HEART

by Jan Carlsson-Bull

June 13, 2003

 

Donovan Trevarro was my first heartthrob. He had large brown eyes and the longest lashes. He had a winsome smile, shy but not really. And on top of those irresistible features was the blackest waviest hair. I guess he was about 3’11" by then. You see, we were in third grade. Or was it second? It doesn’t really matter. I was in love, and it was Valentine’s Day. There was only one course of action, and I took it.

Straight to Woolworth’s, with just enough money in my pocket for a Valentine, an over-the-top all-out gushy Valentine. Woolworth’s was that store that you could count on for aromatherapy. You didn’t even have to inhale. The scent of pencils, corn candy, and more greeted you at the door. I went after the "and more." Having picked out a Valentine up to my standards, I headed to the counter that held any cologne you could possibly want–not the kind you might pick up across the street at Eisler’s–no nothing quite so impeccable as that. This occasion called for a distinctive scent that you could purchase only at Woolworth’s. I doused my card generously with this Eau de whatever, tucked it in the envelope, sealed it, and printed "DONOVAN" clearly on the upside. Did I sign my name? Are you crazy? Anonymous love is much more romantic. Besides, I was just a little terrified of this whole thing.

So off to school I went, undoubtedly wreaking. When the time came for our Valentine exchange, Donovan of course received his, because I planted it in his hands and ran for dear life.

Alas, my first big crush soon moved away from our small town. I have no idea what ever became of him–if he held onto that round-the-bend charm or grew into the most charmless specimen among men. But he definitely held my heart and until his next bath, it stuck to him.

I still love Valentine’s Day, but thanks to a few more years and a tad more reticence, my husband can rest assured that I no longer see fit to douse my cards of endearment with something memorable.

It’s quite an adventure to give away your heart, but like all adventures, it’s scary. I think this is because the heart manages in so many ways to serve as the receptacle for what matters to us, for what really really matters to us.

Of course it’s also an essential organ in our human organism. Without it, we don’t live. Without its well-being, we don’t live well. Heart disease continues to be a major killer in this country. So we’ve learned to eat hearth-healthy, to exercise and tone the muscles of our heart, to manage our life stress so that our hearts neither ache or break out of proportion to what’s going on….. unlike the poor guy belting out the lyrics of that Country Western number by Billy Ray Cyrus:

You can tell the world, you never was my girl,
You can burn my clothes when I am gone.
You can tell your friends, just what a fool I've been,
And laugh and joke about me on the phone.

[Just] Don't tell my heart, my achy breaky heart,
I just don't think he'd understand.
'Cause if you tell my heart, my achy breaky heart,
He might blow up and kill this man.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t try to sing it?

Actually, we’re all blessed with the promise of extraordinary resilience, because our hearts do ache and break and take far longer to heal than they did when we were in third grade spewing out Valentines.

I have no doubt that some of you are here today with spirits that are heavy with a sense of loss or uncertainty or anxiety or even self-effacement that has tumbled into depression. Let me offer you a memory.

The circumstance was the death of someone I loved very much. It was many years ago. I had planned the memorial service though I was not yet a minister, but stumbling my way through seminary, learning, without realizing it, how to be a one through all the stuff that life seemed to be throwing at me. My family and friends and I were gathered at another church in this city, and I had built into the order of service a time when anyone might come to the front of that sanctuary and share what was in their heart.

My Father got up. Now I need to tell you that I had never associated my Dad with eloquence. Verbosity, yes, eloquence, no. He loved to talk and was beyond gregarious, which served him well as a traveling salesman. He was a consummate golfer, which served him well as a businessman. He was a Pandora’s box of one-liners, which made him the hit of a party; but this wasn’t a party. He was a father I could always count on, sometimes embarrassingly so; yet he was always there for me. And so he was that day. He stepped forward and said something like this:

"You know, when you hurt so much because you’ve lost someone, it’s because you’ve taken the risk of loving them. Love carries that risk. The more you love, the more you hurt when you lose that person. But you don’t lose the love. You don’t lose all that you’ve shared with that person. You don’t lose yourself. The hurt that you feel is the sure sign that you’ve gone out on a limb and jumped off for love. The depth of your hurt is the depth of your love."

Dad spoke from the heart, and I knew he was hurting because he loved me and I was hurting. I’ve never forgotten his words. I’ve never forgotten some of his jokes either, but I won’t share any of those.

Our hearts break when we think we just can’t take it any more. But our hearts heal in the most unlikely of ways, and our hearts accommodate emptiness and fullness with the utmost elasticity. How many times have I asked myself why I’m so resilient, why I bounce back again and again? Why can’t I just fall apart and be done with it when life goes so haywire? Why didn’t our city just fall apart two years ago when we were shaken to the core with such loss, such trauma? Why is it that when any one of us gets a certain diagnosis, we think we’ll fall apart before we take one more step, but we don’t. We take that step and then another and then another. We hurt, we suffer, but as long as we breathe, we have the gift of a heart that stretches and bends and contorts to handle just about anything, as long as there are plenty of tears for lubrication and arms to embrace us.

How is it that we are as elastic as we are? I think of Mohammed Iqbal, that Muslim poet and statesman who had his own share of loss and healing. Is this what he was thinking when he penned those lines about the nature of the dust from which we come?

"It is true that we are made of dust
And the world is also made of dust,
But the dust has motes rising."

"….the dust has motes rising." That seemingly sullied substance from which we are said to emerge becomes like waves, with an ebb and flow no less rhythmic than the tidal movements of our oceans, no less tempestuous than the high and low marks of our varied and variable living.

