Prayer for a messy heart
Dear God,
My heart is a mess.
There’s just more suffering and loss and fear in the world than it can hold right now. Help me not let in so much news that I have to put the “closed” sign up in the door of my heart, because my family and friends need it to stay open.
Sometimes my heart doesn’t really trust love.
When my heart is full, help the anxious thoughts and feelings that poke a hole and empty it again come more slowly (or preferably not at all).
Sometimes the old girl does unhelpful things to protect herself.
When my heart is broken, help it not also create an emotional auto-immune disorder – attacking as pathogen what is actually harmless.
But sometimes, sometimes I’m surprised by my heart.
It can be more deeply in love than I ever knew possible.
It can increasingly be gladdened by simple things I used to ignore.
It can hurt for people I don’t even like very much.
It can heal from things I used to think would destroy it.
It can long for you, God. But in ways that look less like piety and more like friendship.
It’s confusing, having a human heart.
So help me remember that while my heart may break, expand, hurt, heal, close, open and overflow - none of that affects my soul.
None of it can get to the part of me which bears your image; the part of me that contains the divine, inextinguishable spark. And for that I am thankful. Because, as stated earlier, my heart is a mess.
AMEN.
Question: What is a word you would use to speak of your own human heart today?
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I have a neurological disability that causes my body and hands and voice to shake, which gives me a lot of anxiety and causes my heart to shake. Thank you for reminding me. It is not my soul that is shaking. You are a dear one Nadia.
I used to say I had a kintsugi heart that had become a heart of gold, it had been broken and repaired so often. During the last 4 years of caring for my spouse with dementia, it kept shattering during the long goodbye. I thought I would be through with such destruction once he died. Instead, I am just entering my 24th month without him and it seems that my heart, like the liver of Prometheus, grows back every night only to realize every morning that it is alone so it can break all over again.