"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you;
I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."
Ezekiel 36:26
I was flipping through Facebook recently when I came across a video by The Work of the People featuring one of my favourite theologians, Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche. In it, Vanier's thoughts on this particular passage from Ezekiel 36 caught my attention:
"That sounds beautiful. But if instead of saying heart of flesh you say a vulnerable heart, it sounds less exciting. And if you want to define vulnerability as capacity of being hurt...So, 'I'll change your heart of stone, which is protective, and give you a heart where you'll be capable of being hurt,' that sounds less exciting. But that's the reality, is that if really we start being concerned about people and loving people, well, necessarily we'll be hurt. So growth then (is) about how to grow through being hurt."To be candid, I never wanted to work in "the inner city." I vividly recall being a part of a small group at one point in time where most of the members were interested in collectively volunteering for an evening at a soup kitchen. It didn't work out in the end, to my great relief.
My hands definitely trembled a little the first evening I ever showed up at a House Blend potluck, uncertain of what to expect and who I would meet inside, but my heart of stone had already begun cracking open through a Scripture story that had come to new life for me several months before. It was the story in which Jesus is speaking to a full house--literally! The house in which he is teaching is packed full right out the door, so that there was absolutely no space for anyone else to enter. A group of friends arrived, so the story goes, carrying a paralyzed friend on a mat, intent upon bringing him to Jesus so that he might be healed. They aren't deterred by the crowds; instead, they creatively climb up to the roof of the house, cut out an opening, and lower their friend right in front of Jesus, crowds or not. It's hard to ignore a man suddenly hovering right in front of your face, and he receives the hoped-for healing that his friends worked so hard for. One day, as I read that story (which can be found in the Bible in Mark 2), what became clear to me was that there were probably so many other people who would have liked to meet Jesus that day, but for whom the barriers were simply to great and who lacked resources like the four determined friends who dug their buddy a new way to get to Jesus, who walked right by disappointed. And I wondered who today might be wanting to encounter God's love and healing, but finding the inadvertent barriers created by Christian churches and institutions simply too great to allow them access. My stone heart began to shatter.
So, when I arrived at House Blend, in spite of the trembling, God had already primed me. And from that very first potluck meal together, I fell in love with this community of people who embraced me unquestioningly as one of their own right from the start--and who have embraced so many others in like manner. But you cannot love people without also accepting the vulnerability that requires--a reality that I saw unfold over and over as new people came into our community over the three years that I was part of it. Stone hearts became flesh.
And vulnerable hearts are indeed capable of being hurt, and mine certainly was when the community that I loved so deeply dispersed this past fall, and at so many other points along the way.
And yet, I would do it all over again--will do it all over again someday--because in spite of the hurt, there is a beauty that is only accessible to us as we become vulnerable and capable of being hurt.
My prayer these days, as I look around at the Church, is that we would become open to allowing God to replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh, even though that means accepting vulnerability, opening ourselves up to hurt and failure and weakness and a whole host of things that we would rather reject. This probably means that we have to abandon some of our ideas about what success looks like, and to wonder whether in God's Kingdom there is a different sort of economy at work.
Because the deep beauty of the good news of Jesus Christ has never been more clear to me than it was in those most vulnerable moments. I suspect that recognizing beauty always requires us to open ourselves to a degree of vulnerability. Can it really be any other way?
