Canter Bridge

Atria and ventricles notwithstanding, the heart is otherwise not a well compartmentalized organ. The biblical proverbialist knows this:

The heart may ache even in laughter,
And joy may end in grief.

We are complex little creatures, walking about in fragile skin with the twin burdens of glory and tragedy just beneath. We feel more than we can say, know more than we can shape into words that can flow gracefully from trembling lips. Our joy knows the bounds only of our inability to express it. Our sadness runs deeper than words can say. All of this is mixed up together in one potent brew of human experience.

Mixed emotions are not a momentary exception to a norm whereby we are subject to just one. They are rather a symptom and still more deeply a feature of the human condition. Each one of us lives this condition in microcosm, behind damp eyes, clenched jaw, and the occasional outpouring of joy or grief. Even joy and grief.

This is how things are. It is not an illness to be cured except by the arrival of hope’s longing when, we are elsewhere told, every tear will be dried. The worst thing we can do now about this mixed wine of the heart is attempt to distill it into clear liquid.

The follower of YHWH, if she is wise, learns to pour out all of the heart’s treasure before him. She acquires the balance to walk, gracefully at times and clumbsily at others, before the face of God in all her naked complexity.

The heart is, even by the proverbialist’s calculus, beyond figuring out.

Yet there is one who knows it. He does not despise.