We the People of the Heart
Wounded places, beautiful spaces
I can’t say exactly when on my spiritual journey that the notion that the heart is the epicenter of the spiritual life settled on me. But it has been a game-changer.
Helen Keller said:
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
How true, yet countercultural this is. Perhaps with her extraordinary brilliance, not to mention her blindness and deafness, Keller was better equipped than most to delve deep into the senses of the heart.
Of course, she is not alone. Every shabby-shoed mystic worth their salt, and more than a few wounded poverty-stricken poets, has been singing the same tune since time immemorial.
To see with the heart, hear with the heart, to speak in the universal language of the heart, to become fully heart-centered people is the main game of the spiritual life. For it is in the heart that our innate humanity gets mingled with the Creator Spirit, who dwells without and deep within and gives love and life to everything.
As poets of the heart, songwriters, and storytellers throughout the eons attest, this is not a journey into the deep without wounds. And we all know well enough that the wounds of the heart are the deepest cuts of all. Oscar Wilde said: “Hearts live by being wounded.” Heart-centered people really do have to embrace the wounds of the thorns to see and feel the exquisite beauty of the roses.
In the final analysis, for the poets, storytellers, and shabby shoed mystics, the heart is a metaphor for what it contains, and what it contains is none other than love.
Love is the jewel beyond compare, the language of the heart, the heaven on earth place, the Spirit infused energy that pervades the universe. The strange thing is it comes with wounds and cannot be fully immersed in without them.
No gem comes without a cost and the most priceless have the most expensive price tags. We people of the heart are very often also the people who bear the deepest wounds of love.
A life lived without love is hardly a life worth living. It would be a heartbreaking tale indeed if the wounds of love were the conclusion of the story. But they are not. They are simply an avenue, a window that reveals the never-ending possibility of the heart to see, hear, and feel, yet to be unveiled more beautiful things. And the most beautiful thing of all is the deeper the wound, the greater the healing. What gets wounded by love also gets healed, strengthened, and beautified by love.
The erudite and heart inspired writing of Henri Nouwen enabled him to envisage God as a Wounded Healer. ¹ This is a conception that spoke to my heart and soul and lingers with me. Our wounds get mingled with God’s wounds, and God’s wounds, when mingled with our wounds, get healed and strengthen in the heart by Love. And that is indeed, as they say, “a beautiful thing.”
Amongst our wounded places, deep within our far-flung spaces, the Creator Spirit heals the heart with the most beautiful things.
Follow your heart, comrades, wounds and all. It’s a game-changer.
¹ Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (New York: Image Books Doubleday, 1972).
— Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
