It’s game on time, let healing games begin!
Deep in the Heart, every mystery of spirit is hidden. – Rumi.
If you regularly howl at the dark side of the moon, you might just be suffering from a severe case of what the Hebrews called hard-heartedness.
There were few things more concerning to Jewish prophets than this pitiful condition (Isaiah 6:9-10; Jer 5:23-26; Matthew 13:13-15; Mark 8:17). Hard-heartedness renders its sufferers with multiple manifestations of overt self-centeredness. In this sad state, they become increasing prone to the lures of the ego-self and effectively devoid of empathy—blind, deaf, and dumb to the needs of others. The hard-hearted person can no longer receive and transmit love. Now if God is love? (1 John 4:7-8), and a vital giver of breath and life to all (Gen 2:7). Then a heart that can no longer receive this life-giving love and transmit it plentifully to others is in a terrible place indeed.
If you’ve noticed a bit of a thyme in my writing about being broken by the self-centered ego. You are not wrong. I don’t write about this stuff as a casual observer, but as someone who has miraculously survived the ravages of a hard heart, to tell the tale. I know all about the dark places that the unfettered ego can take us, because I’ve dwelled in them.
Mercifully, comrades, glorious fallings lead to fabulous risings. The Hebrew prophets are in the solutions game, and the solution for hard hearts is top of their agenda. What they propose is miraculous. Nothing less than a complete heart make-over by the living God, who is as close as our next breath, and ever ready to get this humanly impossible task done.
In my “Changed Hearts” post, I highlighted the prophet Ezekiel’s (11:19) radical solution to heart-heatedness. And here is yet another of his profound heart utterances that makes the same wonderful claim:
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).
The wacky mystic Ezekiel isn’t the only one to come up with this heart transplant solution. The prophet Jeremiah is in the same space when he proclaims:
I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with their whole heart. (Jer 24:7).
The solution to the soul-destroying dilemma of heart-heartedness is just as relevant today as it was in the days of old. And thankfully, it has almost nothing to do with pulling yourself together or getting your chaotic act in order. It has everything to do with turning to the life transforming healing game of the universal God of love and compassion who gets the job done.
To run in this race, we don’t have to be a spiritual Olympian. Actually, I have found it best to turn up, tattered-and-torn, and barefoot.
It’s game on time, comrades, let the life transforming healing games begin!
– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart