You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts.
Paul to the Corinthian Jesus Community

I don’t know how I noticed it but I did. My wedding ring has a lot of tiny nicks and scratches in it. When it caught my attention recently, I was a little embarrassed. Then I thought about having this ring for twenty-five years and figured that a few scratches are a given when you wear a ring for that long. More than that, these scratches and nicks have probably been earned – doing work around the house, taking care of dogs (we now have two for the first time as a family), playing catch with children or teaching them how to ride a bike or hunting for bugs or leaves for their science projects. Rather than bemoan these marks, perhaps they should be celebrated.

Leaving marks – life leaves marks. About the same time I noticed the wear and tear on my ring, I was paging through Nicholas Wolterstorff’s book Lament for a Son. Wolterstorff is a theologian and philosopher who, in this book, writes about losing his twenty-five-year-old son to a mountain climbing accident. In a moving passage weaving images from the story of Jesus, Woterstorff writes about the impact of his son’s death. To believe in Christ’s rising and death’s dying is also to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love. If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded, if gratitude for what is good does not flame up, if insight is not deepened, if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, if aching for a new day is not intensified, if hope is weakened and faith diminished, if from the experience of death comes nothing good, then death has won. Then death be proud. So I shall struggle to live with the reality of Christ’s rising and death’s dying. In my living, my son’s dying will not be the last word. But as I rise up, I bear the wounds of his death. My rising does not remove them. They mark me.

Life leaves marks, its deep sorrows, its immeasurable joys – like the scratches on my wedding ring, like the marks on the hands of Jesus.

Life leaves marks, but is this inevitable? Do we have any control over the marks left? The Bible often uses the image of a soft heart in a positive way, as does Paul in the text above, and when someone is resistant to the Spirit of God, that same Bible will sometimes refer to this as a hardening of the heart. Maybe it is inevitable that life will leave some marks on us, but there may always be the danger that we harden our hearts, that we close ourselves off, that we make ourselves nearly unmarkable.

A few years ago, I encountered another piece of writing that I return to with some frequency. Elizabeth Lesser, in her book The New American Spirituality writes: The opposite of happiness is a closed heart. Happiness is a heart so soft and so expansive that it can hold al of the emotions in a cradle of openness. A happy heart is one that is larger at all times than any one emotion. An open heart feels everything – including anger, grief, and pain – and absorbs it into a bigger and wiser experience of reality…. We may think that by closing the heart we’ll protect ourselves from feeling the pain of the world, but instead, we isolate ourselves even more from joy. From my own experience and from observing many others, I have come to believe that the opposite of happiness is a fearful, closed heart. Happiness is ours when we go through our anger, fear, and pain, all the way to our sadness, and then slowly let sadness develop into tenderness.

A soft heart, a heart on which letters may be written, a heart open to the grief and pain and sadness of the world, a markable heart – that seems something worth practicing, worth struggling for. But such a heart is not at its best merely a passive recipient of the marking of the world. Unlike a ring worn on a finger which is just there when the hand carelessly grabs at something or smashes itself hard against something, the soft heart may be a bit more like a canvas – open to be marked upon, but with possibilities for a creative shaping of those markings. Life leaves its marks, but to some extent, we are invited to be the artists of those lines – to give them a certain shape and contour. To be sure, sometimes our freedom to do this is limited. Sometimes the best we can do is keep our heart open to the painful markings inflicted on it. Even then, though, we have some ability to shape just how deep these markings may be and what other markings we will put along side of them.

“Look how he abused me, mistreated me, defeated me, robbed me.” Harbor such thoughts and you live in hate. “Look how he abused me, mistreated me, defeated me, robbed me.” Release such thoughts and live in love. Buddha, The Dhammapada. Maybe we never have complete control over what will mark our soft hearts, but we have some artistic ability to shape those markings.

If keeping and open and soft heart and being an artist of its markings has something to do with happiness, with the spiritual life, with the Christian spiritual life, then, so too, does paying attention to how we leave marks in the lives of others. I think I would like to give others a lot of good markings to work with as they create the art in their own soft hearts.

Having a soft heart, being an artist of the markings life leaves on such a heart, giving others good material for their own heart-art project – as we approach All Saint’s Day, might this have something to do with being a saint?

With Faith and With Feathers,

David