mind.

I’m rambling and not sure why I felt like posting this. Somehow I find it comforting in this age when so much is “science,” and explanations are limited to the realm of human understanding to think that there is this mysterious inner part of me, the center of me… not my mind, not my thoughts, but me.

And to get back to my original thought, which is all it is, a thought… how easy it is to have a divided heart. Do you think we can do things to have an undivided heart, a heart given completely to God? Or do you think God works that in us? Or both?