The Slow Weary Work of Setting Your Heart Free

How many times do you have to die before you can really live?

“We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. This seems to be close to the heart of that mystery.” — Frederick Buechner

These past few months I’ve felt my soul being cleaved apart, like a deck of cards the dealer keeps cutting and cutting into smaller and smaller stacks until there’s hardly any hand left to play in any of them. I’m stretched thin, too thin to see the world straight or touch the deeper things in it that make being here generally tolerable and, on occasion, numinous. It’s so damn confounding to me that I can so regularly feel I am tossed to the ragged edges of oblivion and in the same instant be confident that I am standing in the center of my one true path. Are my insides always meant to be so twisted and wrung out, like some stale and faded dishtowel in stiff need of a wash and a long rest on the line? No. But is my heart’s rung-outedness a necessary purification in my learning to be free?

Very likely. Yes.

Freedom of any kind is costly. Freedom of soul is the most costly of all. If anyone asks how many times you have to die to attain true freedom of the heart, the answer is nearly always, “one or two more.”

So am I dying again? Yes, of course. To all the shoulds and oughts I have piled on my own back. To every forced way of living to which I have confined my soul. To the deeply misguided belief that I have to “make something happen.” It’s hard work, letting go of all that self-righteous angst, that irrational conviction that the story of the great wide world really is about me somehow. Even when I’m trying to lay it down, more often than not God still has to claw it from my hands. I’m addicted to it, you see, same as everyone. We are, as a species, ego addicts. It is the bedrock of our common ground that, for obvious reasons, none of us wants to admit is there.

But that isn’t all that I am. I am also coming to life. My eyes are slowly opening, and I am waking up. I can feel the immense power of Real True Life flowing beneath the shallow chicken scratchings of my desperate ego performances. That Life waits just below the surface of my common days, beckoning me to drop my burdens and jump in. It demands absolute surrender. That surrender feels like death. I know it is only the death of my ego, but the existential dread feels quite real all the same.

The important thing is, though: I sense that river. I can hear it. I can feel the mist from its spray on my cheeks. So I shuffle my weary bones a little bit closer to it every day, and take comfort in knowing that it’s just a matter of time before I collapse, limp and exhausted, into its welcoming embrace.

That will be a good day. A very good day indeed.

“There comes a time when nothing is meaningful except surrendering to Love.” — Rumi