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Kevin W. Jagoe: Living by Heart -- Beginning a conversation

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As a minister, I often reflect on what it means to bring together tradition, community, and values into the hectic lives of the people I serve.

When I think about what might be a useful lens to begin a conversation about lived values that goes beyond any particular religious (or non-religious) system, I think the phrase Living by Heart gets close to what I hope to share with you.

What does it mean to know something by heart? There’s more to it than simply memorizing something. To know something by heart is to both remember it and to make it a part of us. It may shift and change within us, the words might not come back out exactly as they went in. The melody of the music may change when we sing that song from childhood to our own children. When something is known by heart, we make it ours and it is changed for having passed through our life.

So then, what does it mean to live by heart? To live by heart, we take the raw materials of our experiences and make them a part of ourselves. The values we were taught in religious schooling, around the dinner table, on the playground, and through popular culture.

Some of the lessons were explicit: Take turns. Stop and look both ways before crossing the street. Use words rather than violence. That chocolate chip cookie recipe from childhood is the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe. And some of the lessons were implicit though just as clear. Show up for family in a crisis. What we do is as important as what we say we will do.

When we take all the bits we absorb over time and begin to cobble together a way of living that connects the values of our childhood to the values of our community and who we want to be in this world, then we begin to define what it means to live a good life.

The next step is to reflect on what we’ve learned and to make decisions about what to hold on to and what to let go of. What to commit more deeply than memory. Those are the things we know by heart. Those are the lessons we live by almost intuitively and which hold us up when we find ourselves in the most precarious situations.

It is important to reflect from time to time on what we are learning and what we are teaching those around us. To pause in the midst of living in this very strange world and hold up our values to the light. As we enter a season of increased darkness and changed celebrations, perhaps this season marks an occasion to reflect on what is on our hearts. To be a bit more in sync with who we want to be, how we are to be, and what we want to do with the uniqueness of our lives. May we each learn, a bit more today than yesterday, to live by heart.

The Rev. Kevin W. Jagoe is minister of BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship – a community of believers, non-believers, seekers, and skeptics. Find them at buxmontuu.org.


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