Yearn the Heart

The sacred stance of vulnerability - and why it’s so hard

“Yearn the heart forward.”

I brush the hair from my eyes and the sweat from my forehead, half-glaring at the phone on the floor. The workout app I use each morning has a cheerful instructor who calls out this command in the hardest stretches, urging me to bend a little deeper. 

More encouragement than exhortation, I’d heard the words a hundred times before they caught me last week. What a strange line in the midst of a sweaty workout. When you learn to do lectio on daily life, you start to pay attention to the words that leap out at you. So the more I stretched, the more I thought about the deeper truth.

Yearning the heart forward is the stance of vulnerability. You can get hurt if you don’t shield yourself. But it’s also the way I want to walk into the world, willing to love, willing to be loved, knowing that both could hurt but believing the risk is worth the cost.

Turns out that most of my favorite things involve yearning the heart forward. Marriage?  Parenting? Writing? Faith, friendship, service, learning, creativity, compassion, trust? 

All of it yearning, reaching beyond fear, learning to stretch a little deeper each day.

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The word “yearn” finds its roots in old English and German words for “eager.” (I half-cringe, half-sigh when I read this, knowing my own too-earnest and eager ways in the world.) To seek, to strive, to desire — all of this is yearning, and it bends me not just toward my own toes in exercise but toward the other in compassion.

Prayer — especially intercession on others’ behalf — feels like yearning the heart forward. Reaching and stretching toward another, aching and longing for their needs, not just my own, raising hands to God in hope or desperation. How much I want this good gift for my friend, my family member, a perfect stranger: to have an answer, a family, a home, a healing, a job, a community, a freedom, a forgiveness.

We yearn for each other and we yearn for ourselves. This is the movement that keeps us moving forward, stretching toward the source of goodness in God for whom we long.

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When I am working out in the morning, and the calm voice of the instructor tells me to yearn the heart forward, I often want to snap back “no.” This hurts, or I feel like I’m going to fall over, or I’m too tired, or this is too hard. I would rather quit.

But working against that resistance is precisely the point. Leading with the heart can be a painful, uncertain, exhausting, challenging stance. Much easier to withdraw and withhold, to curl back into the protective shell. 

But humans aren’t snails or insects, no exoskeleton to protect us from the outside. We have tender skin and fleshy muscles first, only the bones underneath.

Yearning forward is how we were made.

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Years ago, after I’d started my first blog and was taking baby steps to becoming a writer, someone close to me mocked my work. Likely this has happened a hundred times in my life; we don’t know the conversations people have in our absence; we’ve all passed idle cruelty as gossip. But because this person did it publicly on social media, and because websites tell you where visitors are linking from to reach yours, I saw and read what they did. 

Curious, I had clicked on the referring site from my blog to see why so much traffic was coming from there that day. And when I saw and read what had happened, how easily my words were mocked, how casually the cuts were made, how carelessly others laughed at my expense, my heart sunk all the way back into my chest.

I have never forgotten how that felt, to be made small for what I loved. To be stabbed in the back for yearning the heart forward.

But I realized I had a choice to make that day. I could stop writing, close down the blog, never share another word publicly again, nurse my wounds and carry what I thought was a worthy grudge. Or I could take a deep breath, take a walk outside, get a good night’s sleep, pray a thousand times in the years since to keep forgiving this person (whom I still have to see regularly, by the way, who still has no idea I know), and keep going with what I love. 

This is yearning the heart forward. Loving what we were created and called to love.

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When I was younger, I couldn’t stand the statues of the Sacred Heart in Catholic churches.

My own parish had one in the basement, tucked in a dingy corner by the bathrooms. I’d skitter past it quick as I could without meeting Jesus’ gaze, his downtrodden eyes, his broken fingers (likely the cause of his relegation downstairs) pointing to his bleeding heart. I’d hold my breath and race up the stairs rather than look him full in the face.

Too creepy, too costly a love like that.

But thanks to adulthood, and grief, and the complicated realities of being a Christian in a crumbling world, I have come to cherish that once-scary Sacred Heart, broken and bleeding but still holy, unafraid to show pierced flesh or real wounds.

Now I see the Sacred Heart not as morbid or macabre but proof of the cost of love.

If you love too, if you yearn the heart forward, if you keep going when wounded people wound you, if you keep your eyes and hands fixed on the point and purpose of being a human and seeking the divine, you will wind up with a heart like that. 

Broken and bleeding but still beating. 

Now when I see the statues, or slip into a Sacred Heart church to pray, or catch the gaze of Christ in the icons I keep around me as I pour out my heart on the page, I realize that seeing the Sacred Heart everywhere is part of yearning the heart forward.

This is the conversion of metanoia that breaks us open to compassion, seeing and suffering with everyone else.

It’s a hard time to keep yearning, to long for goodness and beauty and truth in a world wrapped in the opposite. But if I know you’re yearning, and you know I’m yearning, don’t our hearts meet in that deepening stretch of reaching forward, and don’t we find God there among us, always pointing to the sacred truth of what love brings?

Statue from the Chapel of the Sacred Heart at Grand Teton National Park. (I told you I see him everywhere now.)