Ambivalence

I have been reading a biography of John Donne and spending time in his poetry, prose, and sermons. I'm sure I'll have much more to say before I reach the final page, but this morning I found myself lingering over a single word.

Ambivalence.

It is a word we still use, but I suspect we've thinned it out over time. Today it usually means little more than having mixed feelings or being unable to decide. It has become the language of hesitation.

Its roots tell a richer story.

The word joins two Latin ideas: ambi—"both"—and valentia—"strength" or "power." Ambivalence is not weak indecision. It is the experience of being pulled by two genuine and powerful forces at once. 

John Donne knew that world well. He lived between eras, between faith traditions (the war between Papists and Reformers), between ambition and surrender. His poems reveal a man capable of breathtaking devotion and painful self-examination in the same breath. He rarely presents himself as a finished man. Instead, we meet someone wrestling with contrary desires—someone who refuses to pretend that the human heart is simple.

If I'm honest, I recognize the same struggle in myself.

I want to be humble (I hope), yet I enjoy recognition. I long for rest, yet I keep filling my calendar. I believe God's providence, yet I still worry about tomorrow. The conflict is not only around us—in politics, culture, and competing ideas. It lives quietly within us.

Augustine captured it with remarkable honesty when he prayed, "Grant me chastity and continence—but not yet. (Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 7)."

(quick side note) The reading has been a little bawdy due to the fact that Donne wasn't quite the Anglican priest in his younger days- and there are consequences to that lifestyle, but also a type of wisdom- I laughed out loud when I read this quote from the Donne bio:

‘chastity is not chastity in an old man,’ he declared, at a time when he was a chaste and ageing man himself, ‘but a disability to be unchast’

These lines have survived for sixteen centuries because it exposes something we would rather hide. It is not hypocrisy. It is ambivalence.

Hypocrisy conceals the divided heart - Ambivalence admits it.

Perhaps we have become uncomfortable with that admission. We live in an age that rewards certainty and polished appearances. We curate our convictions until they seem perfectly consistent. Yet the people I revere as impressive men—David, Augustine, Donne, Lewis—rarely sound polished. They sound honest.

Maybe maturity is not the absence of opposing desires -  it is the slow ordering of them.

Hypocrisy hides the divided heart. Ambivalence reveals it. Wisdom slowly orders it.

That thought has been following me around all morning. I suspect John Donne has more to teach me before I'm finished with him.