THE HEART—HABITABLE AND HOSPITABLE
To ask, “Who am I?” leads straight to the other people who are part of me. Is there any layer of self where there are no others? We find ourselves partly by remembering those who are the most deeply woven into us and by continuing to relate to them. An experienced psychoterapist told me that a great deal of his work has to do with the quality of the “community” that clients carry around inside them.
So it helps to think of ourselves as a sort of community. Each of us has a different set of people who inhabit our heart. To think of the heart as a home is not necessarily a cozy picture: There are peaceful, loving homes, but there are also many with divorce, violence, and other miseries. There are limits to the picture—clearly we have to think of ourselves as individuals too. . . But the bias of our culture tends to play down the ways in which we are communities in ourselves. It is easy to ignore the fact that the very language we use in order to think about ourselves and to describe ourselves is learned from others and that at every crucial point we are shaped in relationship.
How do we discover the shape of our hearts? There are two basic ways. First, we can find out who are the leasing members of our inner community. It begins as an exercise in naming the most significant others. These are the people who indwell us, who are at the core of our “home life” as a self. We always live in their presence, whether they are physically there or not. Whether our heart is habitable or not depends in large measure on our relationships with these people.
Second, we can look at the boundaries of our life. Besides the most significant others, all sorts of people figure in our heart’s domestic drama. Often we have no choice about them—a new boss, colleague, or neighbour, and the people we come up against as we move through many situations. But even in those relationships that are simply given by the situations we find ourselves in, we are rarely passive. Our heart forms its habits of welcoming and rejecting. There are different ways of being part of one heart’s community. Its boundaries are not fixed, and they can be no more open or more closed. This is what I call the hospitality of the heart. How welcoming are we to different types of people? How willing are we to be given hospitality by others—or even to ask for it?
So two essential dynamics that shape our heart are its home life of deepest relationships and its patterns of hospitality. They can be seen as two forms of overwhelming.
David F. Ford—Regius Professor of Divinity at University of Cambridge.
To ask, “Who am I?” leads straight to the other people who are part of me. Is there any layer of self where there are no others? We find ourselves partly by remembering those who are the most deeply woven into us and by continuing to relate to them. An experienced psychoterapist told me that a great deal of his work has to do with the quality of the “community” that clients carry around inside them.
So it helps to think of ourselves as a sort of community. Each of us has a different set of people who inhabit our heart. To think of the heart as a home is not necessarily a cozy picture: There are peaceful, loving homes, but there are also many with divorce, violence, and other miseries. There are limits to the picture—clearly we have to think of ourselves as individuals too. . . But the bias of our culture tends to play down the ways in which we are communities in ourselves. It is easy to ignore the fact that the very language we use in order to think about ourselves and to describe ourselves is learned from others and that at every crucial point we are shaped in relationship.
How do we discover the shape of our hearts? There are two basic ways. First, we can find out who are the leasing members of our inner community. It begins as an exercise in naming the most significant others. These are the people who indwell us, who are at the core of our “home life” as a self. We always live in their presence, whether they are physically there or not. Whether our heart is habitable or not depends in large measure on our relationships with these people.
Second, we can look at the boundaries of our life. Besides the most significant others, all sorts of people figure in our heart’s domestic drama. Often we have no choice about them—a new boss, colleague, or neighbour, and the people we come up against as we move through many situations. But even in those relationships that are simply given by the situations we find ourselves in, we are rarely passive. Our heart forms its habits of welcoming and rejecting. There are different ways of being part of one heart’s community. Its boundaries are not fixed, and they can be no more open or more closed. This is what I call the hospitality of the heart. How welcoming are we to different types of people? How willing are we to be given hospitality by others—or even to ask for it?
So two essential dynamics that shape our heart are its home life of deepest relationships and its patterns of hospitality. They can be seen as two forms of overwhelming.
David F. Ford—Regius Professor of Divinity at University of Cambridge.
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