"Follow your heart, but take your mind with you." Such a lovely quotation to begin a new year.
Because both are necessary, if we are to lead a happy and fulfilling life. Mind without heart is efficient, effective, productive, but can also be sterile, unhappy, uncaring. Heart without mind is intuitive, emotional, spiritual, loving, but can also be biased, impulsive, unwise.
In 1959, the Lindsey Press published a slim volume entitled Essays in Unitarian Theology: A Symposium. Edited by Rev. Kenneth Twinn, who was at that time minister of Chowbent Unitarian Chapel in Atherton, Lancashire, it has eight different contributions by eminent Unitarian theologians. All make fascinating readings, but the one which really spoke to me was the first contribution, by Twinn himself. It was called A Personal Affirmation and I would like to share the first few sentences, as for me, they sum up what Unitarian theology should be about - living with heart and mind together.
"What I look for in religion is a system of thought that will give meaning to life - not necessarily that will answer all the questions I might raise, but that will give coherence to my experience of the totality; and a meaning which will at the same time suggest a way of life, involve a commitment or categorical imperative (to us whatever may be the jargon of the age), of the whole. The conclusions I have reached, the system I have evolved... is far from complete... It is not original, but influenced by what I have been taught, by patterns of thinking in which I have been brought up. I confess that I can never be ultimately satisfied with it, and that I ought to keep on examining it and modifying it, but it is something I can live by now. I recognise that it should not conflict with any facts that have been scientifically demonstrated, but equally it must respond to and correspond with all sides of my nature, spiritual and emotional as well as purely rational: my insight as well as my five senses. Therefore it has a poetical as well as logical expression."
So perhaps it is up to each of us to formulate our own theology; our own system of thought and belief that will satisfy not only our minds but also our hearts. And, crucially, it must be a system of thought and belief which can be lived by, not just pretty words and ideas talked about on a Sunday. A combination of heart and mind together, which will enable us to live wise and happy lives.
