Heart of Faith: Chapter 4

Chapter 4 — How Will I Know?

Our biggest problem is that we have nearly two thousand years of Christian history ignoring this critical aspect of human nature. More, the secular society at large is hostile to the whole concept on multiple levels. The only reason it’s not illegal is that no one in government has heard of this kind of faith.

So while there are surely plenty of people over the past 2000 years who managed to live by the commitment of their hearts, it was instinctive, not a fully conscious choice. Their minds knew something deep inside was not going to budge, so the intellect surrendered to the task and organized a decent response. This makes it almost hit and miss. In more ancient times, it was part of the ambient culture. For us in our Postmodern world today, it requires that we consciously adopt something initially alien to us.

In striving to link our minds back to serving the heart, we quickly become quite alien to those around us. We will surely stumble across folks who manage to live this way, but it is wholly unlikely they have this kind of explanation for it. If you should echo my explanation above, it is once again hit-and-miss whether they will accept it. In general, people who have been striving to make that connection to their heart of faith will embrace it as soon as they hear it. That’s because their hearts already know the truth, and will overwhelm the intellectual resistance.

People who come into this with little or no experience trying to follow their hearts will struggle. If they imagine this is something “cool” or has the potential to serve as a social trend, they may elect to fake it. Anyone with significant church experience has already seen plenty of religious fakery. Paul warned the Corinthian church against such in their upside-down fascination with speaking in tongues. I’ve been in some groups where different kinds of fakery was institutionalized and carefully controlled. You learned your performance and were instructed to never question whether it was genuine. Part of why it was so easy to detect is that these institutions were also hung up on Western mythology and a high reliance on objective proof.

There is no objective proof for an awakened heart. Proof and objectivity belong in the realm of the intellect, on a lower level.

For those of you determined to claim this legacy of God’s mercy, there’s no reason to doubt. If you can accept the basic facts and concept behind it, I find it hard to imagine that you would fail to eventually connect. Then again, there are so precious few among my acquaintances who live this way that we lack a significant body of experiential lore. So I’ll offer the few common elements that I’ve seen thus far.

The thing you are looking for is primarily a driving sense of moral purpose. Something far bigger than yourself will call you and start sorting out your previous commitments. In relatively short order, things you once doted on will become rather unimportant, while some other things will loom large. Some people experience that shift in priorities as waves over the remaining years of life. But you won’t have trouble giving away stuff that belongs to now dead interests. The danger is that, without sufficient awareness of the unique Hebraic sense of morality, you may easily mix emotion or passing fancy for something eternal. Be cautious, because you may waste time chasing the wind. Then again, if you pursue nothing, you can’t grow by the necessary experience factor.

But even the mind can grasp that a powerful sense of communion with God brings a powerful sense of communion with His character in Creation. Once you understand that nothing God has done has to be justified, that all living things belong, then you can more easily let go of the false Western morality of saving the world. There is no need to bring order out of chaos, as it were, because the natural world at large is just fine as it is. While it may not mean you are eager to sleep in a tick-infested bed of poison ivy, you still gain a sense of joy at nature as it is; the ticks and poison ivy won’t offend you by doing what they do.

By the same token, you realize that humanity is also part of Creation. Too often we encounter the Western assumption that mankind is separate from nature, that we have to handle humans differently, in a special way that isn’t appropriate for the rest of nature. This is mostly wrong, it that what works in nature works in human nature. Again, your biggest barrier is a vast ocean of false Western expectations. There’s nothing wrong with people using what God has provided, but you’ll find some uses disturbing because it seems more like taking God for granted. At the same time, you may experience a fresh interest in morally justified uses, such as discovering edible plant life in your area that is often dismissed as weeds by others. This is not the same thing as the Green religion that despises humans as a plague on nature.

What separates mankind from the rest of nature is our mandate to restore divine justice through our growing awareness and obedience to His moral character. No other part of Creation has that task. However, it requires that we develop a sense of communion with God through the living joy of moral truth singing back to us from all Creation. Remember what Paul said about that desperate longing of Creation for the revelation of who lives for His glory? Creation greets those of who live by our hearts, rejoicing that someone gets the message.

You will be better connected to your own body. There are a thousand ways this will affect your self-awareness. It’s not a massive solution to your internal problems, but puts you in a better position to know the truth of your problems. For example, it becomes possible to trace the source of your own emotions, to discern why you have such a strong reaction to something that others find inconsequential. Oddly enough, you will begin to doubt authority figures like never before. That’s because we know for a certainty that the majority of those you encounter in our Western world will be hostile to the truth in the first place. Again, this is not some objective truth, but God’s own truth to which you are connecting. Aside from powerful moral assertions, your heart allows your mind to ask better questions.

Once you begin to make your mind accommodate a higher moral purpose in the heart, you’ll find your mind tends to work with a greater clarity. This is in part because, once the heart claims it’s rightful position superior to the mind, the intellect no longer wastes resources trying to work out a wide range of questions that are now answered. Unjust options are eliminated, so there’s fewer frivolous and unproductive paths to explore. Instead, the mind sticks to what it does best, which is organize and implement the moral purpose supplied by the heart.

Let’s hear from others.