Reawakening The Poet

I'm slowly reading through John Eldredge's "The Way of the Wild Heart" when I get time and I'm having an interesting reaction to it. I'm finding that I disagree with a lot of his theology, logic, and impressions of what it means to be a man or woman. And yet, I'm also finding that I am hit on an emotional/faith level hard almost every time I read a part of it. Last night was no exception. Eldredge believes that men naturally ought to go through a few stages in their lives. These consist of the Beloved Son, the Cowboy, the Warrior, the Lover, the King, and the Sage. I was reading about the Lover and found this part impacting on me (I've bolded the parts that stood out to me especially):

The Poetic Awakening

We've heard ad infinitum that men are rational beings, along with the supporting evidence that our brains work differently than do women's, and this is true. Spatial abstractions, logic, analysis - men tend to excel in these because we are more left- then right-brained, and the commissural fibers that connect the two hemispheres appear in women in ratios far higher than in men. Women have an interstate uniting both sides of their brains. Men have a game trail. Thus men tend to compartmentalize, a capacity that allows men to handle the atrocities of war, and administrate justice. It also makes them excellent chess players and auto mechanics.

And yet . . .

I don't buy it. Too many men hide behind reason and logic. A man must grow beyond mere reason, or he will stunted as a man, certainly as a Lover. No woman wants to be analyzed, and many marriages fail because the man insists on treating her as a problem to be solved, rather then a mystery to be known and loved. David was a cunning tactician as a Warrior, but he was also a poet of the first order. Jesus could hold his own in any theological debate, but he is also an artist (the Creator of this world of Beauty) and a poet (by whose Spirit David wrote the Psalms) and a storyteller. When he says, "Consider the lilies of the field," he does mean analyze them, but rather, behold them, take them in, let their beauty speak, for "Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are" (Matt. 6:29 NLT). He appeals to their beauty to show us the love of God.
The Lover is awakened when a man comes to see that the poetic is far truer than the propositional and the analytical, and whatever physiology might say, I've seen it happen in many men.

I came to Christ not because I was looking for a religion, but because I was looking for the Truth, and, having found it, I knew it must be true across the realms of human culture. I yearned for an intellectually defensible case for Christianity, and I found it first in Shaeffer and then in the Reformed writers, to whom I remain very grateful. There are reasons to believe. My head was satisfied, but my heart yearned for something more. While I found logic in my theology (and went to war against my philosophy professor), I was being wooed by Beauty in the mountains and deserts, in literature and music. Why did they bring me closer to God than analysis? Why did the dissection of systematic theology cut all life out the living Word? Then I discovered writers like Oswald Chambers, C.S. Lewis, and his Sage, George MacDonald. Smart men, all of them, quite capable of making a good argument. But that is not the essence of their glory. They speak to the mind, but also to the heart. More so to the heart.

-The Way Of the Wild Heart, John Eldredge, p. 186-187

I like the idea that truth is not just propositional/analytical but poetic as well. If one could just balance both sides of this truth, it would seem to me they would be protected from error and protected from a dead experience of faith as well. I know which truth I lean more towards, the propositional/analytical type but the times I've felt closest to God were when I was briefly experiencing the poetical. I certainly don't agree with much of what Eldredge says, but I found that his words and ideas give me hope for my too-often passionless faith. It seems in many church traditions the people choose either a path of doctrine or a path of experience. Lord God, please give me both.

May Light increase!