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The Deceitful Heart
The heart is deceitful above all things; who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9
In the new lectionary the readings are chosen on the basis of the similarities between them: God’s word in the Old Testament parallels God’s word in the New Testament. Today the similarity would seem to consist in the mixture of blessings and curses uttered by the prophet Jeremiah, on the one hand, and by the Lucan Jesus, on the other.
We are all familiar with the Beatitudes, which we used to memorize in Sunday school, but the version with which we are familiar is from Matthew’s gospel (5:3-12). In Luke the blessings (6:20-23) are coupled with the Woes (vv.24-25). The blessing on the poor (v.20) is followed by a curse on the rich (v.24),
In Jeremiah the curse comes first: “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man” (17:5), followed by the beatitude, “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord” (v.7).
Luke has been called the evangelist of the poor; he underlines the danger of wealth in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man (16:19-31), who simply did not see the poor beggar who was lying at his gate (v.20). How we act in the world depends on how we see the world, and that is why I have chosen as my text Jeremiah’s lament about the deceitfulness of the human heart.
Often we deceive ourselves, thinking we are perceiving or doing one thing, when the actual situation, unknown to us, is quite different. The mechanism of such illusions is projection. Projection is the process of unconsciously placing somewhere else a need, a value, a concern, or a fear that has its proper place in me. Since I do not recognize it in myself, I deal with it as something external. I am deceived by my illusion and fail to grasp that the real event is taking place in the lights and shadows of my own inner life.
The poet Robert Burns asks God to give us the grace to see ourselves as others see us. This would certainly be a start. Through projections I put the stamp of my soul on everything; everything is made in my image, according to my unconscious drives and needs.
To work through our projections is to become conscious of things as they really are and of how, by distorting them, we have given them power over us. Only through this process of working through our projections, a process which lasts a lifetime, can we become conscious and free human beings. This is the key to using all things well, with detachment, in proportion to the goal of conscious, integrated wholeness.
In the end, the blessings and the curses, whether of Jeremiah or of the gospel, cancel each other out. We can only do what is right if we can see what is right. This is the challenge of inner work, of healing the blindness within, of recognizing our inner poverty and opening ourselves to the divine light.
February 15, 2009
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