The Path of the Heart

In that moment, I lost everything. I felt pain for the first time. I was abandoned and alone. When they cut that cord, my last hope, I knew there was no way back, no way to recapture that feeling of belonging. In that instant, my connection with everything and everyone was destroyed. I not only lost my mother, who was my protector, but the essence of God himself dissolved to a lesser world. The knowingness evaporated into nothingness and through my tears, I lost all meaning of life and love. I was born a coward for I was afraid.

And so my search began for the sanctity of that lost world. I knew that if I sought long enough and hard enough I would find it.

Now, some parents help, they hold you and stroke you, and almost convince you that you are still a part of them. Some don’t. They neglect you and bruise you, and leave you hanging in an emotional abyss, making everything worse than it already is.

First, they send you to school to learn the truth, which rings untrue in the bell tower of your heart. Then, they send you to church, and tell you to pray to some invisible God, repeating some magic words, as if they are trying to appease him. But in your heart of hearts you know that you won’t find him there, because from the beginning he was always around and within you, in silence and in glory and in peace, filling that emptiness with no struggle at all. So you do what they say, and you leave the church empty. But they don’t seem to understand as they recite their catechism, looking for him in empty words that are always changing.

The years continue to pass, and you keep searching despite the difficulties, for something is driving you forward. You grow up despite everything, bodies stretching out, hearts holding more things in, not flowing anymore, but stumbling, not pure, but polluted, then nature takes over, and in the end you survive in this jungle in an animalistic way.

In your heart you are empty and you know that something is very wrong. You don’t quite seem attached to anything or anyone, and you feel like you are floating out there like a bird without a perch, or a ship without a shore. And you keep looking for your immutable faith.

Nothing seems to work, everything is constantly changing, people come and go, accidents happen, you move around in circles as others are born and others die. The cycle continues endlessly.

At times, you experiment with substitutes to fill that need to be connected to something. You form friendships, you maintain relationships, you even get married, but find they weren’t it after all. You are afraid your children will inherit your emptiness.

Sometimes you are soothed and fed, but still unsatisfied. Because somewhere on some level you know that something is missing. Your appetite is being fed, but your hunger remains because it’s all junk food.

Then one day, when you have almost given up hope, and both your heart and your soul are exhausted beyond human resources; when you have stopped running in circles looking at everyone and everything, wondering what it is that you need to find; when you are sitting alone in the stillness of defeat ready to give up, rather than to go on hopeless and conquered by this world which has fed your surface, but left your soul starving; whether by chance or by design, you look inside yourself instead of outside, and in an instant you find Him there.

What surprises you even more is that you can see Him, hear Him, and feel Him, within you and without you, his acknowledgement surrounding you, just as he did before you were born. And somewhere inside you a distant memory reawakens, and you are at peace for the first time in your life, for you have finally come home.

All false lovers fade in the face of true love. In that shining moment of unconditional love, everything falls into place, and you are reborn again. You were born a coward, but now you are a hero, for God is real and you have found Him.