Let Not Your Hearts Become Hardened

Poto by Pete Nuij on Unsplash

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Ezekiel 36:26

Lots of times as I’m preparing these weekly posts I begin from my current status and allow the words to flow through me. Along the way I come across quotes and images that support my initial thoughts or sometimes go in a much different direction then planned. This week was one of those divergences.

When I perused my collection of photos and came across this image of an owl in flight, I knew I had to share something that had been troubling me for weeks. How to protect myself and others from the negativity and division that seems to pervade our daily lives. If that is all one is tuned into a person could start to feel despair creating physical, emotional, and creative blockages; therefore hindering the evolution of hope, joy, and goodness that still exists; that extends far beyond our visible current events, personalities, behaviors, and attitudes.

Sorting through my stream of thoughts and practices I found that I could indeed and often do express joy, light, and love during periods of darkness, though not becoming oblivious to outer appearances, but astutely aware of my surroundings. My much more resilient and authentic self is free with a much brighter and stable tapestry—full of life and radiance. Remember these words from Virginia Woolf’s poem “Stay Alive”?

Stay alive, stay alive inside you, stay alive also outside, fill yourself with colors of the rainbow, fill yourself with hope. Stay alive with joy.

There is so much more to reflect upon and practices in which to engage in and ways to stand in Truth just by becoming inner witnesses. The more I renew practices that I’ve allowed to lapse the more I become acutely aware of the the psycho-spiritual principles that embrace the mind, body, spirit spectrum. We were made whole and it is only through forgetting that we find ourselves in peril — individually and collectively — slipping so to speak into bleakness. We are a collective and these words from Bill Nye, best-selling author and scientist reminds us of just that.

There really is no such thing as race. We all came from Africa. We are all of the same starburst. We are all going to live and die on the same planet, a Pale Blue Dot in the vastness of space. We have to work together.

I find myself losing interest in dialogues that are not regenerative. We’ve had centuries to learn to live harmoniously and develop ways to behave as sacred people of God across cultures. It has taken years of meditation and other spiritual practices for me to feel grounded more often than not. The disturbances can still be painful, but I’m able to bring myself back to something reliable and fortifying through practices from the contemplative tradition.

Rituals and spiritual practices are meant to inform and transform us. Often change looks different than we expected, that doesn’t mean those practices become irrelevant. In fact that interior work is foundational to our staying alive! We end up being robust warriors of inner power, visionaries of light, and open-hearted beings of kindness and forgiveness.

But there is another aspect of this transformative work I must introduce and that is the power of play; unmitigated, romping and letting go (in a different way) where you are dancing because you cannot do otherwise and don’t care if someone is watching. Play is essential for a softening of the heart. As Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) believed “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”

And so he continues:

The incidence of play is not associated with any particular stage of civilization or view of the universe. Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny it, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

Each day we can begin anew, not tired and exhausted but recreated. But what else about play that is so important is the integration of endorphins squealing through the body creating something we all need a bit more of genuine inner irrationality. Huizinga believed:

Play presents itself to us. . . as an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives. As a regularly recurring relaxation, however, it becomes the accompaniment, the complement, in fact an integral part of life in general. It adorns life in general, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual—as a life function—and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function.

Where I’m living spring is bursting forth, blossoms are dropping off into greenery everywhere; and of course, pollen is everywhere, too. However, a re-birth is happening in us as well.

In a prescient and beautiful book, Dancing in the Darkness Spiritual Lessons for Turbulent Times, Otis Moss III shares the story of his daughter dancing in the dark. During a difficult time socially when as a pastor he was receiving death threats and other angry messages, and worried about the well-being of his family and church community, one night he heard a noise in his house. Filled with fear, his mind reeling, sleep deprived, and armed with a bat he went searching his house, checking windows, locks on doors, etc.

Satisfied that no intruder was in his house, he relaxed for a moment, ready to get a few hours of sleep when he heard noise coming from his daughter’s bedroom. His heart racing, he ascended the staircase ready for anything unexpected. Moss found his daughter swirling, laughing, leaping in the dark bedroom; moved by internal music and a vocabulary of simple ballet steps. Relieved, yet still a bit perturbed, he let his guard down and allowed his daughter teach him.

What we forget, faithwise, in our fear—what I was forgetting that night in my daughter’s room—is that even in the darkest night, when we see no light at all, the light is still there. The sun is still shining over the Earth even as our side of the Earth rotates away from it. The stars still shine above us, no matter where we are or how thick the clouds above our heads. What we need in the darkest nights is to keep walking along the path until we can glimpse the stars again. What we don’t need is to panic and run blindly in the woods.

This is one of my favorite essays in the book. The wonder of a child who can lead us out of darkness and the power of movement to free us from those things that bind us and keep us stuck.

When we can dance in the dark, we will also be able to soar like an owl, a solitary, nocturnal bird able to travel long distances with amazing endurance. . . soaring in the sky with wings fully expanded.

There we will have set ourselves free with a soft heart, compassion, and goodwill toward everyone.