“Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?”
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind.”
Matthew 22: 36-37
Heart. Soul. Mind. These words speak of something important. After all, they speak of the ways we go about our relationship with God. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus did not say “Love God.” Anybody can do that. It is God, after all. If you believe God is present in your life in any way, one part of that presence will be love. There are probably times and ways that we wish Jesus had stopped there. “Love God.” We can do that. Our love of God can be one of the many loves that we have in our lives.
But he doesn’t stop there. There are qualities to this love of God that go beyond any of our other loves. We love with all our heart. With all our soul. With all our mind.
Heart. Mind. Soul. These words speak of something real and deep and transforming, even while they are elusive to define. Of course, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from trying. Over the years, scholars in Hebrew and Greek have studied these words, and they can now tell us exactly what Jesus meant when he spoke them.
Heart. It is your control center; it is the place of your will and your intentions. It is the source of your thoughts, actions, and words.
Soul. Well, here, even the scholars can’t agree. For some, soul describes the essence of who you are as a living being. For others, soul describes some part of you that is immortal and leaves the body when you die. You have a soul…or you are a soul?
Mind. It is that thinking part of you. It includes reason and knowledge, but it also includes memory and imagination.
These are two or three sentence descriptions of the unnumberable ways that scholars have explored and defined heart, soul, and mind. And still, it is hard to say what it really means, what it really looks like to love God this way. So again, the words speak to something real and deep, even while they are elusive to define. And maybe that elusiveness is okay. When it comes to life-changing and life-defining ideas like loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, there is more to knowing them than simply defining them. In fact, there is a way that defining can be delimiting.
In one of his classes, Dr. Bill Hendricks, one of my theology professors who became a spiritual mentor for me, talked about the difference between an Eastern and Western way of looking at the world. We are very much a part of the Western mindset, and that Western perspective has shaped the way we understand the Christian faith. Dr. Hendricks said that the Western mind believes that once you have defined something, you have exhausted it. With this definition, you have determined the essential quality of something; you have determined its scope and boundaries. So this is what it is, which means that if someone else says something different about it, that means one of us is right and the other person is wrong.
Heart. Soul. Mind. Maybe the power of these words is not just in their meaning, but in their ability to touch and inspire us. This touching and inspiring may be especially important when we talk about them in terms of loving God. So instead of adding my own definitions, I decided just to be with them and see what thoughts they evoked.
Soul. What do we mean when we say that something touches our soul? What are we saying about a person when we say they have soul? Why do they call it soul music, especially when there are ways that any kind of music can touch the soul? Why do we call that person a soulmate? It is a word so powerful that people can spend their whole lives looking for this person and can be devastated when the relationship with their soulmate doesn’t last.
Heart. I love you with all my heart. This is not a phrase we use only for God; is Jesus saying it should be reserved for our love of God? We say we love lots of things, but only a few do we love with all our hearts. And this kind of love is reserved for a particular person, not a particular food or place or idea or belief. What are we “putting in” when we say we are putting our hearts into it? What is the difference between felt and heart felt? What is happening when are hearts are broken? What is happening when our hearts are full?
Mind. What does it mean when we say our minds are blank or empty? Or when our minds are so full of thoughts that we wish we could turn our minds off? Is that even good thing to wish for? Is that even possible? What have you “lost” when you have lost your mind? Where do you go when your mind gets lost in thoughts? What does it mean to be mindless? What does it mean to be mindful?
I look back over what these words have evoked in me, and I see lots of questions. Of course, we could join the scholars in trying to give answers to these questions so we can have an even better definition of heart, mind, and soul. But I don’t think that Jesus, with his invitation, is inviting us to get a clear definition of the words and then apply them to our lives. I’m not sure love of God works that way. I’m not sure a better definition always leads to a clearer picture or a fuller experience of heart, mind, and soul.
Instead of answering the questions, maybe we could live with them for a bit or from time to time. Instead of answering, maybe we could wonder about them. Maybe we could live with them and wonder about them long enough for them to reach and resonate with those places inside of us that are heart, soul, and mind. And when we get there, our heart, our soul, and our mind would say to us, “Yes, this is what it means to love God.” And we would know this love to be true.