Educating the Heart

 Xavier le Pichon (see the previous posting) said it: we are not born all at once with fullness of humanity, but with the capacity for full humanity.  We grow human (the French would interchange the English word “humane”) as we choose to live in relationship.  Educating the heart, he says, is not done by ourselves alone; it is done in relationship.  When the kids were infants and toddlers, we lived in a very simple flat with one small bathroom.  In that bathroom was a window with a type of privacy glass that was designed
to distort the view, but ended up being pretty ugly.  So on that window Kathy and I hung a little banner with a tree at sunrise and a quote from then-popular Khalil Gibran: I wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.  As we walked into that little bathroom each morning, our eyes would fall on that quote.  I would often smile at it as wishful thinking, my heart not as winged as Gibran’s, my spirit not as thankful, my will not as prepared to love.  Perhaps it was wishful, and indeed I considered it a prayer, to offer to God my heart for his wings, my spirit for his, my will to be given to his love.  

Pichon says that when we enter the personhood of another, when we place ourselves in relationship, escaping the prison of our independence and privacy, that in the presence of the other, especially the fragile, or needy other, that our heart begins to become educated.  Our children could not yet read.  When they awakened in the morning they did not have Gibran’s words to become a prayer inside them, to give their heart wings.  They awakened to another day of Kathy’s loving, Kathy who would be home with them as I would be at work, Kathy who would endlessly care for them, nurture them, as she endlessly cares for and nurtures me, and all who come within her sight.  And Kathy’s days of loving would prepare them to anticipate the return of a loving father from work.  She would call prepare them to draw me into relationship, to run to me with tiny hands reaching up to me, pulling me down into Daddyness, and they would educate my heart, and I would be defenseless, incapable of privacy.  It is not at all surprising that these little children have grown winged hearts, and that they live loving lives. 

As I listened to Pichon (I do hope that you listen to his voice in the interview)  use the word educate I recalled my own use of the word with students at the university, telling them that it comes from the Latin word ducere, to draw, that it means to draw out from them what is already within.  When we enter into relationship with a fragile other, whether a dependent child or an aging relative or a poor stranger, the capacity for humanity that is within us is drawn out.  We find in our hands a cup of cool water for the parched lips of the thirsty other, a cup that we don’t remember having, that we don’t remember filling.  As we fall in step with the other, into companionship, we discover a resourcefulness we had not known in our privacy, our safety, our fenced-in lives of self-sufficiency.

And so it does not surprise me that these three children would have winged hearts, that they are instinctively drawn to relationship, that they have a natural sense of compassion.  Loving was something to which they awakened, something that drew them into itself.  They read it in Kathy’s face, and heard it in the story she gave me to tell each night when I came home, to relationship.

Coming: God’s heart, our heart.