Where there is heart, there is hope. Maybe not certainty, maybe not guarantees of lasting health, or lasting marriages, or children who do what we think they’re supposed to, or world peace in the next decade or subways that don’t stop between stops or all the stuff of our day-to-days that can feel so messy. But where there is heart, there is always always hope.

"We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, that reluctant paragon of Unitarianism, in his essay on Friendship. He said more.

"How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth."

Have hope he was telling us. The person sitting next to you is good to be next to, and you are that person for someone else.

As much as I find hope in Emerson’s words I find the cherry on top of it in Annie Dillard’s poignant and ornery work, An American Childhood. The book had been lying at my bedside far too long. I recently picked it up and couldn’t put it down. I ingested it, and I savored her commentary on Emerson, whom she had ingested at the ripe age of sixteen.

"Ralph Waldo Emerson," she proclaims, "excited me enormously…. Emerson was a thinker, full time, as Pasteur and Salk were full-time biologists. I wrote a paper on Emerson’s notion of the soul–the oversoul, which, if I could banish from my mind the thought of galoshes (one big galosh, in which we have our being), was grand stuff. It was metaphysics at last, poetry with import, philosophy minus the Bible. And Emerson incited to riot, flouting every authority, and requiring each native to cobble up an original relation with the universe. Since rioting seemed to be my specialty, if only by default, Emerson gave me heart."

Now who knows what the sage of Concord would have had to say about his capacity for inciting to riot, but I’ll bet he would have smiled. Annie Dillard makes me smile a lot, and she gives me hope for those dust motes rising because she stirs up so much of it. "One big galosh," as the ground of our being, for example, is a remarkable contribution to the language of reverence.

"Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth," sounds the echo from Emerson. Yes, the heart is a receptacle for what matters most to us. It has its own knowledge, its own wisdom. Is it any wonder that at the conclusion of the most familiar account of the birth of Jesus, in the Gospel According to Luke, we read that Mary, his mother, "kept all these things and pondered them in her heart."? The shepherds had just paid a visit to the newborn babe, alerted by angels who had paid them a fairly spectacular visit. They had come quickly and sure enough found Mary and Joseph and there in a simple manger, the child of whom the angels had spoken.

"And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child; and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart." (Luke 2: 17-19)

Time passed. Jesus grew into an adolescent. A real bona fide adolescent. Now it was an annual custom for Jewish families to observe Passover in Jerusalem. So Mary and Joseph and Jesus went and observed the feast according to their tradition. When Mom and Dad were ready to go, Jesus was nowhere to be seen. "Ah well, he’s probably among our other friends," they sighed. "He’ll show up as we leave Jerusalem." So they set out for home. Still, no Jesus. So back they went to Jerusalem, and where did they find him? In the temple, talking with the teachers, who were amazed at his young wisdom. After an understandable exchange between parents and son, and a mystifying response by the young Jesus, they began their journey home. And again, we are told that Mary "kept all these things in her heart." (Luke 2:51)

Where else would one ponder all that is puzzling, all that just doesn’t fit together coherently? The mind can’t get its arms around just happenings. It’s a matter for the heart. The heart has its own mind.

What’s in your heart this morning? How is it filling with questions and musings and confusion and hurt and joy and all those things that you wonder about and care about? Maybe it’s full. Maybe it’s empty. Maybe you’re feeling resilient this morning, so the arms of your hearts are doing a fairly amazing yoga pose. Maybe you’re feeling brittle. You’ve had it with whomever and whatever and you just don’t want to have to flex one more centimeter. The circumstances of life, that "one big galosh" or whoever she is, are most definitely not on your side today. Then again, maybe the spirit of life has thrown you a party. Maybe things are wonderful.

Whatever the circumstances of your life, you’re not alone. You’re next to someone, whose life stuff may be every bit as complicated or as wildly joyous as yours. Sure, we’re made of dust, but imagine those motes rising. Yes, our hearts break, but they heal in spite of our sorry prophecies that we’ll never, absolutely never, get over whatever. We might disappoint ourselves mightily. We might let our families down and dismay our friends and not live up to those expectations that we knew we would meet. But we have something inside us that forgives, that flexes, that keeps hope pumping through those atria and ventricles.

Take a leap of faith….and time. It’s Valentine’s Day again. This time, it’s Valentine’s Day, 2003. I’m in Alta, Utah, and my nephew, Todd, and his fiancée, Jennifer, are walking up the steps of an avalanche-proof chapel–I’m not kidding. Every basic building in Alta is avalanche proof. And the chapel is called, Our Lady of the Snows. Can you imagine a woman who’s avalanche proof? Well I’m not our lady of the snows, just their minister and Todd’s aunt, and I’m about to preside at their wedding. I’ve known Todd since he was a tiny baby. I feel like I’ve known Jennifer that long. The ceremony unfolds. They speak their vows to one another, vows that they have each carefully composed. My throat tightens. I catch my breath and pronounce them husband and wife. They kiss. I know it will last. The chapel will. Jennifer didn’t run after Todd with a cologne-sodden Valentine either. They’ve known each other for 13 years–a good-luck number in my book. They’re expecting a baby this year. In fact, next month. It’s okay. Math doesn’t matter sometimes. Love is taking root, and dust motes are rising.

You’re not alone. Take a chance. Let those eye-beams wander. Dare to read their language. And take heart. Love happens because of it.

Amen.

 

Sources:

http://www.rediff.com/freedom/iqbal.htm

http://www.oracleband.net/Lyrics/achey_breaky_heart_.htm

The Bible, Revised Standard Version.

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, Harper & Row, New York, 1987, 238-39.

The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edited by Brooks Atkinson, Random House, Inc., 1940.

Mohammed Iqbal, "The Journey of Love," in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 610

 

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