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Drawing Near to God with the Heart: first post of a series

Lynne Baab • Thursday January 26 2017

Drawing Near to God with the Heart: first post of a series

In the interviews for my two midlife books [1], I heard from many people about a desire to integrate all the parts of our lives into one whole. As we look back on our lives, we can see diverse threads, some of them meaningful and some of them trivial and inconsequential. Some of the aspects of our work, some of the things we do for recreation, some of the people we spend time with, and some of the habits we have clung to for years seem ridiculously meaningless. We wonder why we have continued to do them. But mixed in with these increasingly unimportant parts of our lives, we find threads that we know are deeply significant to us.

Our culture drives us toward fragmentation, which is coupled in early adulthood with the desire to try lots of things and experiment with many different options. At midlife and in later years, too, often people long to weed out the insignificant threads and find a unifying center for the threads that have meaning but feel dislocated and scattered.

Many describe this process as a move from the head to the heart. We have the sense that in early adulthood we strove to understand the world with our minds, and our minds generated all those enticing possibilities that took us in a variety of directions. As years pass, many experience a desire to live more from the heart, to center our lives more on things that have meaning, to embrace our values with our whole selves, to draw near to God in a way that involves our whole being, our hearts as well as our minds.

Some describe this process as finding and nurturing our soul. In Thomas Moore’s book, Care of the Soul, he writes that it is impossible to define the soul in a precise manner, but, “we know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth. . . . Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy.”1

Inner communing, intimacy, attachment to heart values, integration of all the parts of ourselves, being centered . . . these are some of the most encouraging and meaningful aspects of growth and development I heard about in interviews about midlife. These themes are relevant to people of all ages.

Bill, 35, one of my interviewees for my midlife books, said:

In my very early years as a Christian, when I was in high school, I was connected with God in a genuine experiential way. But I quickly moved into theology and Bible study, focusing on knowledge and an objectified sense of faith. There was a small emotional part of faith, but it was disconnected to the analytical part. My brother died eight years ago, and that began a process of change. In the past year or so, I’m finally understanding who Christ is and what it’s all about. As humans we suffer. My early experience of Christianity was an upward journey to a higher place. Now it feels to me that the core of the message is that in the experience of pain, God brings redemption and comfort. The direction I’m headed is to experience God in the midst of my daily life, in creative activities, in pain and sorrow.

In my interviews with midlife folks, many people reported that tears are much closer to the surface than they have ever been before. These are not simply tears of pain; they may also be tears that connect us with profound realities beyond our comprehension, such as the great love of God, the great mystery of life, the enormous privilege of loving and being loved.

This is the first post in a series that I have entitled “Drawing Near to God with the Heart,” and I include under that title a variety of emphases that can help us live the whole of our lives in integrity and genuineness. In this series of posts I want to explore more of what it looks like to live a unified life, loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength.

(Next week: God woos us. If you’d like to receive an email when I post on this blog, sign up under “subscribe” in the right hand column. Illustration by Dave Baab)

[1] This post is excerpted from my book, A Renewed Spirituality: Finding Fresh Paths at Midlife, available in paperback here and on kindle here. It focuses on spiritual paths for individuals at midlife. My other book on midlife addresses what congregations can do to support people at midlife, Embracing Midlife: Congregations as Support Systems.



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