Good Hearted

At the end of every year I attend the St. Hilda's prizegiving service and the leavers' service and see a string of young women cross the stage. All of them are big fishes in this particular small pond of the school where they have spent the last five or seven years of their lives. They are making the journey we must all repeat a hundred times, that of becoming a small fish in the next pond, whatever it may be. And at every service the school hymn is sung: Blest Are The Pure In Heart.

Whoever, back in the day, chose that hymn to be the one that defines the school and its relationship to the almighty had a particular idea of the what a girls' school should aspire to be, and what a girl should aspire to be. I'm guessing, of course, but I think that vision would have to do with all the characteristics we attribute to the heart: feelings, loyalty, relationship, emotion. With that vision in mind, the aspiration is one of pure and chaste behaviour springing from undefiled and clear feelings, which is, of course, a laudable goal. But it's not what Jesus meant in the saying upon which the song is based.

For first Century people, of which Jesus was one, the heart was not the seat of feelings. Feelings originated, so they thought back then, in the liver, not in the heart. If we had persisted with this idea we would not be saying,

but we would say, instead,

Which I think you would agree, lacks a certain poetry.

The heart, so Jesus and his contemporaries thought, was the place where the will resided. It was the seat of intention and purpose. Which brings a whole different set of meanings to Jesus' saying Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. It doesn't mean, as we usually suppose, blessed are those who have got their emotional life sorted out, but rather, blessed are those whose intentions and purposes are clear.

And it brings some light to a phrase whose poetry has intrigued me for years: Mary's words to her cousin Elizabeth as the two women incredulously enthuse over God's seeming predilection for those who are not doing as well as other people think they should. He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, says Mary. Which when you think about it, is a rephrasing of the saying her son would later include in the Sermon on the Mount. The proud chase every which way, following the dictates of a will which is informed not by reality but by their own imaginings. The poor and excluded, with nothing to protect and no pipe dreams to follow, are free to see things clearly; to be pure in heart.

They are the ones who are most likely to see what is really at the heart of the universe.

And here is the meaning of Christmas: this universal heart is given to us in a living breathing metaphor. An unmarried peasant girl and her fiance. Pain and sweat in the night. An umbilical cord and placenta and damp shining helplessness and a tiny mouth crying for the breast.

Comments

Merv said…

... and even now 'son quienes cantan la gloria de Dios'

Thank you for your inspired insights.

22 December 2015 at 19:35

Dr. Diana said…

I am totally impressed with your thoughts. The picture is like a sunshine in the ocean.

Thanks
Dr. Diana

29 December 2015 at 22:39

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Living the lies

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it. Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder. One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...

Available Light

Search This Blog