Holy Is the room of the heart

Novelist Gail Godwin has collected some of our most memorable words about the heart.

"Now that my ladder’s gone," Yeats wrote, "I must lie down where all ladders start / in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." Sounds almost like a manger.

"Give me," prayed St. Francis, "a transformed and undefended heart."

"My heart teaches me night after night," says the psalmist.

"I left my heart in San Francisco," croons Tony Bennett. In what city is yours?

"Our shared bedroom, my heart," wrote Augustine to God, his beloved.

"Work of seeing is done," says the poet Rilke, "now practice heart-work upon the images captive within you."

"Do you suppose Oz could give me a heart?" The Tin Woodsman asks Dorothy.

Scrooge, a stingy man, works late on Christmas Eve, sends his underpaid clerk home as late as possible, refuses to make a donation to the poor, turns down his nephew’s invitation to Christmas dinner, goes home, pulls on his night-cap, slips into bed, and is visited by ghosts: First his late business partner, Jacob Marley, then the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. In the night he is given a new heart.

Our hearts can turn to stone, but God can write on stone; they can become "hearts of darkness," but "light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not put it out."

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What is the heart? Carl Jung says, "The utterances of the heart...always relate to the whole."

The heart is the room of the real self, the true self created in the image of God. It contains mind and feelings and the will which chooses what to do. It is also where the imagination dwells. Native Americans, says Barbara Brown Taylor, speak of "looking twice." The first time we look we see with our physical eyes and make our initial judgments. But then we look twice, and with this second sight see with the eyes of the heart, see at the edge of things what we may not see at first.

It’s the imagination that lets us take a second look at the world and see what it truly is and what it might become. As Robert Kennedy famously said:

The rabbis tell a story of a village wracked by dissension and ill will. One day a stranger came and gave a prophecy: The Messiah has come and is one of them! They began to look at each other with a new eye: "Is Ol’ Tom the Messiah? Is Rachel? I’ve never thought much of her." As they began to look for the Messiah in each other they began to see the divine in each other. And the divisions and acrimony and long-held grudges were swept away.

Is this not one meaning of this holy night? That since God has come as a child we might see the God-child in everyone?

Paul spoke of the Christ born in us! "Til Christ be formed in you" is how he said it. Our bodies filled with the divine, Christ entering and dwelling in our hearts so that the whole of us, mind, emotions, will, imagination are transfigured by his light.

I adore the holy incongruity of this night: The holy and human now wed, the material and the spiritual mingling as one. And I love all the happy foolish ways we re-enact it in church in liturgy and pageants, costumes and all. For one night angels are in leotards and shepherds in tennis shoes. A real mother holds her child as the Christ child. "Please don’t cry ‘til 8:15," she says, as if Jesus didn’t cry.

Christmas pageants always go wrong. They’re supposed to. That’s their job. We’re humans trying to act out something divine. It is comedy, human and divine. I’ve told you the story of Henry, who had the talent of wrecking every Christmas pageant. One year he set an angel’s wings on fire with his Advent candle. Another year he was King Herod, and as he stood to give his orders to the Wise Men, he caught his foot in his robe and toppled head-over-heels down the stairs of his makeshift throne.

This particular year he was given what was thought to be the "fail-safe" part. He was the Innkeeper. He was behind the door of the Inn the whole night with just one line to deliver. When Mary and Joseph came to the door and knocked he’d open the door and say, "There’s no room in the inn!" Six words, that’s all.

When the night came he listened from behind the door, taking it all in, the wonder of this night. When Joseph knocked he opened the door and said the line he’d been given to say, even though he hated to be the one to say it. "There’s no room in the inn," he forced out, loudly, perfectly.

Then as Mary and Joseph turned, to leave, he blurted out: "Wait! Wait! You can have my room!"

The play was effectively over! The End. But Christmas had happened. Happened in the holy room of the heart.

This past week I’ve listened over and over to James Taylor sing a familiar carol, and its words old yet new:

What then can I give you,
empty as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb.
If I were a wise man,
I would know my part.
What then can I give him?
I must give my heart.