learning through meaning, experience, and story

Something that's been coming up a lot in conversation this summer are the interrelated topics of meaning and experience, and story, by which they are connected. These topics have been coming up in relation to two different things: how the head and the heart learn differently (head through meaning, heart through experience, and you can connect the rest of the dots there on your own); and the rather extraordinary imbalance of experience and meaning in our present culture.

The first has played a large part in understanding the journey God's got me on in all this, why he leads me into things that I can intellectually grasp, but resist experiencing. The dynamic of how the heart learns was part of an old post I did about how we deal with suffering and the questions it raises, but the basic idea is that heart can only ever learn through what it experiences. Meaning is meaningless to the heart.

When we are wronged or injured, our hearts are taught that we are of little value, resulting in the pain we feel (and the desire not to experience it again). When we are comforted and loved and supported, our hearts are taught that we have great value, resulting in the joy we feel (and the desire to experience it again).

There is no reasoning here, no past or future, just the shape and strength that our collective previous experience, and forward-looking hope and fear, have made of our hearts. There is only the present experience interacting with the present shape. Which is not to say that reason doesn't respond; it does, in a variety of ways. But the vehicle of every response has to be through story. The information of the head's meaning is translated by story in order to make sense to the heart, which experiences the information.

Obviously, I'm using the term "story" broadly here. For example, in the wake of "Alice" being slighted by "Bob", her head may remind her heart of the event (or an amalgam of events) of "Charles" loving and valuing her, and so soothe the pain in the moment by reawakening the experience of that joy. Or her head may spin a quick tale of why Bob and his opinion of her is worthless, and smother the pain with pride. Or her head may discover a story of misfortune that Bob is currently suffering himself, and awaken compassion or pity to replace her pain. I'm not saying these are all good or even very effective responses, but it's what we do, and the part we play in shaping and strengthening or weakening our hearts ourselves.

God wants our hearts, as much as our heads, to know his goodness and love. But that doesn't mean protecting us from all that we fear, because for one thing we all know that our hearts can be wrong in their hopes and fears. For another thing, we would never learn any better that way; experience ought to teach our hearts to be wiser (that is, better at matching hopes and fears to reality) and stronger (that is, more resilient to the effects of hopes, fears and reality).

If we only had comfort, all the time, our hearts would be paltry and shallow and ignorant of the vast ways and means God has to love us, knowing only endless single-note comfort. He teaches us the width and breadth and depth of his love by leading us out into the wide, broad, deep world and showing us his love in every circumstance, and thus shapes and strengthens our hearts. Very often, it is only in the places we fear – the places where our hearts have been shaped by previous experience to expect rejection and the pain of being devalued – that he can get us to pay attention to him, reach for him, to our huge loss.

Which has all been part of this solitude. One of the enormously beneficial and scary effects of solitude is that you can't get away from your own mess. Everything that our hearts believe make us less valuable, less worthy of love, because it's what we've been rejected for before. You sit there with the mess and God slowly reveals each part, letting you discover his purpose and love and value of you in allowing it in your life in the first place. His purpose and love is guaranteed, by the way – not because of our value, but because of who he is, which is what our value depends on in the first place.

Which is too good and joyous a thing to be dragged down by a rant about all that's broken and twisted in our current culture (that may be a slight exaggeration), so I will leave that for another (more ranty) day.