Stage Five — HEALING

How is the heart healed?

A Word Before the Fifth Stage

My friend,

I want to say something before we start, and I want you to hold onto it through everything that follows, because this is the stage where people get hurt if the frame is wrong.

This stage is not a punishment. It is a hospital.

You have just come through Community, and I suspect you are tired. That stage is beautiful and exhausting, and it does something to a person that nothing else does: it shows you yourself. The friction of living close to others has a way of surfacing what solitude kept politely hidden — the spark of pride when you are corrected, the sudden impatience, the coldness you did not know you were capable of until someone crossed you.

If that happened to you, you may have concluded that you have gone backwards.

You have not. Let me be as clear as I know how:

Seeing your own wounds is not failure. It is the first evidence that healing has become possible. You cannot heal what you have not seen. A man who cannot see his condition is not healthy — he is merely undiagnosed, and undiagnosed things go on quietly doing damage for decades.

I thought I was considerably further along than I was, until the friction of shared life demonstrated otherwise. That demonstration was the most useful thing that happened to me in twenty years, and it felt at the time like a collapse.

Now three warnings about how to walk through here, because this material can be used against yourself.

First: the aim is an honest heart, not a perfect one. You are not looking for a clean report. You are looking for an accurate one.

Second: despair is not humility. It wears the same clothes and it is actually a form of pride — a refusal to accept that mercy applies to you on the same terms as everyone else. If this stage produces in you a settled conviction of worthlessness,

something has gone wrong in the reading, and I would ask you to come back to this page.

Third: some wounds need more than a book. I am going to talk about the examination of the heart, and it is genuinely healing work. But there are injuries — trauma, real depression, the aftermath of things done to you rather than by you — where self-examination is the wrong instrument and can make things considerably worse. If what surfaces here is larger than a fault, treat it as larger than a fault. Tell a doctor, a counselor, someone competent. That is not a detour from this road. Refusing to do it is.

Four chapters. Hope first, then attention, then diagnosis, then the healing of what happens between you and other people.

We go inward now, and steeply. But we are going in with a physician, not a prosecutor.