The heartbeat, the core of the ‘Great Charter for Justice’ (sometimes called the 10 commandments) is a Command to Love God, and a Command to Love our neighbour as ourselves. Each generation adapts the charter to meet the new situation. In theory, they might add something new, but they must never do it is such a way that it causes heart failure. In reality, new traditions take on a power of their own. The distinction between the heart and the edge becomes unclear. What was once a matter of the heart can become an obsession with externals.
The problem is that the heart is on the inside. It cannot be measured directly. External behaviours are on the outside and can be, or so it seems, be more easily measured. Clean hands, pots and pans can be scrutinised. But the heart may not be available for inspection. Therefore, the guardians of the ‘tradition’ are prone to policing externals. They ask trivial questions and forget to ask the important one. They can no longer distinguish God’s Command from human custom.
But the Beloved Son of God lives out of the Heart, the Centre. He confronts their hypocrisy. He confronts their refusal to hold the inner love of God and neighbour and the outer ways this can be embodied as one dance.
These guardians of the law, the Scribes and the Pharisees, are concerned with ritual defilement, about putting something ‘unclean’ inside yourself. They move from the outside in, and fret about contamination. With this in mind, all of their energy is focused on the outside world and whatever might make someone unclean.
But Jesus, like all good spiritual teachers, is more concerned about moral defilement, and the havoc it unleashes in the world. This happens in exactly the opposite way. It begins and grows in the human heart, in the cultivation of evil thoughts and intentions. People are destructive from the inside out if their hearts are fixated on fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, slander, envy. Discover what is driving these things and you may know how to make Peace.
But this is the problem. We can agree with Jesus that the heart is a strange landscape, but the reason why we do certain things may not be clear to us. This is why we need to know ourselves well. This is why we need to come regularly to confession. This is why we need the gift of a friend who challenges our worst behaviours and tells us the truth about ourselves. As we become more aware of what drives us we have better choice in whether to go with it or not. If we surround ourselves with ‘flunkies’ who only tell us what we want to hear, we might never grow in wisdom or understanding. Worst still, we might be destroying love and not know how to reverse the trend.
Over the course of my life, I have been invited by certain events and challenged by friends to take a good hard look on the ‘inside’. I do not find this kind of inner scrutiny easy or enjoyable. Knowing my hidden self doesn’t always match the scrubbed up persona I like to present to the world. Lifting the veil and humbly acknowledging who I really am is not an activity most are willing to do. But when I have found the courage to shine a light into my darkness there has always been a payoff. I find I can be a better person. Perhaps this is what Carl Jung meant when he said that we grow up, not by entertaining figures of light, but by making our darkness visible.
