The Lost Life of the Heart – from The Sacred Romance

The Lost Life of the Heart 
from The Sacred Romance by John Eldredge and Brent Curtis

On the outside, there is the external stories of our lives. This is the life everyone sees, our life of work and play and church, of family and friends, paying bills, and growing older. Our external story is where we carve out the identity most others know. It is the place where we have learned to label each other in a way that implies we have reached our final destination. Bob is an accountant; Mary works for the government; Ted is an attorney. The Smiths are the family with the well-kept lawn and lovely children; the Joneses are that family whose children are always in trouble. Here, busyness substitutes for meaning, efficiency substitutes for creativity, and functional relationships substitute for love. In the outer life we live from ought (I ought to do this) rather than from desire (I want to do this) and management substitutes for mystery. There are three steps to a happy marriage, five ways to improve your portfolio, and seven habits for success.

There is a spiritual dimension to this external world in our desire to do good works, but communion with God is replaced by activity for God. There is little time in this outer world for deep questions. Given the right plan, everything in life can be managed . . . except the heart.

The inner life, the story of our heart, is the life of the deep places within us, our passions and dreams, our fears and our deepest wounds. It is the unseen life, the mystery within—what Buechner calls our “shimmering self.”  

“[Our] original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it at all . . .      rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”