Circle Dance of Time, The

God Sensible to the Heart

God Sensible to the Heart Faith is God sensible to the heart —Pascal “It is the heart that senses God and not reason,” Pascal says. “Here is what faith is: God sensible to the heart not to reason.”1 As I understand it, the heart senses God and God is sensible to the heart when the heart is kindled, and when that happens the mind is also illumined. Faith is “God sensible to the heart and not to reason,” but when my heart is kindled with enthusiasm it is my mind that sees which way then to go. It is my mind that sees the road of the heart’s desire. What I mean by the kindling of the heart is the sort of thing Tolkien describes in Frodo at the beginning of his adventure: He did not tell Gandalf, but as he was speaking a great desire to follow Bilbo flamed up in his heart— to follow Bilbo, and even perhaps to find him again. It was so strong that it overcame his fear: he could 21 almost have run out there and then down the road without his hat, as Bilbo had done on a similar morning long ago.2 This describes the kindling of the heart that enables the mind to see the road of the heart’s desire among the many possible roads one could take into the future. But where is God in all this? In a meditation called “The Heart Determines,” reflecting on the Psalmist’s words “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel,” Martin Buber says The guiding counsel of God seems to me to be simply the divine Presence communicating itself direct to the pure in heart. He who is aware of this Presence acts in the changing situations of his life differently from him who does not perceive this Presence. The Presence acts as counsel: God counsels by making known that He is present. He has led his son out of darkness into the light and now he can walk in the light. He is not relieved of taking and directing his own steps.3 When I ask God to guide me, God answers in effect “I am with you” but doesn’t tell me which way to go, and yet the Presence, “I am with you,” does somehow guide me. I act differently in the changing situations of my life than if I were unaware of the Presence. I am not relieved, though, of taking and directing my own steps. So “The Heart Determines ” as Buber entitles this meditation. There is a gap here between “I am with you” and the kindling of the heart. One is relational, the Presence, but doesn’t tell us which way to go, and the other is experiential , the kindling of the heart, and does tell us. And so “The Heart Determines,” as Buber says, and yet it is God who kindles the heart, I want to say, and the grace of God 22 God Sensible to the Heart is a kindling of the heart and an illumining of the mind. It is the Presence that kindles and illumines. God Kindling the Heart “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.” That is the full sentence from Psalm 73 Buber is commenting on, but he does not want to take the second half of it as referring to a life after death. “It is into His eternity that he who is pure in heart moves in death, and this eternity is something absolutely different from any kind of time.”4 I gather that what Buber is denying here is a life in time after death, but he is affirming a life in eternity. “In each Thou we address the eternal Thou,” he says in I and Thou, and “through contact with every Thou we are stirred with a breath of the Thou, that is, of eternal life.”5 Yet that breath is not a breath of immortality but a breath of eternal life. We have met a God, he says, “who is not ‘immortal’ but eternal.”6 What is the difference between immortality and eternal life? “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness,” Wittgenstein says, “then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”7 So immortality would be infinite temporal duration, but eternity would be timelessness. Eternal life, though...