Bleeding Hearts

I find that thoughts, contained in my mind every day, go unspoken. Often, I choose silence in the name of conformity to culture at large. I’m an agreeable person by character, but my inner world is quite the opposite. I view society around me as plagued by neuroses. Humanity has a broad propensity towards dissonance, hedonism, apathy, chaos, and contempt. All aforementioned qualities represent a broader issue: we have not been reconciled to love. However, in each person lies a desire to seek truth, harmony, love, and justice. Any attempts towards sanity are castrated by the domineering societal desire to numb oneself in any way possible. Materialist culture tells us that we should satiate ourselves through compulsory buying. Patriarchal culture denies half of humanity its very nature, that is, the vulnerability to love and be loved. The communion between fellow neighbors has become perverted. No longer do we wish to connect with one another on the basis of mutual esteem; rather, we search to confine relationships into a box of inauthenticity and mutual transaction. As I see it, the desire for relationship and mode of life based on intimacy, autonomy, esteem, peace, accountability, collective meaning, and compassion is subverted by the systemic dogma of white supremacist, competitive capitalist, individualistic, materialist, ethnocentric, religiously authoritarian, patriarchal society that is the West. Even on a broader scale, this only reflects an expression of the fundamental issue of being a fallible person in a fallible world. We fucked up, we fuck up, and we will continue to fuck up (and that’s okay).

My conformity to this culture has only isolated me from the integration of my inner world and external man. In order to integrate myself in this manner, it is necessary to contribute my perspective to the symposium of human experience. Many articles suggest that in order to start a blog, one should have a niche. My focus is to provide snapshots into my perspective of the human experience. While I don’t want it to be perfect, I do want it to come from a place of desire for a life and idyllically a world based on intimacy, autonomy, esteem, peace, accountability, collective meaning, and compassion. My lens of the world is shaped by my perception of the person who is Jesus Christ. In him, I find, for myself and all of creation, life beyond death. In him, I see the reconciliation of all things. Perhaps most of all, I find that God is love. The nature of God being, “I Am that I Am.” Acute theological study would find that God is in all things; deducing this idea even further, we may see that, since God is love, love permeates all of reality. It is a source that we need only awaken to, and in doing so we drink from the waters of everlasting life – not just life beyond the grave, but a more fully human experience of the life we have now. Through the canonical life of Jesus, I see a love that is true. This love is epitomized in the Passion. Christ’s life was freely laid down so that we may be reconciled to God, to a love that exists beyond the self. In his resurrection, we may see that despite even the slaying of the innocent, in the eyes of God, we are, in our lowest of morality, still worthy of love, compassion, forgiveness, and even our own resurrection. In this, I find ineffable meaning. Christ for me is a person, but also God; a king, but also a slain lamb; a symbol, but also reality; a moral goal, but a liberator of dogmatism; real, but never certain. Am I not making sense yet? Good. Knowing him has returned me to my most fundamental nature: to love and to be loved.

I welcome the reader to join me in engaging with the world from the heart. During the Passion story, Jesus’s heart was pierced. Both blood and water gushed from his wound. Much of being a “Christian” for me has been a journey of embracing my own necessary suffering and life alike. The bleeding heart of Christ serves as an allusion to this. In engaging with the world from an open heart, our fate is to feel pain, but alongside it exists love, joy, connection, faith, and great meaning. Let’s do it. Together, bleeding hearts.