February is “Heart Month.” Presumably the American Heart Association chose February as the month to raise awareness about cardiovascular health because in February we celebrate Valentine’s Day which we observe by the giving and receiving of hearts of all kinds -- heart-shaped Valentines, candy, jewelry, rocks – symbolic declarations of love, of giving our hearts to one another. Hearts have long been associated with love. When we bring our emotions to the surface, we “wear our hearts on our sleeve.” When we speak our deepest feelings, we “pour our hearts out.” Feelings of tenderness “warm our heart,” and compassion “pulls at our heartstrings.” When grieving, we feel “heartache,” and loss of love renders us “heartbroken.” The French word for heart, coeur, associates hearts with courage. We “take heart;” we “lose heart.” To “hearten” is to encourage. When can engage in a task “wholeheartedly,” “halfheartedly,” or our “heart’s not in it” at all. We can be “bravehearted,” “heavyhearted,” “lighthearted,” “tenderhearted,” “hardhearted,” or totally “heartless.” That’s a lot for the heart to carry.
The heart also bears many religious significances from the seat of joy, thankfulness, integrity, and courage, to purity and righteousness:
A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance. – Proverbs 15:13
Create in me a clean heart, O God. — Psalm 51:10
Blessed are the pure in heart.– Matthew 5:8
The list could go on, but the one that hits me the hardest is this --
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. – Ezekiel 36:26
-- for February also happens to be the month in which I received an actual heart from a far-too-young donor who had died tragically in a plane crash. Had my heart become stone? What did I need to cut out, let go of, change? What were the spiritual lessons I needed to learn?
I recently discovered another woman’s story of her heart transplant – Lerita Coleman Brown.[i] The parallels between us are almost too uncanny to be believed. Within eleven months of each other, we both received a heart transplant at the age of 41. We have the same blood type and body size. We were both college professors. After our transplants, we both wrote books about our spiritual reflections on our heart transplants and became spiritual directors. Most striking of all, both of our donors were named Jody/Jodi.
Of course, our stories also differ in significant ways. Lerita is black; I am white. She was single and had no children; I was married with a young child. Her donor was about her age; mine was only nine. She waited four days for her heart while I waited almost four years. She had some significant complications post-transplant; my post-transplant journey has been fairly smooth. Nevertheless, the impact of the transplant on our lives, the spiritual wisdom gained is very similar. As we are entering “Heart Month,” it seemed fitting to share a few of those spiritual insights here.
Surrender, Trust: Both of us struggled mightily with the fact that so much of our lives and our respective heart issues -- hers, heart failure; mine, deadly dysrhythmias – were beyond our control, (though I often thought if I could just learn to meditate better I might be able to control my heart rhythm, ignoring the fact that my heart was the size of a basketball and mostly flopped around.) Neither of us wanted to let go of our hearts. My heart was my constant companion for over forty years, the center of my love and identity. Now they wanted to cut it out, and then trust that a newly implanted heart of a stranger would start beating after sitting in cold storage for several hours. And we both dealt with the fear of dying. As Lerita asked, “Do I have enough trust in God to go through with this?” (1478).
We both needed to learn surrender and trust. Lerita described this as listening to and trusting the “still small voice of the spirit.” As she wrote, “ . . . you are going have to LISTEN to the quiet urgings of your spirit that lies deep within your heart. You are going to have to TRUST what it tells you” (1855). Similarly, for me, letting go and trust were a matter of listening to an inner wisdom. The days I listened, when I was open, everything flowed. In those moments when I surrendered to a deeper knowing — especially those closest to death — I experienced a deep peace. I realized letting go is not so much a leap of faith as a fall into a deep pool, trusting that the water would buoy me up. I learned I needed to focus on the faith, rather than the fear; to ride the current of this river of my life, and be held in this deep pool by love.
Patience: “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” – the song from Rent recalls those days of waiting. My lessons in patience came from the waiting – over a thousand days, thirty-five thousand hours, two million minutes. I often felt like I was counting the minutes. Patience was difficult with every day I couldn’t go out and play with my son, with every shock of the implantable defibrillator, with every night of wondering if I would wake to see the morning. For Lerita, whose heart told her, “You’re going to need plenty of PATIENCE,” (1855) lessons in patience came with weeks and months of a difficult recovery and episodes of rejection.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart . . . ,“ counseled the quote from Rilke above my desk. I learned that patience was also a matter of letting go and trust, as well as of being fully present in the here and now, not the longed-for future. I was reminded of Sisyphus, who day after day rolls his rock up the mountain, only to have it roll back down, and then turns, goes back down, and rolls the rock up again. Patience is being willing to roll the rock up the mountain countless times, in trust. It is a matter, as Rilke suggested, of living the questions now and, with hope, living into the answer.[ii]
Hope: What is a heart transplant if not hope? In granting the possibility of new life out of death, it is the essence of hope. Yet, hopefulness is also knowing death is imminent and finding a way to live well into that knowledge. The impulse of hope encourages us to go on despite the odds against our endeavor. Hope indeed seems to spring eternal. In my darkest days, something would come along and lift me out. Hope is a testimony of the human spirit, lifting us up, refusing to refuse us. This new heart brought hope to me, and I believe that in our going on together, we carry the hopes of my donor’s loved ones as well.
