YouTube: The Marriage of Head and Heart
“Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female … a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh …” Matthew 19:4-5
This week, Beth and I celebrated our 43rd anniversary. We’ve been through a lot together, including raising two children and 41 years of ministry.
The verse above is attributed to Jesus, but it’s quoted nearly verbatim in other parts of the Bible, suggesting it was a popular reference. I like to think of it as a reference to the ideal marriage between the intellect (male) and the intuition (female) of each individual. We have a physical and spiritual side, with the body being the earthly vehicle of the soul. The fact-oriented intellect is an invaluable tool for navigating through the material world, so much so that we often neglect the intuitive, spiritual side.
Metaphysically speaking, the man leaving his father and mother represents that period when the individual expands their awareness of themselves as something more than we typically associate with our body-based earthly history. To be joined with a wife is to become aware intuitively that our true essence is spiritual, that we occupy a body, but we are much more.
The marriage of head and heart is the beginning of a new understanding of how we approach life. Am I a human being seeking a spiritual experience, or am I a spiritual being having a human experience? It is a very important and meaningful distinction to make, as it opens our mind to a much larger context that quite possibly encompasses many incarnations. This thought alone is mind expanding. In this sense, we leave our earthly mother and father as our beginning point. They gave birth to our body, but not to our soul. So we turn to the soul which has always carried the larger picture of what our life is about.