Holy God, Have Mercy Upon Our Hard Hearts
Guest Commentary of The Very Rev. Heather VanDeventer | St. John’s Cathedral
Recently I went with my younger kiddo and my mom and step-father to the Utah Shakespeare Festival. I first went to the festival in the mid-80’s, and my folks have gone nearly every year since 1981.
While it has been over 20 years since I have been able to go with them, I enjoy being back around the festival and having the opportunity to be immersed in theater for a few days.
The two Shakespeare plays that we saw are not often performed — “Timon of Athens” and “Coriolanus.” There are various theories about why they are rarely performed, including speculation about how much (or little) of them was written by Shakespeare. But in the end, I think that part of why these two plays are not performed as often as “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “King Lear” and “Richard III” is that it these two plays end with a particular kind of tragedy.
Hope versus hardness
At the end of “Romeo and Juliet,” I come away with hope that the feuding families will live into a fresh start. At the end of “Richard III,” there is a good king who follows. Even the end of “King Lear” — written around the time of “Timon of Athens” and “Coriolanus” — has the next ruler determined to end the civil war.
But at the end of “Timon of Athens” and of “Coriolanus,” the audience is left with characters whose hearts are hardened. Timon chooses to crawl into a cave and die with hatred of humankind after most of his friends and his “friends” have spurned him and been unwilling to come to his aid. His heart is so hardened that he cannot see the kindness shown to him by a truly faithful servant, nor the invitation to explore the why of humanity with a philosopher who has become an ascetic in the hills.
Coriolanus has a disdain for the common people which eats him up and sets him at odds with Rome his beloved home. He dives into hatred of his own city and people and leads the army of a neighbor against Rome — only to be called back to his sense of honor by his mother, then negotiating a peace between the two cities. But by then his hardened heart has infected his fellow commander of the Volscians, whose warriors beat Coriolanus to death before living into the peace.
What does the Bible say about the hard heart?
In various places in the Bible, we read about hardness of heart. This condition results from not listening to God and ignoring ways of following God — think of Pharaoh in Exodus and also about how some of God’s people stopped following God at Meribah.
There is an arrogance that goes along with hardness of heart, as well as being stubborn and unwilling to listen to others. Soft-hearted people are sometimes characterized as being mild-mannered and maybe even as pushovers, but those who are tender-hearted remember to make space for others, which is one way of respecting the dignity of other human beings.
Hard hearts of hatred in Spokane
In the past week, there have been various local incidents of hatred — from a Christian nationalist worship gathering to racist graffiti and white supremacist leafleting in Spokane neighborhoods.
There is hardness of heart in these events, as well as fear of those who seem to be different. When we reaffirm our baptismal covenant, we are called to turn our backs on the ways the world tries to lure us into being hard-hearted and instead to turn to Jesus and follow in his ways of being soft-hearted.
My prayer
Every week brings new situations that call for our prayers.
I presume that your heart, like mine, has ached for those who had to evacuate from the local fires and for those whose homes and businesses were destroyed.
There are other situations, nearby and far away, that may make you, like me, so frustrated or disgusted with your fellow human beings. When you feel your heart getting ready to give up on the world and become a Timon or a Coriolanus, pause and breathe. Feel the beat of your soft and pliable heart and enter that space of prayer to listen for a word from God. May you hear a word of guidance, a word of counsel and a word of hope.
I share with you one of my favorite centering prayers, the Trisagion. It is a prayer from the Eastern Orthodox traditions that is found in various places in the Book of Common Prayer, including the Eucharist, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. I like to say it out loud, three times, and with some slowness or weight to it, although there are times when I say it many more than three times silently or aloud as a breath prayer.
Holy God,
Holy and Mighty,
Holy Immortal One.
Have mercy upon us.
The Very Rev. Heather VanDeventer has served as Dean of the Cathedral since August 2018. She is a graduate of Yale University and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. She is married to the Rev. Dr. David Gortner, and they have two school-age children. They are excited to be in the Inland Northwest and participate in the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement in Spokane.
I confess that the Book of Common Prayer, despite its contributions to English, and consequently, to American society, never really resonated with me. When I pray, opening to the divine, I don’t follow a liturgy, especially that which had been imposed upon me from a young age. Why? It treated the whisperings of a love relationship like it was a business transaction. Worse yet, any level of thankfulness and hope was always drowned out by an extensive pleading for mercy, recognizing forgiveness only at the end of a closing “Amen” devoid of its true meaning; and leaving me to slip back into a “sinful” state as soon as I remembered that I had schoolwork to do, taking me away from any state of “prayer” I knew. Instead of teaching hope in God, it led a whold congregation to deeper bitterness every week, sermons regularly degenerating to blasting the “Communists” into the fires of hell with anathemas. The end seems to have been exactly that to which you’ve drawn attention. I recall a woman who seemed to epitomize this, who saw me in a library, imagined I was “Mother God” somhow, and kept begging me for forgiveness. We often must sound to God a lot like that hapless woman.
Eventually, I came to understand hope more than I had, and what a gift it truly is, partly by recognizing its role in faith: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebews 11:1) Hope grows with faith and nurtures it. Faith cannot be faith without it. But there’s a difference. Faith relies upon some kind of evidence. To the Christian, it’s evidence of the resurrection of Y’shua. But sooner or later, hope must take a leap, not of faith, but without any evidence by which it can exercise its existence, and when it does, an inner muse has awakened. Perhaps we should recognize faith as a sort of “training wheels of hope” in that respect. I think there’s a spiritual dynamic to be realized, and it can only happen as a grace, a grace not defined by “undeserved love,” but by an endowment of a good beyond ourselves that awakens us to possibilities we had never imagined.