A divided heart: I’ve been pondering that phrase and what it says to me and about me. A divided heart. For my heart is divided. I long for the moment when passion and hope and intellect unite and leave me whole to want, to desire, to do just the one thing, just the one simple, glorious, noble thing.
… But of course that’s a lie—I don’t long for that, not really. For I know too well where I can find it and that’s not a place I go willingly.
My integrity lies at the bottom of a pit, at the rock bottom where I have nowhere left to hide, and all secrets are out, and all pretence is gone. That’s where my heart is whole and healed and undivided, where I’m honest and alive and with my God.
But getting there is a fall, a plummet, and I have this urge to upward mobility.
“Israel was a luxuriant vine yielding plenty of fruit. The more his fruit increased, the more altars he built; the richer his land became, the richer he made the sacred stones.”
It strikes me as fitting that Israel erected his sacred stones in high places, as though the higher you get the nearer you are to God. That’s the creed I know I live by in my bones—the higher the better, the better the holier.
But on the high places all I have is my own divided heart with its guilty secrets and confused longings and broken dreams.
And I know where God is. God is in the depths. God is down, down, down where my fallen heart is whole in its honesty and my vision clear and my soul simple.
“Break up your fallow ground”, says Hosea, “it is time to go seeking the Lord”.