H is For Heart

    In the Divine Alphabet, which sets forth God’s names or attributes, we have had Accessible, Beauty, Caring, Dumbfounding, Excessive, Friend, and Good. Now to the heart of the matter.
    A heart is, literally, the center of a living being. We know it as the muscle that circulates blood, without which we die. Indeed, two of the scariest words you might ever hear are “heart attack.” But people have not always understood the circulation of the blood. In older times, the heart was thought of as the seat of intelligence (while the brain was understood as a cooling system for the blood). Intelligence embraces not only thinking but feeling, and not only theory but practice.
    So, moving beyond literalism, it is misleading to contrast “head” and “heart.” The heart is not mere feeling, but rather is our center, where everything about us comes together—rationality, emotion, conviction, “core values,” our virtues and vices.
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    The word first appears in Genesis 6. The human race is going to pot, and God sees it: “every imagination of the thoughts of [the human] heart was only evil continually.” Note the claim that human thoughts come out of the heart. And they are bad thoughts. In the next verse, however, we discover God himself has a heart. God is sorry about how his creation has turned out: “it grieved him at his heart.”
    Hang onto this insight: there is some sort of parallel between evil in the human heart and grief in the divine heart.
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    Much later on, Egypt’s pharaohs are oppressing the Hebrew people, and clearly desiring to reduce their population if not ultimately to wipe them out. God intends to redeem his people, and his means for doing so is to “harden” the pharaoh’s heart. But pharaoh’s heart was already hardened—he was an oppressor, a willful and all-powerful ruler who brooked no counsel. So God’s punishment upon pharaoh is nothing other than to let pharaoh suffer what he has made himself. God hardens the heart that was already hard.
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    Still later, when God’s people had been redeemed from Egypt and taken possession of the land God gave them, they fell away from God and God allowed them to be taken captive and to be exiled far away. In their exile, God raises up prophets to encourage them to return to him. Perhaps the most important thing those prophets say is this promise. God promises them that he will change their hearts. Instead of the heart of stone that they have, God will give them a heart of flesh. And instead of having commandments written on stone that must be taught from one person to another, God promises to use their hearts as his writing tablet, to write his law upon their hearts.
    This means that God’s living law would be one with their heart, would be right at the center of their being.
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    Jesus was a doctor and when he saw us as patients, he knew what our disease was. And it’s still our disease. We have hard hearts. For instance, he told the people who wanted to trip him up about divorce, that the old law accommodates divorce because people have hard hearts. And sometimes he looked around at his opponents and grieved because of their hardness of heart.
    But how does a person change his or her heart? How is a hard heart softened?
    It’s there on the tree, the tree planted on Calvary hill. It’s a grieving heart—it’s that divine heart that we first saw in Genesis 6. This time, instead of a flood to wipe out sin, the cure is an exposed heart, stretched on that wooded tree, a heart that bleeds openly, until it stops.
    The cure for the hard human heart is there in the expiring divine heart.

Easter Trespass

After early morning thunder, Easter Day turned sunny in Dallas. It was our Easter in Virustide. There were no churches open to visit, no restaurants, no parties, and perhaps worst of all, no Choral Evensongs. Of course, lots could be found in the Virtual World, but the sunshine was calling, and the feet took the head and the heart outdoors.
    Crowds of people were outside, as if this were a normal spring Easter, not too hot, the air washed clean by the earlier rain. But you could tell it wasn’t normal. The crowds were not, shall we say, crowded. A group of five were lingering near a tree, drinks in their hands, but not that close to each other. Talking, smiling, laughing, but not touching: the unnormal distance was present there in the midst of normality.
    I have been avoiding the Katy trail of late: when many runners and walkers and bicycles and dogs are out, one cannot but be in a crowded crowd. So I was off, I’m not sure where, following a sidewalk, crossing some grass, passing a closed-up baseball field, climbing a hillside, clambering down to a street. And I was crossing an empty parking lot when I noticed an electric cart pulling up parallel to me. It was not close, but the driver seemed to want to talk.
    He asked me how I was doing. Fine, I said, just out for a walk. Then with apology he told me I shouldn’t be there, that this is a children’s hospital . . . May I say, it was the gentlest reprimand I’ve ever received in my life? Of course—I said—I understand perfectly. I get it; I have grandchildren. Very sorry. And I retraced my steps and went around.
    What’s that word for walking in a place you’re not supposed to be? that word for going on a path you’re not supposed to go on? It begins with a “t.” Yes . . .
    So it was Easter, but it is not yet the final Easter. We go on erring and straying and trespassing. The Virus is still here. But someday, someday it will be the final Easter, and there will be no more need for the many things we do now to protect one another.
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    Department of Small Things. I don’t believe one can find “Easter Sunday” in any edition of the Book of Common Prayer. I was a new priest when a charming but crotchety old guy told me I had an error on a sign I had made. It’s “Easter Day,” Felix (RIP) told me. Since then I’ve fancied that’s because Easter always falls on a Sunday.
    On the Web. “He’s Asking Your Permission” is a very brief meditation on Maundy Thursday I wrote for the Covenant blog: https://livingchurch.org/covenant/2020/04/09/hes-asking-your-permission/

 

 

 

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: