Samain                                                                                      Moving Moon

A continuing conversation. Purity of heart. Scott asked Sunday if he could not will one thing was his heart impure? Took me some thought but I realized the answer. No, not impure, divided.

A divided heart is the normal human condition, a heart pulled among family, self, ambition, beauty, money, any of the sundry things which can seem urgent, central to us. Kierkegaard is, of course, holding out an ideal, an instance in which we can bring all of who we are into one focus, on one central value. Kierkegaard saw that one thing as love of God, all else falling short.

Back to the U curve graph I talked about a while back, the one where life satisfaction goes down as we reach mid-career then heads up as we age. I proposed that we get happier because aging imposes limits on us: financial, physical and temporal. Another way to think about it might involve the divided heart. Perhaps as we age, we become (or can become) less divided in our will.

This could relate to my desire to do only those things that only I can do. Once we get clearer on who we are, what our Self is, we become (or, again, can become) more focused. This may be the process of our heart becoming less and less divided.

It may be that the third phase is a whittling down of the divided loyalties at our center, a purging of the now understood to be less critical, less urgent, less central. As that U nears the top of the right hand, it may reflect the heart yearning toward, perhaps achieving unity. It is a consoling idea to me to think that we might be able, near the close of our life, to will one thing, even if for only a short period. We might call it at-one-ment.

Samain                                                                                      Moving Moon

Reflections after presenting Purity of Heart.

First, its origin lies as much in H. Richard Niebuhr’s essay, “Radical Monotheism and Western Culture“, as it does in Kierkegaard. Both press forward a key idea, that a center of value is critical to human flourishing, and, both, too, suggest God (Yahweh) as that center of value. With God at the center of a human life, Niebuhr the natural human tendency toward polytheism is checked at its source.

He identifies polytheism as allegiance to multiple values that compete for centrality, e.g. greed, patriotism, race, historical precedence, but that distort the human character if placed in a position like God’s. God, in other word, pushes out the hubris of race-based living, of a life focused on money and success, of a nationalist’s unhumble pride in country, of tradition’s right to determine behavior. With God in the center life focuses on love, justice and compassion, away, in other words, from the cruel lenses other god’s put on us.

Though not the same, Kierkegaard’s purity of heart aims in the same direction, putting God at the center, the relationship with God as the one thing willed, means the individual can live out of their own center rather than a socially determined one.

I think, with Niebuhr and Kierkegaard, that we have to choose with great care that value we put in the center of our lives, that one thing that we will. We can learn from them that certain choices lead to contorted lives that often wreak great harm on the individual and the culture in which they live their lives. Not hard to see the examples. Bernie Madoff. The KKK. The Tea Party. Most bankers and folks who live their lives in pursuit of money. You can add to the list with ease, I’m sure.

Where I part company with Kierkegaard and Niebuhr lies, I think, in the area first of metaphysics. I’m simply not convinced of the existence of God. Many of my friends are comfortable with a spiritual realm beyond or next to or interpenetrating this world, I’m not convinced of its existence either. So to put God or some other God-equivalent at the center of my life just makes no sense to me.

Are there, though, centers of value, the one-willed thing, that can produce eudaimonic lives? I believe there are and furthermore I believe they are multiple, not singular. Let me suggest a few: justice, compassion, love, beauty, art, children, the elderly, the mid-career adult, a healthy eco-system for human beings, even a particular place or people or culture.

Second, to the question of what if we cannot will one thing? What if we cannot have a single center of value? I believe these conditions are the norm and that the willing of one thing, for instance, is the exception. We can still hold ourselves to the goal of a single center of value, of willing one thing. Does that mean we’re bad if we don’t achieve it?

Of course not. It probably does mean though that there is an aspect of your flourishing that goes wanting because your energy and attention is diverted in multiple directions. Note that this is true even if all the multiple directions are the kind of focii referred to above.