Intro to Balance of Mind & Heart

I recently completed a graduate school class called Psychological Testing. The very last assignment of this class was to take the Clifton Strengths Finder along with 4-6 other self-assessments left to our choice. All, if not most, of the student including myself chose to do 2 personality tests one known as the Myers-Briggs and the other is the Enneagram. The Myers-Briggs specifically looks at 4 distinct categories and under each, depending on the answer, a person leans toward one of two types. One category looks at how a person makes decisions and copes with emotions known with types of either being thinking or feeling. The interesting notion is that Orthodox spirituality and early Church ideology was that the mind (thinking) is not divided or separated from the heart (feelings). The word ‘heet’ in the Coptic language is often translated as heart; however, the context is both the heart andmind. This notion of divide is even wrongly applied to theology and spirituality. Theology is often viewed as a matter of the mind, reason, or logic while spirituality a byproduct of the heart, emotions, or sentiment. However, this separation could not be farther from the truth. What makes it hard is that sometimes as individuals we have a preference or tendency to use one over the other. The fact of the matter is that both were created by God for service to Him and to others. Take prayer for example, a desert father said the following of quality prayer: “You must pray not only with words, but with the mind, and not only with the mind, but with the heart so that the mind understands and sees clearly what is said in words, and the heart feels what the mind is thinking.  All these combined together constitute real prayer, and if any of them are absent, your prayer is either not perfect or is not prayer at all.” Take a hospital as an example. Any person who goes to a hospital has a chart with every single detail of their medical history. The medical chart is something that has all the ins and outs to know what the patient has and what’s being done; mind or knowledge. A hospital also has doctors who, or at least we hope, have the drive and tenacity to serve others; heart or drive. A hospital that only has one without the other is no hospital. Likewise, a person who does not at least struggle to bring the mind and heart together fails to become fully human; fully made in God’s image.