Emotions

The most sentimental thing in the world
is to hide your feelings;
it is making too much of them.
GK Chesterton

I came into this world a very sensitive, emotional person. God in his wisdom saw to it that my father was not.

I remember the first time I heard Beethoven’s 9th Symphony: I was so moved by the grandeur of the music that I wept. I was 10 years old. When my father saw this, he yelled out to my mother, “Billie…he is crying…OVER THE MUSIC!” This greatly troubled my dad and continued to do so until I brought home my first girlfriend.

My dad spent considerable time teaching me to master my emotions and to utilize my reason. When I would begin crying during an argument he would respond by saying, “Tears do not persuade me: where is the logic of your assertions?” --Or some other such rational comment. And for this I am grateful. However…

Somewhere along the line I became frightened of my emotions, “making too much of them.” And this fear took on a religious veneer when I entered the world of Reformed Theology. (Or, as I now like to describe it, The Land of Vulcans and Stoics.)

It seems to me that much of conservative Christianity is void of emotions: no joy, no passion, and not even any real peace. Okay. There are a couple of emotions I do see from time to time: for example, anger during arguments or a passionate condemnation of those who are In The Wrong. But you get my point.

The fact that God gave us humans a capacity for emotion, gave us the ability to feel, tells us that he thinks emotions are a good thing. Certainly, there is the proclivity for perverting them or for making too much of them, but to rule out of hand all emotional responses appears to me to be a denial of the gifts God has given us.

Where we should celebrate our emotions some of us have a tendency of being embarrassed by them or even of downright hating them! Why is this? Because we have been lied to. We have been told that emotions are dangerous: are they any more dangerous than our minds? Yet we are constantly being told to repress our unruly emotions (“emotions” are most always described pejoratively) and listen to logic and reason, as if our logic and reason have always inexorably led us toward Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

I believe that when we disown our emotions we are choosing to deny our humanity. In fact, I believe that people who repress and deny their emotions are refusing to become fully human. After all, isn’t it our emotional responses to the world around that let us know that we are becoming conscious—that our minds and souls are waking up?

When we deny our emotions we are denying a part of our self, and this is incredibly unhealthy as it keeps us from knowing ourselves, keeps us from encountering a part of us that either needs healing or celebrating.

God comes to us, reveals his self to us not only through our minds but also through our emotions, through our senses. Refusing to utilize our senses, then, we are refusing to know and experience more of God.

When we push away our emotional response, say, to beauty or ugliness, we are choosing to be incongruent…refusing to have a corresponding and appropriate emotional response to the beautiful or the ugly. Consequently, we detach and disassociate ourselves; thereby choosing to not be authentically engaged in the life God has graced us with.

By the way, one of the reasons some people express their beliefs by saying, “I feel that…” is that their beliefs have an emotional component. They feel strongly about what they are asserting and so find it only natural to describe the belief as a feeling. (This is especially so for people who are kinesthetically oriented.) That’s why they look at the person who snidely exclaims, “I could not care less about what you feel but want to know what you believe” with such dismay: their beliefs and feelings are congruent. One is synonymous with the other. (Not that this makes their belief True or Wise.)

When Lazarus died, Jesus wept: he grieved over the loss, grieved for his friends. His response was not merely intellectual (don’t you know I am the resurrection and the life?), but an emotional one. Mind and heart operated together, congruently. He felt what he believed. Death was an enemy to be hated and overcome, something to be grieved over, yet with a sure hope.

To repress or deny our emotions is, as Chesterton noted, “making too much of them.” Yet, it can also be a case where we are not making enough of them, not giving them the weight they require, not listening to what they are telling us about ourselves. Either way, to deny our emotions stunts our growth as humans and restricts our ability to know and enjoy God. I don’t know about you but this doesn’t feel like all that wise of a choice.

copyright Monte E Wilson, 2007