One of the difficulties for those communicating or living out their faith today, is that Western culture has created a false split between our heads and our hearts.
We are told to live our lives with cool reason. We learn at school thathe world was created as a cosmic accident. We are told that life is a conglomeration of atoms and matter, and there is nothing beyond that. Yet our hearts act betray our rhetoric, just listen to how people speak at a funeral. We feel that life should not end at death, we grieve and hope to meet again loved ones who have passed on from this life. When a tragedy like the Asian tsunami, the Chinese earthquake or September 11th happens we react with indignation, we feel that things should not be like this.
We feel our hearts moved by things we encounter everyday, a sunset, a painting, a smile from a stranger, the stars in the night sky. Our feelings tell us that the everyday is infused with the eternal, yet our brains interrupt these moments, informing us that our feelings are incorrect, that the world is a cold and barren place. This is one of the reasons that evangelism is so difficult in the West. Western people still have religious experiences, they have them often, yet this split between the mind and the heart acts as a circuit breaker, cutting us of from the spiritual murmurs of our souls.
These conflicting ways of understanding and feeling the world create great angst within us. We become internally torn, we swing between atheism and faith; between despair and hope.
Some abandon the heart, simply living their life with cool calculations and an unfeeling distance, running from connection, intimacy, and emotion. Others abandon the head, living in a confusing swirl of emotions, being tossed and turned by every feeling.
Biblical faith reminds us that there is not a split between our hearts and our heads, we are given the reason of the mind as a perfect counter balance to the language of the heart. One of the functions of faith is to restore balance, to bring peace to the angst created by our modern culture, and to unite our spirits and our minds.
