Prophets, Holograms, and My Misplaced Heart

A Journey Toward Wholeness

I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the damage done when you teach a child that her deepest self is depraved and corrupt. There’s a psychological split, a shattering. Like any person newly arrived in the world, she is eager to learn what she must do to be good, lovable, acceptable to God and everyone else. When you tell her that her heart is the problem, she’ll scoop it out and put it in a cage. She’ll watch it night and day, squinty-eyed, suspicious. She will learn to live as a hollow person, ordering her life according to a set of moral principles, lost to herself. For a time, in a way, she’ll thrive.

But no, that’s not true. In certain cultural settings, she will be praised for her ability to “die to herself.” She will appear to thrive while she wastes away.

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I attended Florida Southern College, which was loosely affiliated with the Methodist Church (an institution I considered extremely liberal at the time). As part of my undergraduate program, I was required to take an Old Testament and a New Testament course. I arrived at both with the arrogance of a true fundamentalist. (I’d read the Bible cover to cover more than once, memorized dozens of verses and passages, and knew my theology backward and forward.) Early in the course, my OT professor set an assignment that was meant to highlight contradictions in the accounts of creation, various ancient battles, and so forth. I was indignant. To my mind there was, without a doubt, a way to make every word of the Bible literal and historically accurate. Contradictions simply could not exist in a document that had been preserved without error through thousands of years and multiple translations in several languages. I couldn’t imagine why my professor would have any interest in teaching a college course on a book he didn’t believe. I did the assignment and got an A in Old Testament, but I held the school, the class, and the professor in contempt.

You can imagine, then, how little room for interpretation I or my people saw in the passage from Jeremiah that warns about the wickedness of the human heart. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” The writer might have said “deceitful and wicked,” but he didn’t. It wasn’t enough. “Above all things.” “Desperately wicked.” And the final question? It haunted me. When the writer is lost for words, you know you’ve entered the realm of the abstract, the profound, where terrible things grow beyond our capacity to name or imagine.

I find myself in a similarly difficult situation to the one Jeremiah once faced. The damage of the doctrine of total depravity, on my life at least, exceeds my powers of description. Who can know it? Hell, it’s my story, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. So often, when I try to understand it, to make a reckoning, I cannot find language that’s sufficiently comprehensive, or I get bogged down in endless metaphors. Maybe the best approach is simplicity. (I advise writers to pull back when they’re trying to convey strong emotions. “Less is more,” I say. So I’ll take my own advice.)

The essence of the trauma I am attempting to name is separation. Before I reached the developmental stage of understanding myself as a whole, I had to separate myself into parts. My heart had to be extracted and observed. (Note: Every time it appears in this essay, I could replace the word “heart” with “body,” and it would be equally true of my experience.) I don’t suppose it matters if my heart was figuratively banished to another dimension or locked in a cage or if it remained inside me with all connecting roads severed or barricaded. The point is that it was lost to me - I could not hear its voice or honor its pain; I could not be guided by it (a safe and Biblical modus operandi for a fundamental Christian; a devastating one for a human girl).

I think of my life over the past two decades as a journey back toward my heart. But here’s the kicker: according to what I was taught, a turn toward my heart was a turn toward the very heart of evil. When is it ever advisable to make such a turn? Who gives you permission? Where do you find the courage?

My about-face came via a group of Christians who were passionately invested in the doctrine of the new creation. The heart did not remain suspect forever, they said. It was transformed at the moment of salvation, when a person became something other than what they were before. Maybe you have had the experience of finding something your body desperately needs - a nutrient you were deficient in, perhaps - and you suddenly feel reborn? As if you’ve found the now-and-forever answer to everyone’s problems? That’s how I felt when I embraced the teachings of this group. I felt as if I was reading the Bible for the first time. I felt as if it might be possible to live with some measure of freedom and spontaneity, because my heart had been fixed.

And then I had children, and I began to wonder if they were born with sinful hearts or if they were simply incomplete. I wondered if many of the behaviors that might be interpreted as sinful were just a matter of children having needs, feelings, individual personalities and perspectives. I wondered if that was okay, if, in fact, it was a perfectly normal part of the human experience. I began to wonder about the virtues of absolute submission to authority. I was less interested in dominating my children than I was in knowing them, in encouraging them to know themselves and like themselves. I thought their young hearts were marvelous.

And then, last year, I discovered I had a body. (Surprise!) I found, to my complete shock, that I could feel sensations in and around my heart. I tapped into deep wells of grief and rage. I came to know the lightness, the buoyancy, of joy - joy not just as a religious concept, but as a physical sensation.

I would like to say that I met my heart last year, that we were reunited, but that’s not quite right. I wanted a simple metaphor to offer you, but I’ll have to alter it a bit. Because it wasn’t precisely my heart that I needed to reclaim.

Many years ago, with fear and trembling, I stopped journeying away from my heart and started journeying toward it. (That’s how I perceived it at the time.) Along the way I often felt the path was blocked - I seemed to stand before a wall, an impenetrable screen that projected images of the terrible things that might transpire if I came close to the core of myself. Time and again, I ran at the wall and found it to be nothing but a projection, a hologram. It wasn’t real. Time and again, on the other side, I found some abandoned part of myself, usually sitting on the ground with her knees pulled up and her head hidden in her arms.

Would it surprise you to know that I love those girls, every one? Would it surprise you to know that they wanted things like freedom and agency and friendship and pleasure and healing and hope for the world, that they wanted those things not just for themselves but for everyone? They didn’t understand why I rejected them. As I have received them and embraced them, I have known an exhilarating resonance that makes me feel as though my whole being is a ringing bell. I am beginning to understand what it means to healed, intact, coherent and alive.

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If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to go one step further. This metaphor - the path, the projections, the abandoned ones - is as true of the world at large as it is true of my internal landscape. It is hard to turn back toward one another, especially when the ones we’ve turned away from have been characterized as evil. If we find the courage to turn, to journey, we’re confronted with our worst fears, our most crippling shame. To our frightened selves, these images feel realer than real, like unscalable walls. They aren’t. They’re holograms, crafted by media, trauma, religion, and culture. When we push through them, we find people who look strangely familiar. They don’t know why we hate them, but they long for peace and unity.

I hope you do not hear me saying that I have arrived. My journey isn’t over. There is so much more of myself to reclaim, and I am nothing like finished with grief or anger or sorrow. But I’ve made my peace with Jeremiah. I hope he is no longer weeping. I hope he discovered that his deepest desires were good. I hope he made peace with his heart, and that you have, too.

May we all, in turning back and making the fearful journey, become whole.

May we all, in turning toward one another, make the world whole.

Amen.