Heart Wide Open
(An excerpt from my memoir by the same title)
What does it mean to have an open heart when it comes to a life of faith?
When I surrendered “I know for sure” and confessed, “I don’t know, and that’s okay,” my religious and personal life collapsed, as I had always known it.
The Tribe (Evangelical Christianity) puts great stock in understanding its beliefs (Orthodoxy) with the mind.
Recently, I had a conversation with an Evangelical scholar who had just read a section of this memoir. He commented,
“I was hoping your intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage had landed you in a place where you still intellectually affirmed the historic doctrines of Christian orthodoxy.”
He did add, perhaps to cheer me up, that he did not think I had “lost my salvation.”
As I walked away, I thought, Oh well. At least I’ll make it into heaven — even if I wear a big dunce hat!
But there are ways of knowing other than through the mind. Such vehicles of perception, according to Spiritual teacher Adyashanti, “are refreshingly liberating from our conditioned thoughts. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism.”
An essential way of knowing is through the heart.
This lesser-known operating system of perception is captured in the words of Jesus “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Mystics and other world religious traditions like Sufism have been aware of our capacity to see with the eye of the heart for centuries.
The heart is seen as the core of the human person. It’s our essence. Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “But it is not because the heart, per se, is the authentic human being, but because in its role as the aligning agent, it allows that authentic being to manifest.”
This aligning agent is closer than our breathing. We don’t have to spend our lives hunting it down. It is always there, just as the sky is behind the cloud cover.
What exactly, then, is heart-based knowing?
Any attempt at a definition takes us into the world of metaphors. The heart is certainly not the blood pump that I’ve had assessed by physicians over the years with everything from stethoscopes to echocardiograms.
If the heart is readily available for those willing to look beyond a conceptual operating system, is it located in our bodies? Is it a part of our brain? The most potent answer to the question about the nonphysical nature of our being was seen in my mother-in-law just before she died. My wife Kris writes,
“A week before our mother died, her caretaker was helping her into a hospital bed set up so that she could sit and gaze out the window into her garden. By this time, our mother was struggling to walk. As she approached the bedroom, our mom stopped and looked up at Sandy (her caretaker). She said,
I am not my body. That is not me.”
If she was not her body, who was she? Who are we in relationship to our world?
We don’t just have a heart (the pump), but we are heart.
The Psalmist alludes to this inner capacity, “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God.” However, heart yearning goes one step further; it speaks to God’s longing for communion with us.
Such mystical connection, generated in our innermost being, enables alignment with what Rabbi Rachel Timoner identifies as “the one unifying presence that connects all life.”
Throughout this memoir, I recount my heart-based experiences in the world of Presence. One theme that pans out in all these encounters is love.
When I access my heart do I love in deeper and less defensive ways? Do I love my enemies? Do I move beyond an armchair sentimentalism and do good where I have opportunity? And how do I encounter Presence in dreams, visions, through animals and nature, and in multiple encounters with world of the ineffable?
I’m in the process of coming home to my heart. But I’m not there yet.