I love therefore I am?

Some years ago, I wrote a book called Why be Happy when you can be Normal?

There's a line in there that says that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

I didn't mean a disappointing night out or a bad stock pick. I don't mean the many mistakes of a busy life. I was thinking of hurts caused to others - hurts caused to myself, terrible relationships, crass responses. Negative attitudes towards people whose motives I might imagine but could not really know. Many of us listen to an inner voice of quiet contempt for others.

How are you feeling this morning? That is, how are you feeling about yourselves? How are you feeling about family, about friends, about colleagues? Your response to the state of things? To the state we are in?

All of us here today have learned to rely on our minds. To depend on our capacity of thought.

I think therefore I am. The poster-boy of the Enlightenment. Get the Descartes T-shirt. Wear it with pride. But that Cartesian certainty is not enough - not enough for the life the teachings of the great religions encourage us to consider.

I think therefore I am. I think, therefore I can avoid my feelings. I think, therefore I often behave like a jerk. Self-justifying. Hard. Cruel….even

I don't want to be cruel.

But I know too that failures of feeling can happen when there is too much emotion - when we are overwhelmed - usually by anger, or fear, sometimes by grief or loss, the disengagement of our rational self. What do you do? I lash out. I lose my mind. I lose control.

It's not easy being a human animal.

Emotion and feeling.

Those words. Those self-states - are often used interchangeably - but there is a difference. Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, theorises that feelings are the result of the brain interpreting emotions – that is, reading the raw data. The mind adds the nuance, the complexity - but what if it doesn't? If the basic emotion is too overwhelming, too difficult, the mind may block the feeling associated with the raw emotion.

Desperately, we try to rationalise. Show me a way out. Return me to equilibrium as fast as possible, because that is what the mind/body unit seeks above all - equilibrium. Homeostasis. Back to normal.

Even if back to normal is the last place we need to be - in order to develop as a human being.

Some years later, still thinking about my hardness of heart - as the Bible calls it - folks in the Bible are always hardening their hearts – and it’s an act of self-harm, a kind of sclerosis that also harms others.

So thinking about my failures of feeling - I realised I hadn't gone far enough and it occurred to me that my errors of judgement - great and small - WERE failures of feeling. When I was too afraid to feel, too smug too feel, too self-assured to feel, too certain in my views, too attached to my point of view, and I could not let in the feeling.

Or when I self-righteously allowed myself to be carried away with anger. Or overcome with pain. Or even overcome with happiness... how scary is that? Quick - don't let the feeling in. When we block out the feeling our judgement is impaired. We are acting as a semi-human. No longer a whole person.

The most surprising sentence in the Christian scriptures is this: God is Love. Not God is Thought. Not Cartesian division between Res Cognita - Thinking Things, and Res Extensa - Everything Else - Animals, Creation, Women. But let's not go there.

Christ as Logos - Christ as the Word, In the Beginning was the Word - therefore cannot be at odds with God as Love. There cannot be a division. The Word, the abstract miracle of language, of discrimination, of understanding, of judgement, of objectivity, cannot be separated from what Dante called the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

And what does Paul tell us in Corinthians? You know it.

If I speak with the tongues of men and angels. but have not love…. I am… what? A gong, a cymbal. A noisy empty vessel.

The teachings of Christ point us towards ourselves as fully integrated humans not split, not separated, not ricocheting from Head to Heart, from Mind to Body. Not ruled by our passions or our dogmas. Instead, to find, as Wordsworth puts it so beautifully, all our thoughts are steeped in feelings.

So for me, the most difficult sentence in the Bible is that I must love my neighbour as myself.

Who is my neighbour? Asks the smartass lawyer in the scriptures?

And the answer comes in the parable of the Good Samaritan. That is, a traveller gets beaten up and left for dead, and the Rabbi passes by on the other side, and so does the Levite - both men of stature and means, respected in the community, and it's left to the Samaritan - in those days, some no-hoper from that low-grade dump, Samaria, to take care of the beaten-up guy, and leave money for his recuperation.

Your neighbour is the one who needs you to feel his pain. His situation. Your emotion might be fear, or disgust, but your feeling - that is, your fully functioning mind and body self, will meet the moment as it needs to be met. That's hard work.

And I came back in my thoughts to the reading which we have just heard from the Gospel of Mark, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

I wrote another line in another book

What you risk reveals what you value.

And that's a riff on Mark.

I risk my chance at being whole - at being a fully integrated human - every time I am prepared to split myself into bits to get what I want. If I am acting from a part of me, I am losing the whole of me.

How to recognise this? How to act against it?

There is only one way - and it is the hardest road - because it is the way of love - that far from being a luxury response, love is the most difficult thing of all.

I love therefore I am?

