Have you ever tried to protect your heart from some danger, some struggle?
Have you succeeded, because I know I haven’t?
In “The Four Loves” C.S. Lewis describes some effort to protect one’s heart by not loving.
He says, “There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap I carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
I feel like this is what I have done to my heart, not to keep from loving, but to keep from being hurt in another way. Jesus of Nazareth once said that no man can serve two masters; he will hate one and love the other. I tried to serve two masters; God and academia. The story of my pain goes back to my second semester in graduate school. I was taking a course about theories of human development and family studies, and the last assignment was a paper discussing our “worldviews” of the topic and how all of these ideas could fit together. My first mistake was not starting the paper until the weekend before it was due. My second mistake was being naïve. To me, the word worldview has a connotation for how I see the world, and that is primarily as God in the center. I wrote a paper that drew upon theory and scripture and got a “C” on the paper. I was not prepared for that disappointment and when I talked to the professor about it he just dismissed me and my ideas.
Well, this past fall I was in another theories class, the doctoral one, and it was taught by that professor as well as another who would be equally, if not more dismissive of my ideas. I think I determined that I would not be hurt, I would not be dismissed and I would do anything I could to play by their rules. The problem was, by studying that hard and making that the priority, everything else in my life that brought life and joy was brushed aside. It was the first year since being at Auburn that I did not attend homecoming at Cedarville University – where I earned my bachelor’s degree – and I withdrew myself from almost all activity with Grace Campus Ministries. I forgot what is ultimately true and real and valuable – those things that bring life. Or maybe I didn’t forget but I accepted a shadow of the real, imitations, instead of the real.
I got a B in the class, but I lost a piece of myself that I didn’t realize I had lost until recently. I began rereading John Eldredge’s book “Waking the Dead” and it reminded me of the centrality of the heart and how important living from the heart is. I realized, I haven’t lived from my heart in a long time. So I feel awake, and new and alive – sort of like Eustace in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” after he has been de-dragoned.
Eustace had been turned into a dragon, and was quite resigned to the fact that he would be a dragon forever, when Aslan brought him to a pool where he could bath. But, Aslan said that Eustace must undress first, so Eustace started shedding his dragon scales much like a snake would shed, but Eustace discovered that under each layer of skin he removed there was another layer…Eustace tells the story:
“The lion said…‘You will have to let me undress you’….The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…He peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker…and there I was smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me in the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.”
I feel like I’m myself again…or at least mostly like myself. I think I am still under attack from an enemy who doesn’t want me to be myself, who’d rather see my heart dead. So I am seeking my heart for love, for God, clearing the rubble in which it is trapped; the butterfly struggles out of its cocoon, that struggle for life from death.
