Heart-Centered Spirituality
I am in recovery with my heart.
For years, I held a heart-sickness that was invisible to me, though its effects were not. It was a belief and a practice that I thought was holy, but turned out to be nothing more than self-hatred. It was the belief that my heart was fundamentally an enemy, bent on my destruction through deception. And this inner narrative had tragic consequences that I am slowly unwinding and unlearning.
I came to this belief through the multiple stories I told myself and others told me. Throughout my life, I encountered the normal human experience of having multiple wants, often as a way to explore the world. And sometimes they felt like contradictions. How could it be that on one day I wanted to do good and practice kindness, while the next day I wished everyone would get out of my way? Rather than be gentle and curious with myself in the presence of God, I thought ignoring myself was the only forward. As if I could starve my heart into holiness by refusing to acknowledge its unfolding development.
For others who grew up in this particular religious narrative, there is one verse that stands out among the rest to justify this heart-hatred. It’s a slender, sharp sentence from the prophet Jeremiah:
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
These words wreaked havoc within me. I internalized a shallow reading of these powerful words, which turned them into poison. My understanding of these words was poor, because I divorced them from the prophet’s larger rhetorical strategy and historical context. But to me, they meant three things:
First, my heart has a cruel plan to deceive me and bring me to ruin. Therefore, anything my heart might want to say should be met with suspicion. After all, my heart’s speech could only be laced with deceit.
Second, this constant beating companion at the center of my chest, the center of my selfhood, was beyond cure. To be beyond cure meant that any growth or improvement in my heart’s wisdom or holiness was unattainable. Even if my heart had good mixed up with bad, the good would never be enough.
And third, no matter how hard I tried, I could never have the understanding that I naturally wanted. My heart would always be an unfathomable mystery, wanting nothing other than my destruction.
Quite a lot of scarring for a tender heart to hold.
But even while I metabolized these beliefs, I could not shake the fact that my experience of God’s presence took place in the center of my chest. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, my earliest and clearest way to recognize God’s presence was to become aware of the wordless speech my heart would say. My intuitions felt like cooperation with God’s grace, not hurdles in the way. It seemed that there was a way I could recognize reality even if my mind did not know and my eyes could not yet see.
These days I am rehabilitating my relationship to my heart. It’s a long road to recovery, because so many of my stories were unexamined. But as I continue to search the Scriptures, I am astonished at how positively they describe the heart. It surprises me to encounter story after story portraying the heart as vital and precious. The heart, it turns out, has far greater capacities than I had told myself. Capacities such as:
Where true prayer happens
Where the law of God dwells
Where God puts God’s wisdom
Where God puts God’s desires
The engine of seeking God
The center of loving God
An instructor and teacher
The container of eternity
The container of God’s poured-out love
A storehouse of God’s treasures
Where Christ dwells
If the Bible bears witness to the preciousness of the heart, then my practices of prayer should teach me the same. As I explore the many ways to pray, I am reminded that in many traditions the heart holds a privileged place. Because the heart is the place where Christ has chosen to dwell, it is where all other faculties must go. In prayer, all parts of us are summoned to meet with God in the throne that he has chosen in our chests. We are pulled towards wordless, mutual rest with God in the home he has made within us.
Some traditions speak of the mind “descending” into the heart, in order to be still and quiet in the presence of God. Each part of us makes its way towards the heart, to find rest and healing in the flames of God’s smoldering love.
Strange as it seems, God has chosen human hearts as a fitting place to dwell. That pulse hiding beneath your ribs, that gentle flutter under your skin is a sanctuary. It is where God has chosen to rest, to teach, to speak, and to pray. It is a place that you can feel and inhabit with God, where God fills and longs to fill even more.
In our modern disembodiment, we forget that our hearts speak and are made to hold God. We think too little of our hearts, learning to silence them or ignore what they have to say. We get caught in a downward spiral: we do not know what we want because we do not listen to our hearts. And we do not listen to our hearts because we do not think we should.
But what if we explored another way? What if we took Jesus and the apostles, and the ancient wisdom writers seriously? What if “guarding one’s heart,” didn’t mean protecting ourselves from ourselves, but realizing the precious gift we’ve already been given? That these hearts reliably want to lead us to God through our longings, not in spite of them? To do so would be an act of courage: exploring and learning what we want. An invitation that Jesus makes to his disciples and continues to make to each of us.
What would it look and feel like to hold this more complete, more biblical view of the heart within me, coming to know and trust that:
My heart holds an infinite capacity for love
My heart reminds me of God’s presence, when my mind and eyes cannot
My heart leads me in my honest search for God, whom I want to know
My heart teaches me wisdom, because it is where God speaks and dwells
My heart longs to be filled with the fullness of God, for which it is made
I am learning to recover this relationship with my heart. And one simple practice I have, to remind me of this truth in my body, is to hold my hand over my heart.
When I do, I am reminded that I am touching a “thin space,” one of those sacred sites where the veil between heaven and earth is wafer-thin. Rather than imagine God over and above me, my hand resting on my heart recalls the truth that God is within me: alive, acting, speaking. God has made a home here, and is helping me yield more of my heart. With God’s love, I long to make my heart wider: opening its doors and drawing back its curtains to hold even more of God’s compassionate presence which has always held me.
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