I need a quick take post or something. I have all kinds of various untied threads waving and flapping all over my mind and arranging them into any kind of actual coherent order seems impossible, somehow. Not that I do that regularly. Don't want to lie to potential new readers and give them a wrong impression that this is a blog of rational well organized thought. If you wanted that I'm sure there are better places in the vast interwebs.
Anyway, so for a ramble through my scattered mind, first up we have the movie ET, which we watched yesterday for family movie night. (I did have some sort of vague impression that it was a national holiday and suggested we watch a documentary on the development of labor unions in America but surprisingly no one liked that idea–the children ate prefab chicken fingers and frenchfries with katchup, how the proud foodie has fallen, and I tried to make a nice sausage and kale thing for Matt and me but it turns out, I Really Do still Hate Kale.) So I always think movies must be some kind of reflection of the values of the culture at the time they are made and so from ET I would glean that America in 1983 thought that children should have a high degree of independence and were fairly intelligent, more so than all the adults around them. The first point I will grant, children should have lots of independence, the second point I quibble with, I never like the “children will show us the way because of the purity of their hearts bla bla bla”. Anyway, more interesting to me was that the main character child, forgot his name, was not tuned in to the thoughts of ET, as was explained by the older brother to the idiot scientist (although that was kind of funny, in a not funny way, does NASA need guns?) it's not that the child can think ET's thoughts, it's that, drum roll because this is really clever and shocking, he can feel his feelings, wondrous pause because something really remarkable has been said.
Except that it's not remarkable at all, it's exactly like what Steven Spielberg and every other single American of his culture and situation values. It's not what we think, it's what we feel.
Found myself, as I was shoving school lists through my dying laminator, rocking in the tiny child's rocking chair, drinking the end of a bottle of white wine, angry at the privilege of feelings over thought yet again. Feelings are just the easiest thing in the whole world. Everyone has them. Practically everyone, with a few notable exceptions, to some degree or other is ruled by them. And empathy, while important, because if you don't have it you might be a psychopath, is not that hard. A child can easily be taught to empathize. To Think, on the other hand, that is Not Easy At All. Teaching a child to think, or trying to think oneself about something, or trying to understand what another person thinks, is not the easy way.
The sermon this Sunday was from 1 Corinthians 2 which ends, “but we have the mind of Christ”. A red blooded American would rather it said, 'but we have the heart of Christ', look at how much we feel and how much we love and how much empathy we have. Which, possibly, was the problem in Corinth. Everyone was busy living out their feelings of affection for one apostle or teacher over another, and we haven't even gotten to all the other problems. They considered themselves to be high “minded”, judging the philosophical systems of many, but it was really a matter of the preferences of the heart, and not in a good way. The correction was to understand with the mind, and not to understand the self, or even other people, but to understand Christ through his own revelation in Scripture.
Christians like to say “I have a heart for…” Or “she has a heart for….” which isn't wrong. I just wish there was more of the old “I have a mind to….” Lately I've only been saying unhelpful things like “I feel like it's going to be ok” or “I feel like we should do such and such”. It would be a lot of bother for me to say, “I've stopped and thought rationally about this for two whole minutes and it is my considered and researched opinion that we should actually go to the store after all.”
And that, my dear friends, is all I have to say about that. Here is a picture of a cat thinking something unspeakable about a bird, and feeling it too.
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