Title: A Woman’s Journey to
the Heart of God
Author: Cynthia
Heald
Date: 1997
Publisher: Nelson
ISBN: 0-7852-6820-0
Length: 234
pages plus 5 pages of endnotes
Quote: “The
Bible is the guidebook to the heart of God.”
First of
all let’s note that Heald describes her vocation as a ministry to teach young
women.
Stereotypical men are meant to
be turned off by the sentimental language in this book. Women who want
Christianity to mean that it’s their duty to be “happy” or “popular” are meant
to be seduced by it, although they may be disappointed that that’s not what the
book’s about.
As regular
readers know, there’s nothing new in me saying
that Christians should be careful not to confuse being a Christian with the
worldly ideals of “happiness” or “popularity” (that so conspicuously meant so
little to Jesus). Christians have much to be happy about and should be good
friends to have, but “happiness” and “popularity” are luxuries that aren’t
necessarily available to everyone.
If we are
healthy we’ll tend to feel cheerful (eupeptic), and if we’re not we may feel
anxious, depressed, grumpy, or exhausted—and although distracting ourselves
from those feelings can help us work through them, the spiritual life, all by
itself, won’t change our physical condition. The feelings will persist.
If we live
in places, or attend churches, or work in offices, where adults re-create
the social patterns of middle school social cliques, the mere fact that we’re
following Jesus and not the Queen Bee of the ruling clique will make us
conspicuously unpopular.
And in fact
the way too many church ladies try to seem
happy and popular, in order to give others a good impression of their
Christian life etc. etc., actually has a repulsive effect on people who may be
Christians but shudder at the thought of being like those weird, creepy church
ladies.
Or like
their male equivalents. A boy I liked at university (who was a Christian) once agreed to go
with me to a prayer meeting “as long as they don’t ask me to pray out loud, or
hug other guys.” I assured him that this group didn’t do that sort of tacky
stuff. So of course that was the night some idjit decided to try doing
them...Talk about the Christian Life’s Embarrassing Moments. This is a woman’s
review of a woman’s book addressed to women readers, but the problems
definitely have their male counterparts. Christian men should write about them.
We need
more writing, generally, addressed to Christians who are not going to find
fellowship among the evangelical extroverts.
Long ago an
extrovert church lady asked me, “How can you
see another person, a whole separate child of God, and not want to get to know him or her, not want to claim that person as a friend?”
I said, “Of
all the people you’ve claimed as friends in your life...if you get paid on
Friday, and on Wednesday you have one loaf of bread left and no money, and one
of your friends hasn’t got even a loaf of bread before Friday, how many of your
friends would get half of your loaf?”
“Well...well,
none of them, actually,” she spluttered.
“The people
I want to call friends,” I said, “are the ones who’d get half of my last loaf
of bread.”
I was
underwhelmed by one of Cynthia Heald’s other books, a strangely mismatched
collection of “morning devotional”
pieces with a focus on “calm” that struck me as suitable for bedtime reading,
but downright unhealthy for mornings.(Maybe living with a hypothyroid patient sensitized me to the dangers of inappropriate clinging to “calm.”) I was tempted to start burning this one when I read the nauseous opening poem about how “Sorrow...is a
carefully chosen tool in [God’s] hand.”
We need laws about this kind of...of blasphemy. God is not the sort of
stupid, abusive parent who thinks we need to inflict pain on children to teach
them things. God has enough sense to know that, of the ways people learn
things, pain is the least efficient. Rather, God allows us to make choices that
have consequences, many of which involve sorrow. It’s important for new
Christians to know that the joy of the spiritual life does not remove all
future feelings of grief and pain, that some people have in fact become better
singers by singing through the pain of arthritis; but I wish churches could
agree that people who pretend that (always other
people’s) sorrow is going to make them better people, smirk-smirk, need to be made better people, immediately, by
the discipline of flagellation. Whack! “Since
you like sorrow, Sister Heald, please tell your students how you believe the
blood running down your back is making you a better person today!” Whack!
