I am currently reading the Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis & John Eldredge. It is fantastic to get a book in the hand where every paragraph hits you like a freight train and you must pause and let God settle the dust left from the impact.
The book starts out by stating that:
“above else, the Christian life is a love affair of the heart”1
The sacred romance goes on to suggest that we loose that love by neglecting our hearts desire and passion in order to conform with our religious system rather than staying in tune with God’s heart.
We divorce our hearts and begin to live a double life2
I found this Merton quote over at Louie Louie that describes that divorce as being closed to Salvation by denying our inner life, our hearts
I have used the word revolt in connection with solitude. Revolt against what? Against a notion of salvation that is entirely legal and extrinsic and can be achieved no matter how false, no matter how shriveled and fruitless one’s inner life really is. This is the worst ambiguity: the impression that one can be grossly unfaithful to life, to experience, to love, to other people, to one’s own deepest self, and yet be “saved” by an act of stubborn conformity, by the will to be correct. In the end this seems to me to be fatally like the act by which one is lost: the determination to be “right” at all costs, by dint of hardening one’s core around an arbitrary choice of a fixed position.3
Again talking about the separation or divorce of the outer and inner self. And how the posture of being right at al costs, even if it is right with God by service is a deception and a distraction from the wooing of the romancer calling you out to begin that romance, that love affair of the heart.
I have called you by name, you are mine…..You are precious in my sight and honoured, and I love you (Isiah 43:1, 4a)
God has pursued us with a fierce, scandalous and unrelenting love since the dawn of time, he wil persist by calling you in your heart, and by reconciling your outer life with the inner life of the heart and reconciling the inner life of the heart with God we will find him, and we will be made whole through a love affair of the heart. A love affair between you and God.