Joy: My mother’s favorite Bible verse was Psalm 30:5: “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” By its very nature of incapacitating illness and precarity, the period preceding a transplant is a time of weeping and dark night of the soul. Awakening to the dawning of a new heart, a new life brings, as the psalmist says, joy. A new heart allowed me the chance to live wholeheartedly, without hesitation, with total abandon, open to the joy that is the wellspring of being. In Lerita’s conversations with her former heart, referencing Howard Thurman, her heart asks, “What brings you joy? What makes you come alive?” [iii] The vibrancy that radiates with every new opportunity for that aliveness fills our lives with joy.
Gratitude: It seems to go without saying that the inherent response to a heart transplant is gratitude. How could anyone be anything but enormously grateful for this gift of life given out of the depths of sorrow and generosity. We both felt deep gratitude as well for all those who helped us before and after – providing meals, transportation, prayer, care, comfort, and support. But the greatest gratitude is for gratitude itself. Both Lerita and I grappled with resentment that our lives had not turned out as planned, for the suffering we experienced and the limits placed on our lives, as well as with envy of those who were able, seemingly so easily, to achieve the dreams we had not been able to realize.
Gratitude was the antidote. Living in the fullness of gratitude, we have little room for envy or resentment. In her conversations with her new heart, Lerita learned that her new heart’s name was “Grace.” It is fitting. Gratitude, gracias, graci, grace. To live with thanks is to live in grace, to live graciously -- with kindness and compassion toward one’s own and other’s frailties, and with awareness of the abundance of life’s blessings.
Metanoia: But what of the anger that arises from sexism and racism -- from being treated with disrespect and discrimination simply for the color of one’s skin or for living in a female body? As Lerita’s heart counseled her, the energy of anger, when stored as resentment, only hurts yourself. Instead, put the energy to good use -- set boundaries, create, resist. As Audre Lorde wrote, “Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act. . .” (127). Refuse to be denigrated, but also refuse to turn that anger on others. Let others know what is acceptable and what is not, and then treat them with mercy and a compassion made possible by metanoia — a spiritual change of heart.
Spending days and weeks in the University hospital clinics, I was struck by how artificial and arbitrary are the ways we divide ourselves from each other. Everywhere I looked --infants and elders; female, male, trans; wearing crosses, hijabs, stars of David, pentacles; on crutches, in wheelchairs, and able-bodied; the many hues of black and brown; the tongues of many nations – Hmong, Somali, English, Spanish, Arabic – all of us waiting for labs, for test results, for our fates to be determined. Waiting in chairs, our common humanity is revealed.
“We share a common human nature,” wrote Sam Keen. “The 50 percent of the human race I cast into the category of aliens are fellow humans who, like myself, are faulted, filled with contradictory impulses of love and hate, generosity, and a blind will to survive . . . “ (150). To experience metanoia requires us to recognize that all the qualities of humanity – love, compassion, kindness, hatred, evil, envy fear, violence – are in ourselves as much as anyone else. Accepting “the fullness of our humanity,” wrote bell hooks, “ . . . allows us to recognize the humanity of others” (198). “Metanoia,” Keen continued, “brings the enemy within the circle of co-promising, conversation, and compassion” (150). As Lerita put it so well, “I finally understand that everyone who comes to the earth is here to heal, everyone. A homeless person, a king, or a wall street broker – we are all spiritual beings who are finding our way back home to God. I hold more compassion for people, no matter who they are. . .” (3010).
One need not go through a literal change of heart to experience metanoia. It is possible for all of us, all the time. We may struggle against it, hang on to our grievances and divisions, vilify our enemies, but as Lerita said, “Everyone is just trying to figure it out” (3010).
Love: The central heart wisdom for both Lerita and myself is the importance of love. As Lerita’s new heart spoke to her: “Love is the ultimate, the true emotion of the heart. . . . Love helps you understand that you are part of an interconnected web of relationships; it is designed to help you remember that everyone is connected. Love and connection are the universal message” (2363). In Brian Swimme’s The Universe Is a Green Dragon, the youth asks the teacher what our fullest destiny is, to which the teacher responds, “to become love in human form” (40). This was the lesson I learned when I first faced my mortality in my early twenties, and again with the transplant. I often pondered what life was all about, and the only thing that made sense to me was love – our destiny – to become love in human form.
So, as it turns out, the association of the heart with love is appropriate after all. To become love is the enduring wisdom of the heart.
Sources
Bartlett, Elizabeth. 1997. Journey of the Heart: Spiritual Insights on the Road to a Transplant. Duluth, MN: Pfeifer-Hamilton.
Brown, Lerita Coleman. 2019. When the Heart Speaks, Listen: Discovering Inner Wisdom. Digital edition.
hooks, bell. 2013.Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.
Keen, Sam. 1983. The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1954. Letters to a Young Poet. Revised Ed. Norton, M.D. Herter, Trans. New York: W.W. Norton.
Swimme, Brian. 1985. The Universe Is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story. Santa Fe: Bear & Co.
[i] When the Heart Speaks, Listen: Discovering Inner Wisdom.
[ii] The full Rilke quote is: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Letters to a Young Poet, 35.
[iii] Dr. Brown has since written a book about Howard Thurman, What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman, and conducts retreats, teaches, and has a podcast helping people to access peace and joy in their hearts. Find out more at Lerita Coleman Brown.