Update from Pastor Nate: August 2022

Amy Salomone, “Cold Blooded”
[image description: an anatomical cross section of lungs surrounding a human heart, encircled by blossoming flourishes and several small reptiles]

“How’s your heart?”

These three words, succinct and stunning, bounced around the hallways and greens and chapels of my undergraduate campus with such frequency that they were as much a part of the infrastructure as the mortar holding together century-old brick facades on the campus’ aging buildings.

They were a riff on a favorite question of John Wesley, the man whose theological vision gave birth to the Methodist movement in the 18th century. In an age where calmly rational religiosity and performative piety in service of the status quo were the norm, Wesley’s weird little question, “how is it with your soul?” seeped its way into the hearts of women and men, ordinary folks from all walks of life, making an entire generation of people curious about the state of their inmost being. It was this attentiveness to the inner life, to the state of one’s heart, that made Wesley’s message such a powerful antidote to the dryness of carelessness that pervaded English society in his day.

Two centuries and some change after Wesley passed away, Methodism had spread around the world, and I found myself in a college what blossomed from deep roots in the movement. As we students went about our lives together, we offered each other these three little words as a means of inviting conversation that went deeper than the surface, bypassing the usual concerns about grades and dates and majors and going straight for the heart—or the jugular, depending on who was asking.

And frankly, sometimes I didn’t feel like being asked that question. Someone always seemed to find me and ask me, “how’s your heart?” at the worst possible moment—when I was cramming Gregorian chants for a music history exam, or furiously trying to finish up a part-writing exercise or learn a new passage in time for my saxophone lesson later that day. It wasn’t like I had a lot of time for self-reflection.

But the question also came, miraculously, in moments where I had my head so far up my own rear end that I had no way of seeing clearly how my actions were impacting the wellbeing of others. The question itself called me to my senses. How could I even see my own heart from that vantage point? And every time I was asked the question, even when I resented it, I recognized that it was one of the most important questions that I could be asked.

The question’s earnestness has a kind of awkward intimacy and naked immediacy. It invites us to reflect on the condition of the core of our being, the place where the wellsprings of courage and mercy flow, the place where our ability to see from the bigger picture dwells. The question invites us to consider the thoughts that we are running ceaselessly on loop in our minds and see whether those unconscious programs are actually in alignment with the kind of people we want to be in this world.

All of that is important, to be sure.

But the question has a deeper magic: in asking the question, “how’s your heart,” from a place of honesty and openness, the asker invites the asked into a level of relationality that the ordinary, surface-level interactions that stitch our daily lives together can’t even dream of touching.

It’s a question that, if we receive it and endeavor to answer it honestly, can crack us open to inner depths that we didn’t even recognize were there. They are words of invitation to a deeper level of being, the place where our hearts and minds can be joined as one for the sake of maturity, wholeness, and reconciliation—the very work Christ has entrusted to us (2 Corinthians 5.18-20).

It is the kind of question that flies in the face of the strict and sterile decorum of both genteel 18th century English customs. In the same way, these words can cut through the insipid miasma of “Midwest niceness” that prevents us from being honest and courageous in our dealings with one another (remember the etymology of “courage”—heartiness!).

In our attempts to answer it honestly, this question can transform our relationships with one another from casual acquaintance to deep friendship—the very thing spiritual seekers throughout our community are longing for.

And so my curiosity is this: what if this question became something that we began to ask one another here at FCCBC on a regular basis? What if, in our dealings with one another, in our planning for the future, in our gathering for worship and for sharing with one another, we began with the question, “how is your heart?”

What kind of depths in our relationships with one another and with the community around us would open up if we cut to the chase and got straight to the heart of the matter? How might leading with this question impact the critical work that we are doing as a congregation as we discern our future with the help of the team from Partners for Sacred Places? And how might our life together deepen and flourish if we worked together to hold this question for one and with one another in courage, honesty, and without judgment?

Perhaps we won’t know until we try.

So, friends: pause, take a breath, close your eyes, and feel within: how is your heart? What recurring thoughts are you carrying with you? Where do you feel constriction and doubt? Where do you feel wholeness and joy? What do you fear? What do you desire? What does the deepest part of you, where the river of your being flows into the ocean of God’s presence, have to say about what matters most to you? And where might the presence of the living Christ be trying to break in, to change what is stony and barren into flesh and life?

Let us be courageous in the asking, and in the answering. (And don’t be surprised if I ask you the next time I see you.)

Peace and all good things,

Pr. Nate