It's worth a try.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called Why be Happy when you can be Normal?

There's a line in there that says that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

I didn't mean a disappointing night out or a bad stock pick. I don't mean the many mistakes of a busy life. I was thinking of hurts caused to others - hurts caused to myself, terrible relationships, crass responses. Negative attitudes towards people whose motives I might imagine but could not really know. Many of us listen to an inner voice of quiet contempt for others.

How are you feeling this morning? That is, how are you feeling about yourselves? How are you feeling about family, about friends, about colleagues? Your response to the state of things? To the state we are in?

All of us here today have learned to rely on our minds. To depend on our capacity of thought.

I think therefore I am. The poster-boy of the Enlightenment. Get the Descartes T-shirt. Wear it with pride. But that Cartesian certainty is not enough - not enough for the life the teachings of the great religions encourage us to consider.

I think therefore I am. I think, therefore I can avoid my feelings. I think, therefore I often behave like a jerk. Self-justifying. Hard. Cruel….even

I don't want to be cruel.

But I know too that failures of feeling can happen when there is too much emotion - when we are overwhelmed - usually by anger, or fear, sometimes by grief or loss, the disengagement of our rational self. What do you do? I lash out. I lose my mind. I lose control.

It's not easy being a human animal.

Emotion and feeling.

Those words. Those self-states - are often used interchangeably - but there is a difference. Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, theorises that feelings are the result of the brain interpreting emotions – that is, reading the raw data. The mind adds the nuance, the complexity - but what if it doesn't? If the basic emotion is too overwhelming, too difficult, the mind may block the feeling associated with the raw emotion.

Desperately, we try to rationalise. Show me a way out. Return me to equilibrium as fast as possible, because that is what the mind/body unit seeks above all - equilibrium. Homeostasis. Back to normal.

Even if back to normal is the last place we need to be - in order to develop as a human being.

Some years later, still thinking about my hardness of heart - as the Bible calls it - folks in the Bible are always hardening their hearts – and it’s an act of self-harm, a kind of sclerosis that also harms others.

So thinking about my failures of feeling - I realised I hadn't gone far enough and it occurred to me that my errors of judgement - great and small - WERE failures of feeling. When I was too afraid to feel, too smug too feel, too self-assured to feel, too certain in my views, too attached to my point of view, and I could not let in the feeling.

Or when I self-righteously allowed myself to be carried away with anger. Or overcome with pain. Or even overcome with happiness... how scary is that? Quick - don't let the feeling in. When we block out the feeling our judgement is impaired. We are acting as a semi-human. No longer a whole person.

The most surprising sentence in the Christian scriptures is this: God is Love. Not God is Thought. Not Cartesian division between Res Cognita - Thinking Things, and Res Extensa - Everything Else - Animals, Creation, Women. But let's not go there.

Christ as Logos - Christ as the Word, In the Beginning was the Word - therefore cannot be at odds with God as Love. There cannot be a division. The Word, the abstract miracle of language, of discrimination, of understanding, of judgement, of objectivity, cannot be separated from what Dante called the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

And what does Paul tell us in Corinthians? You know it.

If I speak with the tongues of men and angels. but have not love…. I am… what? A gong, a cymbal. A noisy empty vessel.

The teachings of Christ point us towards ourselves as fully integrated humans not split, not separated, not ricocheting from Head to Heart, from Mind to Body. Not ruled by our passions or our dogmas. Instead, to find, as Wordsworth puts it so beautifully, all our thoughts are steeped in feelings.

So for me, the most difficult sentence in the Bible is that I must love my neighbour as myself.

Who is my neighbour? Asks the smartass lawyer in the scriptures?

And the answer comes in the parable of the Good Samaritan. That is, a traveller gets beaten up and left for dead, and the Rabbi passes by on the other side, and so does the Levite - both men of stature and means, respected in the community, and it's left to the Samaritan - in those days, some no-hoper from that low-grade dump, Samaria, to take care of the beaten-up guy, and leave money for his recuperation.

Your neighbour is the one who needs you to feel his pain. His situation. Your emotion might be fear, or disgust, but your feeling - that is, your fully functioning mind and body self, will meet the moment as it needs to be met. That's hard work.

And I came back in my thoughts to the reading which we have just heard from the Gospel of Mark, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

I wrote another line in another book

What you risk reveals what you value.

And that's a riff on Mark.

I risk my chance at being whole - at being a fully integrated human - every time I am prepared to split myself into bits to get what I want. If I am acting from a part of me, I am losing the whole of me.

How to recognise this? How to act against it?

There is only one way - and it is the hardest road - because it is the way of love - that far from being a luxury response, love is the most difficult thing of all.

I love therefore I am?

It's worth a try.