Fortunately
there’s not a lot of rubbish about the supposed value of sorrow in this book,
although there is some. Most of the book is standard advice about the spiritual
life: faith, forgiveness, study, worship, prayer, practicing virtue, choosing
the right company, putting God first, witness, acts of charity, arranged in the
sequence Heald found new Christians facing each thing. Each chapter draws on
the Bible and quotes a few older devotional books. Heald tries to be tactful,
often evading any specific or practical details that might embarrass the
readers to whom they’d be useful, but occasionally aiming a firm point at
herself: “I will never be alone with another man.” “I was in the wrong.” “I
have asked for direction, but...”
One nugget
of real wisdom appears on page 97. It is customary for Christian writers to
repeat the standard advice that everybody needs to go to church. In an ideal
world, church meetings would be the place where we all found “wise traveling
companions” and were drawn to “that which is lovely and Christlike.” In the
real world, I’ve known many Christians who found that “living a radically
obedient life,” in the sense of reserving a day for “rest,” prayer, and
worship, was incompatible with churchgoing; in fact, for some of us going to
church seemed to be “walking with fools.”
People who
instantly want to claim everyone as a “friend,” without particularly admiring
the so-called “friend,” without having shared any meaningful experience with
the person, without feeling any special loyalty to the person, are not offering
love and good will to humankind. Their real motive is fear. They are
fundamentally very unhappy, probably because their brains aren’t fully
developed, and they try to control their inner pain by controlling the people
around them. That is what is really going on when they demand attention for
themselves. Because of their neediness and lack of respect for others, they are
positively dangerous to any younger Christian who might ever mistake the
neurotic ideas that spew out of their ever-babbling mouths for a “message from
Heaven.” Given half a chance, they’ll indulge their craving to feel “one up” by
tearing their “friends” down, and their advice will become more of a “message
from Satan.”
In
contemporary North American culture, they tend to have learned that they can always attack introverts just because
we’re not extroverts, and “if you really had a loving heart...” blah blah blah.
Introverts need to be vigilant about this. I’m not sure how much churches can
do about it short of flagellation.
I don’t know whether
flagellation or any other discipline could improve a true extrovert very much,
since they have incomplete
brains, but just shutting them up might make churchgoing a little less harmful to serious Christians. And
getting them out of the churches, where they do not, in the strict sense,
belong, might bring serious Christians back in.
Meanwhile,
introverts who are serious about following Jesus no doubt need to be careful
about association with people who drink and gamble and use bad language, as
everyone has heard, but I have found that I need to be even more careful about
association with verbal abusers. Like my self-accepting introvert friends, I enjoy health, sanity, and sobriety
too much to be seriously tempted by the sins of the flesh. On the other hand
some introverts are naturally so hyper-conscientious that we take verbal abusers’ accusations
seriously and lose the faith to despair, and others of us are naturally
inclined to return every verbal attack that is served to us. Neither of those things
draws us nearer to the heart of God. In fact the company of extroverts generally
tends to drive me away from God, even if they are bullying someone else, or
merely wasting time. Wise choice of friends means that, until I know for sure
that people are wise and loyal and particularly
congenial to me, the time I spend with them needs to be brief and impersonal.
The fewer words, the better. My practice of mercy and charity, toward all the
people who are my neighbors (or townsfolk or fellow believers) but are not
called to be my close friends, thrives on “conversations” that consist of orders, prices, and thanks.
So what is
the nugget that’s worth the price of the book, on page 97? Buy a copy and find
out.
There may
well be churches in which some introverts feel drawn to “that which is lovely
and Christlike.” As a young singer I visited many churches, throughout the
Eastern States, and I can’t say I found one; what I remember as being “lovely
and Christlike” were rare experiences and seem, upon reflection, to have been
limited to songs or windows. If you feel that you really are supported,
respected, and affirmed in following Jesus’ example, at a church, by all means
join it. If you find a church where “fellowship” is understood entirely as the feeling people get, when
kneeling between pews and columns and hearing unseen living voices join a song
or prayer from the other sides of those separating devices, that other people you know nothing about are worshipping the same God along with you, even that
is a wonderful thing.
Personally,
I have had to find my Christian fellowship in the way Heald explains on page 97
of A Woman’s Journey to the Heart of God,
with or without the companionship of other Christians who didn’t find Christian
fellowship in the organized churches either. And if I’d found an evangelical
Christian book that mentioned this idea sooner—at least ten years before this
book was published—I would have felt blessed.
