The Feeling Way of Knowing

One of the things that a patriarchal, evangelical modernist theology has done to Christians is make us distrust our feelings. Why? Because otherwise we might not go along with the approved interpretations. Using both brains and hearts, we may come to undesirable conclusions like: people of color are human, women can preach, and gays & lesbians can be healthy members of society. Like peace is better than war, the poor ought to be fed, the homeless housed, the immigrant given space, and the sick healing care. But that's not part of the (patriarchal, capitalist, conquering, shaming, nationalist) orthodox agenda. We are told not to believe our deepest knowing that comes from feeling. We are made to feel ashamed by set ups like "your subjective feelings or God's Word?" By distrusting our feeling way of knowing, we are dehumanized and are led to dehumanize others.

Here is an interesting article from Joan Chittister on the subject:

What Does the World Need?

When poets talk about the human soul, they do not talk about reason; they talk about feeling. The totally human being, they enable us to see, is the one who weeps over evil, revels in goodness, loves outrageously, and carries the pain of the world in healing hands.

Feeling is the mark of saints. It is Vincent de Paul tending the poor on the back streets of France, Mother Teresa with a dying beggar in her arms, Florence Nightingale tending the wounded in the midst of battle, John the apostle resting trustingly on the breast of Jesus, Damian binding the running sores of lepers on the island of Molokai, the soup kitchen people in our own towns giving hours of their lives, week after week, to feed the undernourished. Feeling, we know deep within us, signals the real measure of a soul.

Without feeling, living becomes one long, bland journey to nowhere that tastes of nothing. Take feeling away and we take away life. Feeling warns of our excesses and alerts us to possibilities. It attaches us and opens us and warns us of danger. Because of our feelings we are able to persevere through hard times and find our way to good times. Feelings lead us to the people who love us through life and satisfy our souls when nothing else about a situation can sustain us at all. Feelings, devoid of thought, made only of mist, become the inner lights that lead us out of harm’s way and home to our better selves. Feeling leads us to love the God we cannot see and to see the God around us whom we have yet to come to love. To talk about the spiritual life without feeling, to talk about any life at all without feeling, turns the soul to dust and reduces spirituality to the most sterile of initiatives. And yet we do.

In situations that require insight, wisdom, and concern to resolve them as well as hard, cold information, feelings bring an invaluable dimension. Feelings are the other kind of intelligence, the alternate kind of knowing, the humane kind of reasoning.

What the world needs may well be less detached intellectualism and more thinking hearts, less law and more compassion. Reason that is not informed by emotion is a dry and sterile thing. It comes up with answers too flawed to be humane, too disjunctive to be moral. Reason can be a very dishonorable approach to the task of being human. The kind of thinking that invented slavery trivialized feeling. The kind of thinking that trivialized feeling invented slavery. The world that developed nuclear bombs and made defense impossible, made fun of the peace movement for eroding national defenses. With the subjective obscured, objectivity too easily becomes hardheartedness. As Alice in Wonderland noted, in such a world “down is up and up is down.”

Feeling welcomes us to the human race, where, in the end, the fullness of humanity is all any of us will have to show for being spiritual.