Held in the heart

After Philippians 1:3-11

What does it mean, to be

held in the heart? Is it

a fellowship of grace,

a partaking, or a yearning

of affection? Is it a prayer?

Is it love that abounds

and overflows? Or is it 

knowledge, or discernment? 

Perhaps it is a striving toward

and approaching excellence?

Or a purity and innocence,

without blame? Is it a synonym

of righteousness and its fruit?

Or is all we can say with precision

and certainty is that it has a point,

a purpose, a process, and a goal?

God only knows.

Photograph by Bruce Hong via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Explanation of the heart

After Luke 16:1-13

How we use what we’ve been given

explains our heart

explains our theory of the future

explains our hope in the temporal

explains our hope for eternal family.

The people you know in eternity

will be thankful for how God used

you to get them there, or will be

gnashing their teeth for how

you helped get them there. Will you

receive the steward’s reward

of be found guilty of embezzlement

God’s resources? And so, a daily question:

what do you have

that might be put

to work to change

someone else’s

life?

The answer will explain

your heart.

Photograph by Robin Weermeijer via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The heart escapes

And is it the same things

we say or don’t say as

we talk past each other

the same things that pour

through the air

between us, smashes

into our ears, our hearts,

because we are designed

to talk into hearts

to each other

with each other

the heart

hearts can forget

not remember

mis-remember

dis-remember

it’s not enough

you can’t force

hearts to talk

to hearts

not on my own

my own life

but my words come

quickly now

easily, a torrent

perhaps with blood

like poppies, red

growing in the field

not ceramic but

red poppies, thousands

germinating in each life

left in each grave

a poppy is unmarked

uncelebrated

no monument with words

fading from rain

wind

cold

chipped by heat

the heart escapes

Photograph by Fabrizio Conti via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Is Our Heart Bigger Than Just for Ourselves?

I’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers by Bob Sorge, as part of an online discussion group. It’s not a difficult book to read, but it can be a difficult book to digest. As in, is the purpose of affliction to make us grow spiritually? Does God allow (or bring) affliction to make us grow? If you look at the comments on these posts here and the blogs of others ion the discussion group, you’ll find a wide array of responses, including some people who’ve been offended.

I don’t have a good answer to those questions. If I give an emphatic “Yes!” it sounds like an almost mechanical existence we lead. If I give an emphatic “No way!” then I’m going to have to accept the fact that a lot of things simply don’t have explanations. Bad stuff happens.

Sorge uses the example of Hezekiah, one of the good kings of the southern kingdom of Judah. With the Assyrians besieging Jerusalem, Hezekiah begs for, and is granted, God’s mercy. When God tells him later that his sons would be taken away and made eunuchs by the king of Babylon, Hezekiah’s response is the equivalent of “I’m good with that. At least I’ll have peace in my last days.”

Apres moi, le deluge. Indeed.

This isn’t a question or issue confined to a Biblical text of 2,500 years ago. What’s been on my mind lately is my grandchildren, and their children, and how we are borrowing money to spend today that they will have to pay back long after we’re gone.

There’s something wrong about this. Profoundly wrong.

Congress is preparing to approve a trillion-dollar spending bill. The mind boggles. One trillion dollars. We don’t have one trillion dollars waiting to be spent. We have some fraction of that. We will have to borrow a large part of that trillion dollars.

It doesn’t really matter what it’s being spent on. Our great-grandchildren won’t care whether it was fighter jets or food stamps. All they and their parents will know is that we impoverished them, that we recklessly spent far beyond our means, and we didn’t care.

No matter how noble the cause, the ends don’t justify the means. They never have. But we act worse than drunken sailors because drunken sailors, at least, will eventually sober up.

Apres moi, le deluge.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. We’re finishing up chapter 9, “Desperate Dependence & Heart Enlargement.” To see more posts, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by James Hawkins via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Enlarging the Heart

Andrew, our youngest (now 26), was born at the end of 1987. He would have been born late Christmas Day except my wife was determined he would be born on the 26^th, so he would “have his own birthday,” as she put it. And he was indeed born 15 minutes past midnight.

It had been a long, hard year. My father had died suddenly in March; our church blew up (figuratively) in June, and my career blew up (also figuratively) in October. The baby’s birth at the end of that year was, for us, a sign of hope. And so it turned out to be, after we endured six months of colic.

I can remember going back to the hospital the night of his birth. I had brought his older brother up to see the baby in the afternoon, and then returned to the hospital. My wife had Andrew on her bed, and she was staring and smiling at him. 

“I didn’t know if I could love another baby as much as I love Travis,” she said. “I don’t know how it happens, but I do. I’ve fallen in love with him.”

