A Broken Heart, Part I

Yantai, China

Photograph by the author

Flight from New York to Shanghai, China, Oct. 14

We think our selfishness is redeemable.

I say this in the sense of an inner assumption that my sins aren’t so big; and that I’m worthy of forgiveness. Yet when I truly sense the magnitude of my transgressions, I see how deep they run—to the bone. 

In the confessional, we say, the burden of them is intolerable. Yet the fact is that I do tolerate them; I live far too easily with my sins. I’m comfortable with them, despite my protestations.

Above all, I see how deep they run. As I grow older and the inner sense of myself knits itself together into a more comprehensive entity, I begin to understand that every sin stays with me permanently. They’re indelibly etched into my being; once done, no thing can be omitted from the truth about me.

This is how I am.

If I see this more clearly, see enough of it, then I begin to understand another phrase from the confessional: there is no health in us. I flatter myself with comforting thoughts about how forgivable I am; I rationalize my misdeeds. Even this is a misdeed; I’m selfish even about my selfishness. The situation reminds me of Gurdjieff’s adage that everything in me is a lie of one kind or another. Another thing it reminds me of is his tale (in Life is Only Real Then, When I Am) of how it used to be a tradition to recount a person’s flaws for three days after he or she died.

The sensing of my sins is a duty and an obligation; but the summary of them can’t be seen before much organic contemplation has taken place. I can’t just understand my sin from the perspective of a list, or thoughts of it: its cumulative effect needs to be organically sensed and felt. The experience of sin must, in other words, become three-centered. One is reminded of St. Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue, in which God tells her that mere words are finite and empty. If the door to the true nature of one’s sin opens within and it is properly sensed, it opens on the universe... as Catherine is told, the infinite.

Yet at the same time I’m required to experience the collective anguish of my sin, I see I should not feel sorry for myself. My sin (again, per St. Catherine) is only appreciable to the extent I see it’s sin not against myself, but against God.In other words, to feel sorry for myself because of my sin is yet another sin.

As this experience of sin becomes deeper and more apparent, the action of Grace continues. It is a perpetual and eternal force that exerts the power of mercy and forgiveness despite my unworthiness; and this is the essential mystery of Grace, that it lives and loves utterly without judgment.

In this sense, one is introduced to a complex effort to understand St. Catherine and other mystics (Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hildegard von Bingen) in regard to their emphasis of God’s judgment. The theme of Judgment and damnation is a near-constant one in the religious texts of mystical liberation; only in Meister Eckhart’s mystical teachings do we find a lessening of the intensity with which this premise is prosecuted. The reason for this, of course, is that Eckhart (one cannot doubt it, studying his texts in comparison to the various female mystics of the Middle Ages) had comprehended a higher level of divine truth than others. This isn’t to discount the value of the other mystics, but rather to put them in context. 

I speak from the experience of reason, sense and feeling when I say that every influence of the divine is colored and contaminated by the individual who receives it. No human is without flaw; and we consequently produce flawed interpretations of the Divine Inflow as it arrives in us. In externalizing, it’s nearly impossible to separate our own attitudes, ideas and concepts from the action of the Divine within. 

Let me remark that the understanding of Grace and Mercy as being utterly without judgment is a subtle one. There are forms of discrimination and judgment at all levels of creation, to be sure; creation—both within us and without us—is a hierarchy in which the particles of the Divine are sorted, sifted and re-concentrated. In the process the dross—inferior particles representing admixtures of the Divine with the material—is separated in an action of refinement. Yet all of this “judgment”—the separation of the coarse from the fine—takes place within creation, and God Himself exists outside creation. 

This means that the process of judgment is external to God, not internal. 

Part II of this seven part series publishes on Nov. 27.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.