Is human experience capable of being communicated? The privacy of the individual soul, and the impossibility of fully sharing its experience with anyone else makes both our sorrows and our joys to be ours alone, and not profoundly shareable with others. Only the spirit of the man himself is able to experience its bitterness or sorrow, and only his own spirit has direct sight of his joys. Our conscious experience is a private experience, and all that we know of other people’s hearts has to be taken on trust. Words are not able to take a piece of one person’s spirit and insert that piece into another’s heart. ‘A stranger’ – that is anyone other than the person themselves – is shut out of those private experiences. This is the way that God has made us, as Paul says, ‘What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?’ (1 Corinthians 2:11), for only the Lord has direct intuitive knowledge of the human heart.
But if we are so far apart, what is the purpose of human relationships? Why bother to get to know each other? Is human love meaningless? Is the familiarity that a married couple have with each other after fifty years, an illusion? If the one were to step into the inner world of the other after all that time, would they be shocked to find this was not the person they thought they knew? All human verbal communication is limited, but divine communication is different, ‘for man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart’ (1 Samuel 16:7). He knows our thoughts directly so that he does not need to form an estimate of what we are thinking. Furthermore we know his thoughts in a measure, for when God speaks to us he also gives us his Spirit so that he communicates not just verbally but he gives us the very ‘mind of Christ’ (1 Corinthians 2:16), for the Spirit does not remain on the outside but comes and dwells in our hearts. And yet God commands his people to love each other, and none of his commands are given in vain. Love is a uniting affection and if it were impossible for there to be any true communication between human souls, love would be impossible. The Scripture speaks of deep friendships formed between believers even on earth and love reaches across that barrier. It desires to do genuine good to the other and it strains to learn about the other to the fullest extent possible. We are told, ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ’ (Galatians 6:2), and ‘that we may be able to comfort them that are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God’ (2 Corinthians 1:4). It is not necessary that we fully understand another’s heart, another’s trouble, before we are able to offer effective comfort to them. Why should it be? Our words convey comfort and truth but it is not necessary for us to enter into their heart in order for us to comfort them. The word can go where we cannot go. It is the word of the Lord and he may even use our words spoken in true sympathy, but it is really he alone who comforts the heart. Similarly our joys are to a great extent incommunicable except to the Lord. And yet we rejoice with one another, for the things we rejoice in are centred in the Lord and we all know the same Lord who unites us together. Acts of love cross the chasm between us and are real, though we do not know exactly what they do. Who can say how human interaction will work in heaven?