It’s something of a mystery. How does the human heart make room to love parents, a spouse, children, family, and friends? How does that happen?

It isn’t only through a new family member or a marriage that the heart is enlarged. Sometimes it’s a crisis, a tragedy, a trial.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge describes how trials and crises enlarge the heart. Crises stretch us out of our comfort zones, he says. “It’s no small thing to take a constricted, self-centered, self-absorbed Christian and turn him into a world Christian,” he writes. Crises and trials can do that. Of course, they can also do just the opposite.

But having gone through certain kinds of situations and events does give you a different perspective when you see close friends or family members experience similar things. You understand things that you would have been limited in understanding before. You’ve been through it. You know exactly what it’s like. And you heart enlarges to embrace the person now experiencing the same or a similar thing.

Once you’ve been laid off, for example, you know what it’s like when it happens to your friend, your neighbor, and your colleague.

Sorge cites three principles about heart enlargement:

(1)  We are absolutely incapable of enlarging our own heart.

(2)  One of the distinguishing earmarks of an enlarged heart is weeping and tears.

(3)  An enlarged heart tastes of divine pleasures – it brings a harvest of glory.

I thought the third principle might be stretching it a bit, until I began to think about it. If my own experiences are any guide, he’s right. To touch another’s heart with love and understanding is a taste of divine pleasure.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading the fire of Delayed Answers. We took two week off for the Christmas and New Year’s, and now it’s on to chapter 9, “Desperate Dependence & Heart Enlargement.” To see more posts, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Illustration by Ian L via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Healing the Heart: “The Heart Aroused,” Part 3

There is a scene in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf where the hero emerges from the swampy lake with the head of Grendl’s mother. His own sword being found useless, he first fights with his bare hands, and then discovers a sword in her lair, “an ancient heirloom from the days of the giants.” With this sword he slays the monster and cuts off her head and the head from Grendl’s corpse. But then he sees that the sword has been dissolved by her blood, leaving only the hilt.

David Whyte, in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America, says this dissolved sword signifies two things.

First, that “as the enemy that has frightened us melts away, so does the requisite need for the weapon of attack.” It’s as if the weapon can be used once, and then it’s no longer needed; other battles will have to be fought with other weapons.

And second, that “we can never ultimately show to others exactly how we slew the monster.” We can tell the story, we can create elaborate accounts (like Beowulf) to try to describe what happened, but the battle with our individual monsters can really only be fought by ourselves. This may be the underlying reason by Beowulf fights Grendl and his mother by himself, while other warriors wait nearby (of course, it could be, too, that they were cowards.)

And then there’s the scene at the end, where the aged Beowulf fights one more battle, his last, with a dragon. He succeeds, and kills the beast, but he’s mortally wounded. This time, one young warrior, named Wiglaf, stands with him, while the others hide in the woods.

I find a strange kind of resonance with the scenes in the poem.

For some time, I’ve been regularly talking with a friend about an array of human issues – dealing with anger, how much we are shaped by our parents, how you recognize and break out of patterns of behavior – in short, how to heal your heart. After a considerable period of regular conversations, he told me that I was guarding my heart, that the defenses were significant, and that I needed to find a way to tear the defenses down and become more vulnerable.

To use literary terms, he was suggesting that I had to plunge into that lake and battle with Grendl and possibly Grendl’s mother. No one could tell me exactly how to do this; no one could arm me with the weapons that would be successful. Or perhaps it’s that dragon, and there is no guarantee of success or of escaping with some mortal or even temporal wound.

I think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He knows what he faces; he knows what he is about to plunge into and what is going to happen. His friends can’t even stay awake to pray with him, and before the night is over they will have all abandoned him.

Even when the hotheaded Peter raises his sword and strikes the servant, Jesus does something remarkable – he heals the servant’s ear. It is his last miracle before he dies, and he exhibits a tender vulnerability.

Is that the kind of vulnerability that is being asked of me? Is this what is needed to break down the guarded defenses and heal my heart, this tenderness, this vulnerability in the midst of upheaval, betrayal and certain death?

I suspect I know the answer.  

We’re discussing A Heart Aroused at TweetSpeak Poetry. The links went live yesterday, and I likely went overboard a bit by having three posts on what’s covered in the two chapters being discussed this week. I’ve had the book since it was published in 1994, read it and reread it, and referred to it numerous times in the succeeding 18 years. Among a handful of books I can name, it’s become a part of who I am.

This post is also submitted to Bonnie Gray's blog carnival at Faith Barista, where the prompt is "a heart-healing moment."

Related:

A Kind of Madness: The Heart Aroused, Part 1.

“Beowulf: A Management Guide – “The Heart Aroused,” Part 2.