Meeting June

t’s a strange thing–the human heart. Just when you think it’s impossible for it to stretch one iota more, its tattered edges find a way to expand even by the tiniest of margins. It’s truly a remarkable thing…not to mention a thing that is so often overlooked. 

Many of you know that our nearly 20 year-old dog, Dexter, died a few weeks ago. Many of you have reached out to our household in person, on the phone, in a message, or in a card. Many of you know how difficult it has been saying good-bye to Dexter. Many of you get that, for me at least, he, and Murphy before him, and Odie before him, were never “just” dogs. They were family members of another species–pieces of my life and my heart that grew me and taught me to love in ways that no human ever could. Like I said, the human heart is strange indeed.

The heart is quite a mysterious thing. Throughout the ages, various groups have tried to pin down exactly what the heart is and what it does. The Ancient Egyptians came to understand the heart as the seat of both life and morality. Early Greeks saw the heart as that which kept the body supplied with heat. Aristotle and his fellow philosophers thought the heart controlled reason, thought, and emotion. While the Stoics believed that the heart was that place within us in which the soul resides. But even with all of our hypotheses, a bit of mystery remains about how the heart is significant to our human condition. All we know is that it is. And it’s not just significant to us, it’s significant to God.

Maybe that’s why every year on Ash Wednesday the reading from the First Testament is always from the prophet Joel where it is written, “Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart.” Our hearts are so significant to God, the prophet tells us, that God wants all of those tattered, stretch-marked pieces of our hearts scooped up and brought back to the One who made us so that they–too–can be shaped, formed, expanded, and made new. It’s strange, sad, and beautiful all at the same time, and it is exactly how our hearts are designed to work.

I recently read a book by Maggie Smith. In the book she writes of the human heart’s design and the ways that even the language we use to describe our hearts often runs counter to the strange and wonderful nuances of this creation. Smith calls this to the reader’s attention by saying, “Stop calling your heart broken; your heart works just fine. If you are feeling--love, anger, gratitude, grief--it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it.” This is, perhaps, the strangest thing of all:  A feeling heart–even if feeling tattered and shattered–is not broken…it is working as intended.

Which means, dear reader, that perhaps the only thing preventing ALL of our hearts from being returned to God is not because we have lost a piece or two along the way. Rather, it’s because life and love and grief and loss have left us walling off areas of our own hearts rather than feeling the pain of the heart–in all of its strange fullness–doing its work. Maybe the problem is that we keep fighting the heart’s natural design to feel the full range of human emotion when all we have ever been asked to do is let our hearts simply go about their work.

Letting our hearts do their work means allowing ourselves to be and to feel more than one thing at once. It means letting gratitude and fear cohabitate knowing that it may feel like an absolute mess, and also knowing that our hearts are uniquely made for the mess. It means letting despair and hope sit face-to-face in the same booth, and also knowing that our hearts are made precisely for tables like these. It means letting grief and love dance together, and also knowing that our hearts are only in perfect rhythm when they do. 

For me, it meant grieving Odie, while welcoming my spouse into my life. It meant being so horribly sad over Murphy’s death in 2021, and being completely captivated by Hank and his love of belly rubs. And this weekend, it meant letting the lump in my throat from Dexter’s death be present as we met and adopted June. 

It might be strange, but it’s what we’ve got to work with in this life. I don’t want to waste anymore time fighting the design of my heart. I want to do my very best to simply let it do its work–its wonderful, maddening, terrible, fantastic, shattering, and healing work. I hope you’ll join me. 

Learning to let my heart do its work with you,
Pr. Melissa

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