Still Thinking –Whole-Hearted Living

Each week in the TUC Update I will write a reflection on some issue relating our Christian faith to the experience of contemporary living.  The topics will be wide ranging.  It could be a current film or book; some new insights or information from the sciences; issues of wellbeing and daily living, or just a stream of consciousness that interests me and I think has relevance for our community at Toorak Uniting Church.  I have called this reflection Still Thinking because I want to emphasise that thinking about life and the Christian faith should be both a lifelong experience and done in what I would call a contemplative mode.  While our faith is always informed by our thoughts and our thinking, for me it always remains an activity of the heart.

It has been said that the greatest distance to travel is the thirty centimetres from the head to the heart.  Of course the word heart is used as a metaphor that describes the place of conviction and faith in our lives.  We know what it means to say a person is “whole-hearted,” or that an experience is “heart-felt.”  Both are ways of saying that something is not just important, but that it is central, vital and perhaps of eternal value in a person’s life. 

Central to our Christian faith are the words found in Deuteronomy 6:5. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” In the New Testament these words are found on the lips of Jesus where he states that there is nothing more important in life than to, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37) 

I interpret this passage to mean that essential to a fulfilling life is a relationship of love with the source of life, what the theologian Paul Tillich called the “ground of all being.” And we come to that relationship with God through our whole being – heart, soul, mind and although not explicitly mentioned in this passage, our bodies.  That doesn’t mean that we have to be very very religious to connect with God.  In fact religion often gets in the way of the relationship with the sacred and divine.  Religion can easily degenerate into simply rules and regulations, behaviours and beliefs and can limit the possibility of a transforming relationship with God.

No. What is called for in our lives is a life-long commitment to a journey of openness to and awareness of, all of life.  Or as Paula D’Arcy puts it, “God comes to us disguised as our life.” The best kind of learning we can cultivate in our Christian lives will engage our intellect, our emotions, our actions and behaviours and even the movements of our bodies.  All of life from the church sanctuary at TUC to the Yarra River at Warrandyte is the theatre of God’s activity.

Christopher