Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments or even your own article! Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor
“Apply your heart to understanding…When wisdom enters your heart, and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, discretion will preserve you; understanding will keep you, to deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who speaks perverse things” (Proverbs 2:2, 10-12).
“My son, do not forget my law, but let your heart keep my commands…Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and depart from evil” (Proverbs 3: 1, 5-7).
It’s easy to get caught up in the thought that life is about knowing a lot; externally, ideas and knowledge seem really important and sharing ideas and knowledge really can do a lot of good. But at the end of the day, it is not a question of do I know this or that, am I wise, or am I right, but simply am I living in integrity with my understanding of "the law"—am I acknowledging it fully and abiding by it. That’s the insight I came to this week from meditating on the quotes above. To flesh it out a bit more, I notice two “understandings” at play in these quotes. Understanding first is said to keep us and deliver us from evil, and then in the next chapter, we’re told NOT to lean on our understanding! The difference that reconciles this discrepancy for me is that my understanding of the law is crucial while my understanding of the events and circumstances of my life isn’t something to rely on; in all my ways I’m told to acknowledge God over my understanding of what’s going on in my life, which is nearly always based on my extremely limited vantage point (and for which, Ecclesiastes 7:10 is often applicable: “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For you do not inquire wisely concerning this”).
But going back to my understanding of the law—in Proverbs 3:1 (“do not forget my law, but let your heart keep my commands”) “forgetting the law” is juxtaposed with “keeping the commandments,” so to know the law must not be just to have knowledge of it, but to live according to it, to keep it. But there’s a critical gap between the knowing and the living. The law has to pass through my understanding to become something that I live. The law becomes my life when I “apply my heart to understanding” and then act in keeping with the insight I come to. It’s fairly painless to apply my mind to understanding—there can be a certain mental agony to that—but it gets extra gritty when understanding becomes a matter of the heart. This week’s Swedenborg and Life episode happened to touch on this idea and in it Dr. Dan Synnestvedt describes this distinction well:
“We struggle with the intellect all the time—arguments pro and con—you can constantly go back and forth…that can be a kind of struggle…but, on another level beyond that, the next level down, where we really live, is: what do you really love, who are you, what sort of person are you going to be, and what kind of an existence are you going to have? Now when you get down to that level, that’s when you experience this mental confusion—it’s very difficult—where you can’t reason your way out of things anymore; you feel like the arguments are of equal weight on each side and so you can’t use your intellect to make the decision, so then that forces you to go another level deeper: okay well, now, what do I love?”
On this heart level, I lose my sense of truth so entirely that I am forced to go back to the drawing board only with what I love and the literal words of scripture and decide—what am I going to call true? When I apply my heart in this way, what is my understanding of the law?—which then makes clear how I am to live.
Chelsea lives with her husband and three children in Willow Grove, PA. She enjoys making music, doing yoga, talking and writing about spiritual topics, and living life overall.