I recently wept, as I listened to song on YouTube. This is not an entirely unknown phenomenon for this old mystic. Actually, while walking the walk with Living God during the last twenty-five years, it has become more like a regular occurrence. The song in question was a cover of a Dylan classic called, “Not Dark Yet.” Among it’s the heart-rending lyrics is the following:
I’ve been down on the bottom of the world full of lies, I ain’t lookin’ for nonthin’ in anyone’s eyes. Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there.
It has been well said that “the eyes are the widow to the soul!” But in my experience, equally important, is that tears are the doorway to the heart. I well remember a time when so fully in the dark myself that my heart was as hard as rock. There were no tears to be had or any other spiritual emotion expressed in that deep void of emptiness. Depression and addiction are both soul sicknesses that can take you to the hard-hearted place, and I’ve had more than a serious brush with both. However, self-centered ego mania is the core of all spiritual disease and you can bet your boots that hard-heartedness is a primary symptom of this soul-sick state of barely existing.
It is not incidental that hard-heartedness is a primary metaphor deployed by many biblical scribes to describe this wretched state. In that context, it becomes a barrier to being in relationship with God, and thus all meaningful relationships with everyone else. You end up effectively alone in the world with a self-centered heart of stone, and a fella like me knows plenty about that. If that was game over, it would be a sorry tale indeed, but it’s not. There is a mighty promise for all of us who end up in such dire straights and it comes from one of the most out-there of all the Hebrew prophets, Ezekiel.
I will give them a new heart and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 11:19).
Now, it just doesn’t get any better than this, heart surgery from the living God! Once this takes hold, you just might discover yourself one day weeping in empathy at Dylan song on YouTube. It’s amazing what God can do!
Some of my sober booze-hound friends talk about the spiritual journey from the head to the heart! There is, without doubt, deep wisdom in this. But it is a slow journey, comrades, and one that is always enabled by the great Heart-Softener-Supreme! For just as hard-heartedness may slowly develop and then become acute, so too the cure may take a little while to be noticed. But there will be tangible signs along the way. While hard-heartedness is a sure sign of spiritual illness, you’ll know you are entering the heart-softened space when tears flow from the heart with ease. This indeed, is a veritable sign that whatever your spiritual practice; you are getting right into the God zone, up close and personal with the God who takes the soft-hearted walk with all of us.
I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about the Wounded-Healer-God who weeps when we weep from sorrow or pain. But there is another type of weeping, a weeping for joy, an empathic weeping, an experience of profound connection with the living God and with each-other. We need no great theological abstractions or study for this, just a softening of the heart that lets the tears flow like cleansing rain on a hitherto barren land. May our mystic soft hearts grow, comrades, and our tears of compassion flow and flow.