As long as our hearts are one in Christ, our minds don’t have to be. This is a favorite way to voice our congregation’s self-understanding at First Presbyterian Church of Waco. It helps us to hold and honor a variety of opinions within a particular part of the Body of Christ. We, at First Presbyterian have allowed this self-understanding to both comfort and challenge our mindset. In challenging times, it is our ability to hold this phrase like a prayer that allows us to mindfully attend our individual hearts and minds. Because passions and reasoning can overlap and run together, it is this particular congregational prayer that allows us to take time with the heart and mind separately when its necessary to do so.
The heart, in this prayerful statement, is not referencing an organ in our individual bodies. It is that a more spiritual seat of passion and emotion. In fact, here the heart, here, is imagined as an emotional/spiritual front line receiving our passions. Passions arrive to the heart even before we reason through them. This spiritual and emotional front line can be the place we feel our anxiety and our grief well up. It can be the place from which we cry out, something like, “My heart just aches over this.” The heart, in this way, is a bubbling spring of passion and feeling. It messages and appeals to the brain, “Let’s make some sense of what we are experiencing.”
If you could separate the concerns of your heart and your mind regarding our denomination’s decisions, how would you describe your heart’s concerns?
If your heart has been hurting in the wake of the General Assembly’s votes and actions, how might you rate the degree of your discomfort or even agony?
In the wake of the votes and actions, how much of your heart’s concerns relate to your personal values? How much relates to the effect that the vote has had upon the wider church?
These questions are not the only ones. Perhaps they will help you find your better questions. I hope you will join in discussion at our gathering on February 12th at 7:00 p.m. Note the time change.
Waco Pastor 