Mind and heart

Information is the opiate of the masses. Karl Marx put it differently, of course, but today, with religion waning and information coming out of our ears 24/7, I figure he might have adopted a different comparison.

Many of us have come to believe, foolishly, that the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of wisdom. And for Christians, wiselyness often seems next to godliness.

I see in myself, and in others, this tendency to substitute knowledge for the transformational work of the Spirit of God. Jesus spoke more frequently about matters of the heart, but in our western, brain-centered culture, we find it much easier to embrace thinking rather than doing, or being.

sometimes the best kind of information is the simplest, delivered from someone so ordinary and uninspiring that you almost forget they’re there. the best kind crawls under your skin and unnerves you, makes you wonder why you care at all, that person is so regular. but isn’t that how christ comes to us? in foolishness? suddenly, i’m not as clever as i thought and my soul is aware of a space, i would never ever have known needed filling.

maybe at this juncture in the life of emergent, when we find ourselves on the downward slide into the evangelical sub-culture, it’s time for a different kind of information. not the kind that helps us do something or understand something, but the kind that helps us become. —Jen Lemen

We have this tendency to immerse ourselves in books and conferences and sermons and experiences, thinking that our spirituality is fed by knowledge, when the truth is that our spirituality is fed by being branches that are willingly grafted to the vine and bear the fruit of Christ.

Jen Lemen says it much better. Go take a look.

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