From hearing to heart

I love this image -- from a gallery in Rome -- and have wanted to use it for a long time (forgive me if I already have and just don't remember!). It calls to me today because I was thinking about something that came up in my spirituality group yesterday -- about how we can know something, and talk like we understand it, but actually we don't really "know" it at all.

This came up in a discussion about spirit: what is it, how does it differ from soul, is it the same as Holy Spirit... those sorts of questions. One of the issues for all of us was really around "church language" -- all those things we say in church, week after week, that are just lofty concepts with no real imprint on our hearts. But for someone like me, writing every day about things of the spirit and things of the heart, it's a constant concern: am I really walking the talk, or are my words just empty parrotings of things I've heard and read elsewhere? And in fact, the reason I pair my words with photographs is because the photographs help pull the language down to a deeper level -- for me, anyway.

So thinking about this in my meditation this morning -- and, yes, though meditation is about stilling the thinking it only works intermittently for me, which is why Centering Prayer is my chosen vehicle for that: it's a way of constantly pulling me back to center -- I realized that there is a path these language-ridden concepts of spirituality take.

The Path:

1. HEARING: It starts with what I would call hearing, by which I mean, it enters my awareness field; I've been exposed to an idea, either because someone said it, or I saw it on TV or in a movie, or I read it in a book or on a website or in an email.

2. The MIND: Once an idea has been heard, if I've listened, it goes into that big romper room in the brain where all the young ideas get to play: on the parallel bars, tumbling on the mats, swinging in the rings, shooting hoops... like any gymnasium, it's a noisy place, and, as an adult my natural tendency is, after letting things play a while, to make them go back to their rooms or file drawers or whatever; I do tend to like things to be tidy in there. Perhaps the trouble with all our spirit language is we stuff it in the drawers and never let it out to play.

3. SEEING: Sometimes some of the ideas frolicking around in the romper room are just enchanting, and I find myself focusing on them more particularly. And that's when I tend to get out the camera: I actually SEE the possibilities in them; I get their dimensions and connections and beauty and then I want to photograph and share them. Sometimes the seeing comes from inside me, and I create photographs in response, and sometimes it comes from outside: I see something that calls to me, I take the picture, and then later I look at it and there's that Aha! moment of revelation.


4. PLANTING IN THE HEART: This is the part I long for most, that seems to happen so rarely. I want to plant the ideas more deeply, in the heart, so they will bloom into behaviors. This is why I need meditation: so I can be more conscious about this part of the process. Meditation softens and prepares the dirt, waters the soil, pulls out the weeds so the divine sun can call the ideas forth into blooming.

So I took that original image, and tried to create something from it that would illustrate this process. What I learned from the result is that the brain has to be open for the ideas to bloom. But I haven't yet figured out why I decided to use the flowers in the wheelbarrow. Whose wheelbarrow is it? And why not just plant the statue and the flowers on the ground?

Oh, boy, more thoughts for the romper room!