The Shape of a Heart
Original by A. K.
Imagine a heart.
A tailless spade. Two tear-shaped halves smushed together to form the shape we commonly associate with love. Find it branded in tattoos, in the sticker on the top of your coffee cup, painted on a heartfelt card, or in glittery letters on a tweenage journal you’d rather not unearth from the closet.
Hard to imagine? Probably not. When you stand up and look around, you likely can’t travel far without seeing one. Chances are there is one in the room you are in. Or even on your screen. If (somehow) not, switch tabs on this device and you should find them hard to avoid. In fact, every time I type the words “heart,” or “love,” my keypad even suggests the little icon for me. (There is also one up there but if you are sharp you already stopped reading and jumped to the next paragraph ;)
They are typed with toppled v’s and threes, sent with emojis, and statistically-shown to be the second most commonly used symbol in digital conversations, just behind the laughing face. You probably could have guessed all of those — the bigger and slightly more disturbing fact is that nearly ten times more heart emojis are typed in a day than transactions are made. Which means we use them to convey our point more than we use tangible money to purchase the essentials of every day life. More hearts are seen than any other symbol in the world. They are everywhere. Needless to say, we have a bit of an obsession.
Because we are so close to Valentine’s Day you have probably seen more of them recently than you can begin to recount. The icons have captured our eyes — become a different sort of currency to settle deals of attention and passions. To exude, to convince, to plead, to delight, to sell. It’s amazing how much power can be instilled in a simple shape.
The meaning? The origin? Those are criteria the average heart-emoji user doesn’t know — and I don’t blame them. I did a bit of research on the topic and it isn’t all that lovely.
There are hundreds of theories as to where the heart shape came from. All of them have their truths — most point wholeheartedly (see what I did there?) to the visual commodity we use today, but one is understood by most sources to be the first time this emotional currency was used…
The Opium of the People
In plants, hearts have always been admired in their many specimens (did I mention it is also one of the most common shapes for botanicals?). However, they gained special popularity around 600 B.C. when the heart-shaped seeds of the Silphium plant were commonly used as a spice and medicine. I say ‘commonly used,’ — what I mean is obsessed over.
The Greeks’ and Romans’ use of it drove the plant to near extinction — and when that happened they minted their coins with the symbol branded on them as a sign of protection and prosperity. The shape was literally currency for them.
From the beginning, it demanded our attention and passions.
Back then, the object called the “heart” was still merely seen as an organ. But as people began to learn more about that beating noise in their body that seemed central to their life and spirit, it didn’t take long for it to gain the revered shape of strength as it’s ideogram.
There are still more theories as to how the correlation came about — philosophers including Aristotle are recorded describing the heart as having “three chambers […] with a dent in the middle…” As always, art followed the words of politicians and philosophers — by the 1200s (A.D.) it was safe to say the shape we know today as a “heart” was used as a popular representation of the human organ in the chest.
This famous picture is the earliest example we have of a heart shape portrayed as our metaphysical center. Years later, it still holds that place as a focal point. A center of art, of politics, of design, of architecture, of emojis — our understanding of love, our concept of affection, — our thinking.
On every given plane and still more, how far we have shifted from the original masterpiece God created!
The Human Heart
The inspiration for all of this is an experience I had last week. It only lasted about five seconds but it made me think. I couldn’t find the heart emoji I was looking for so I used my handy dandy emoji search bar and clicked out the familiar word. Unsurprisingly, I found what I was looking for without a problem — but I couldn’t help but notice that the image of the human organ was the very last result for ‘heart.’ It was a bit exasperating to me because the heart is such a beautiful mechanism!
Every second, your heart is pumping blood throughout your body with an alarming amount of force that makes it astounding how long these organs last. More gallons of blood circulate through your body from that single force in a day, than the gallons of gas you are likely to put in your car in a year.
It is constantly doing it's job to keep you alive as the physical center of your being. Typically, the heart is suspended four feet above your toes and just as far from your fingertips, so it’s force must work against gravity to ensure that the blood circulates in a full cycle. Even as you are reading this is happening.
Yet it is immensely easy — maybe even instinctive — to forget about that function altogether and view the heart as something entirely different.
I am not accusing anyone by saying all of this. Or maybe I am accusing everyone. After all, it is not just the symbol of heart we treat this way. How many symbols that we frequent on a daily basis represent something that we know next to nothing about? It happens with flags, with logos, with phrases and team names, with quotes and sayings. Sometimes we forget the shape of the true root.
Facades are crafted to fill in as a simpler form and slowly we forget the real one altogether. Faiths are crushed this way — when we forget why we do something, when we forget it's meaning. When we see in pure ignorance of the shape of its heart. It is a bone chilling feeling to know that one can get so far removed from the truth without even knowing it. My bones are frozen because of it — because even in that moment as the true heart was the last one listed by my search engine, I realized that I am no stranger to this scenario.
The Lustful Heart
I mentioned earlier that the first representation of the ideographic heart was from the Silphium seed. I neglected to mention, however, its most frequent medical use. The aspect that made its first connection with the concept of romantic love was the seed’s common application as a contraceptive. In potent forms, it was even sought to be used after the fact, for annihilation of the fetus’s of unplanned pregnancies.
Twisted, that what we use as a symbol for a life-giving center was first the center of a plant that brought death to mothers’ wombs. That is what the plant was sought out for most, though that aspect was often unspoken. That is what nearly drove it to extinction — what gave it that true greedy, lusty sort of value in people’s eyes when it was minted on their coins.
The symbol, I’ve found, was never an accurate representation of the complex organ and nowhere near being even a shadow of what we regard as our moral epicenter. This isn’t all to say it is a bad symbol — rather a bad system of forgetfulness we’ve created.
The Heart of God
All of these claims, these images, these phrases — mere symbols of what we believe — yet few know the heart of their beliefs.
Few followers of Christ even are willing to take a walk through the valves and craters of the beating heart of God and see what lies there, see the dark tubes of blood constantly pumping. Pumping life into our body. A life given wholeheartedly (I did it again) that could stop giving us grace any moment with a simple choice. A choice He has already made.
God chooses to give us life in a constant pouring of His lifeblood into our undeserving bodies. But we dare not allow ourselves awareness of the constant drumbeat to the symbolic song we are singing — the melody that can only be fueled by a hidden undertone that is the truth behind what we say. It makes us shiver to know of the moist dampness convulsing within our body — much less the constant outpouring of blood, the mind-jogging, heart rattling truth that Jesus’ heart never stopped pouring blood out into us.
From the beginning God knew the precious blood would be necessary, that we could not sustain the beauties of heart-shaped leaves and forbidden fruits and leave it all peacefully untouched. He knew that the heart beating in His chest would be cut out for us — surely, it was already supplying us with everything we needed from the beginning, despite our unwillingness to be fed by the strong fountains of His blood. We are all trees, veins growing from His immense, ocean-like heart, rivers flowing from the root of His astounding grace. There have been symbols contrived, songs composed, words written but that is the heart of what we are. That is the root.
Shapes; symbols. We forget their meanings often or we know their meanings but detach them completely from their ideograms. They are meant well, meant to represent and remind, but at the end of the day, it isn’t a picture of a plump figure that saves a life, it is the real thing. It isn’t an image of the heart of God, it is His heart living, pumping, extending. We aren’t required to understand every aspect — but must know something of it’s ends and outs. We must know it’s shape. When we imagine His heart, it must be love that we see and not some fractured image of it. Not an ideogram.
Let go of the symbols. Now, imagine a heart. What do you see?
