The Heart of Christianity

by Marcus J. Borg

The Bible has many pairs of metaphors for the human condition and our need. These pairs of images portray our predicament and the solution. In bondage, we need liberation. In exile and estranged, we need to return and reconnect. Blind, we need to have our sight restored. In the dark, we need enlightenment. Sick and wounded, we need healing. Hungry and thirsty, we need food and drink. Sinful and unclean, we need forgiveness and cleansing. Dead and entombed, we need to be raised into new life. Yet another of the Bible’s correlative metaphors for our condition and the solution is “closed hearts” and “open hearts.” The condition of the heart matters. The heart, the self at its deepest level, can be turned toward God or away from God, open to God or closed to God.

A closed heart forgets God. It does not remember the one in whom we live and move and have our being; it loses track of the Mystery always around us. A closed heart and exile go together. Self-preoccupied, turned inward upon itself, the shut heart is cut off from a larger reality. Separated and disconnected, it is estranged and in exile. A closed heart lacks compassion. In the Bible, compassion is the ability to feel the feelings of another at a level lower than one’s head, “in the womb,” “in the bowels,” and then to act accordingly. A closed heart does not feel this. Though it can be charitable, it does not feel the suffering of others. For the same reason, a closed heart is insensitive to injustice. Closed hearts and injustice go together. The prophets and Jesus, champions of God’s justice, often indict the condition of the hard heart.

How do hearts become open? The biblical answer: the Spirit of God does it. And the Spirit of God operates through thin places.

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.4

But the notion refers to much more than geographical locations. A thin place is anywhere our hearts are opened. To use sacramental language, a thin place is a sacrament of the sacred, a mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the sacred becomes present to us. A thin place is a means of grace.