Lesson Eight: Thinking With the Heart

Unlike most of the great traditions of sacred chanting, which rely on the rhythmic, almost hypnotic repetition of a single prayer phrase or mantra, Christian psalmody is fast-paced and mentally demanding. Rather than stilling the mind, it floods the mind with images and emotions, and it requires a compassionate engagement with the meaning of the words themselves. The immediate experience of this may be that the chanting feels less ecstatic, more "cerebral" than in other sacred traditions. But below the surface, quite a lot is happening.

Contemplative psalmody works at the level of the archetypal imagination. While some of this work--as we've seen in earlier columns--has to do with the integration of the shadow and the healing of the personal unconscious, its real power lies in the awakening of the unitive imagination.

"Unitive imagination" means the ability to think with more than just the linear mind: to engage those faculties of intuition, sensitivity, and creativity that lie deep within our psyche and support a "wisdom" way of knowing. Another way of describing this full-spectrum thinking would be "thinking with the heart."

Like all the Western religions, Christianity is a religion of the Word. But that Word is a unitive Word; a heart-word. It does not yield itself up easily to a linear, or cause-and-effect, way of thinking. At the literal level, those elements in the tradition, such as the Virgin Birth or the mystical body of Christ, make no sense at all. But to the awakened, unitive imagination, they become precise roadmaps of the path of inner transformation, increasingly transparent by the light of inner illumination.

While St. Benedict may not have had terms such as "archetypal unconscious" and "unitive awakening" at his disposal back in the sixth century, his intuitions in this regard were very keen. His "school for the Lord's service" (as he called the monastery) was in essence a total-immersion program for the awakening of the unitive imagination. And the backbone of his curriculum was psalmody.

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