I’m pretty good at head knowledge. No, actually I am really good at head knowledge. Maybe not as good as that man I’m married to who is well out of the normal range for IQ, but still I’m good. I took the Pew Forum Religious Knowledge quiz and scored 100% (here, try it yourself! – let me know how you did)
Heart knowledge is one I have to work on… maybe not so much to do it better, but to recognize what I do know within myself. I am really good at hiding my own feeling from myself, so I suspect I’m really good at being able to just not see what I see with my heart. Heart knowledge — I guess that’s the stuff you learn by paying attention to what your feelings/emotions are telling you. It is good to be in a place where I can know that these companions (emotions) can be as informative at times as the good old scientific data and facts from a book. It is also good to understand that just like book learning, those feelings don’t control me — but they do help me to learn what is going on.
There is one question in that quiz that gave me a brief pause — it has to do with the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church on what happens at the Consecration:
- The bread and wine become the body of Christ
- The bread and wine are symbols of the body of Christ
At one level, I consider this a no-brainer. It is a point of conflict between my protestant upbringing and my RC faith. I felt head and heart go to war — and then I realized that while I could argue semantics, I could try to pick apart the choices (of course they are symbols, but of course they are more — they come the body and blood present with us), there was that part of me that understood the meaning behind the words and most of the time can accept it. The heart won over the head… The heart remembers why I was called to this particular communion within the Christan family.
Lord — help me listen not only with my ears, but with my heart.