A talk given at Bradford Unitarians one Sunday just before harvest:
Courage comes from the heart…and we are always welcomed by God, the Croí (heart) of all being.
So begins Padraig O Tuama’s prayer that we heard today at the start of our service.
Croi is the Gaelic word for heart and its close to the french Coeur which is the root of the word courage. When we say some one has courage we literally mean they’re hearty, or have good heart. And we have lots of other usages that also refer to the heart, courtesy, is another word which we now mean politeness but really means behaving from you heart, or being led by your heart, being good hearted, the heart of the matter, in my Heart of hearts….
This is older than enlightenment thinking isn’t it? Older than the time when we elevated thinking to be the sign of being: “I think therefore I am” said Descartes putting the brain at the centre of human operations, but the heart, as we can see, has persisted in our imaginations as being the real human centre.
When we trust our instincts we call it a gut-feeling, but when we follow what we really want we know we are led by the heart, and it’s our heart that we follow even when we know it could get us into all sorts of trouble…
It is our heart that we still put at the centre of our most intimate engagements with life, our romantic lives, and when through all the thrills and spills and convoluted tumbles that most of us make before we arrive at anywhere near adulthood, we know we will have experienced heartbreak, probably repeatedly.
Listen to what the poet David Whyte has to say at the end of his beautiful essay on Heartbreak:
If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and even perhaps in the depth of its impact, as well as in its hindsight, to see it as its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready to let go of the way we are holding things, and preparation perhaps for the last letting go of all.
David Whyte ‘Heartbreak’ in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words Canongate
At this time of year – as we approach the season of mellow fruitfulness – the season of mists and crisp walks, we will often experience the change in the season as a time of familiar but nonetheless poignant reflection, we feel the approach of winter and in it its reflection of that ‘last letting go’, we feel it in our hearts.The approaching season brings of course a consolation in the fruits and crops and next week we celebrate these in our harvest service but I wanted to notice before we get there that there is as Shelley knew a glimmer of the future in this letting go, as the leaves turn and our moods shift we also experience a taste of sweetness in the crunch of crisp apples, as ripeness has its rewards too.
Jim brought in conkers and the reminder of childhood that it always brings puts me in mind of the way that seasons turning connects us to the turns in our own lives. As a parent each new phase of a child’s life brings heartbreak, (this is another thing they never tell you about – another one of those things you learn in the doing).
First it is heartbreaking in the sense that you have to learn that your old heart, the self-sufficient adult heart, has to be broken out of just to make room for the scale of your new emotions… and then you discover that it is heart-breaking letting go of the new ways of being you’d only just started getting used to; it is heartbreaking to give up baby grows, heartbreaking when they start going to school, or stop holding your hand to cross the road … and there is something in this pattern of heartbreak and growth that connects us to something larger than ourselves in surprising ways.
The heart that puts its baby in a basket we still call a moses basket, did you know that ‘Moses’ by the way just means ‘son of’, child of, the heart that lets its future be carried by the water, did you know that the Hebrew name for that basket of rushes comes from the same word root as the word for Ark?
The heart that trusts its child to the waters had done so before, and would do so again, heart break after heartbreak, parent to child, child to parent – like a heart in rhythm itself … ba-boom … ba-boom … ba-boom …
When I used to read mine bedtime stories, one of my favourites was a picture book which illustrated a folk tale –
a wood gatherer sets out to cut wood with his little dog behind him, he’s dressed for the wintry afternoon, a great coat and stout boots and his great hands in woolen mittens, and he works hard making good progress and piles of fire wood as the cloudy sky begins to get dark and the wood begin to thicken & it begins to snow, he gathers up the last of the wood piles and makes for home but his little dog begins to bark: he’s spotted something the woodman has missed: one mitten is left in the wood, and we can see a little beetle already investigating the new and alien object…
A woolen mitten lies on a path in the woods and a frog hops up and peers in calling out
“Any room for me?”
and in she climbs. Then a rabbit peers in…
“Any room for me?”
and in she climbs… we don’t have time to wonder how that’s going to work with the beetle and the frog before a stoat shows up “Any room for me?”
and in he crawls but he ‘s not the last because now its a hedgehog’s turn to roll up into a ball and climb in too, a beetle a frog a rabbit a stoat and a hedgehog all in one mitten would be more then we could have imagined but it is so very cold and they appear to be making it work because now there comes a fox and she sniffs at the glove and then asks “Any room for me?”
And in she climbs, this is getting ridiculous when a badger arrives
“Any room for me?”
then a beautiful roe deer,
and a wild boar is next snuffling up “Any room for me?”
she asks and at last a mama bear, on her hind legs
“Any room for me?”
…In the morning the woodsman’s little dog arrives barking excitedly as he find the enormous mitten and a beetle a frog a rabbit a stoat and a hedgehog, a fox, a badger, a deer, a boar and bear all tumble out and escape into the woods before the man arrives and puts his mitten miraculously shrunk back to its original size back on good as new.
It took me ages to realise that in this simple story was a parable about our hearts.
How they go on and on extending and making room but never quite bursting.
But then it took me a while to see that Moses in his basket was also a symbol of Noah’s ark, and a while to see the pattern of metaphors that remind us that each new parent is another creator risking everything and being heartbroken over and over again, and the heart in its beating is a symbol of creation itself, its cycles repeating season by season; dia-stole, systole:
… ba-boom … ba-boom … ba-boom …
Nothing is new under the sun
… ba-boom … ba-boom … ba-boom …
They say the ‘Big Bang expands into infinite space and after a span of 50 trillion years or so begins falling back in on itself in a predicted event called the ‘Big Crash’ when all of matter tumbles back into increasing mass until it swallows itself, galaxy after galaxy, system by system and returns to a darkness of infinite density when again … ba-boom!
it will explode back out again
replicating the pattern of cycles
Hear it beating within us…
connecting us to the cosmos and making space endlessly to enter in…
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