Direction of the Heart
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
I heard an amazing story this week about a bike rider. With the Tour d’France – I say it like an American, no? – going on, you might well assume that it was about one of the riders there. A friend and bike enthusiast wrote a long blog post this week, in fact, describing his views on the superiority of bike riders versus American football players. Incredible stories of bike riders are all the rage this week with riders in intense competition.
But the story is even more amazing than the one about the car that knocked two riders off their bikes. One actually went like a windmill across a barbed wire fence. Both got up and finished the day’s race.
This story starts with an orphan in Rwanda: Gasore Hategeka. He isn’t sure how old he was when his father died, leaving him on his own. Close as he knows, he was 9 or 10 when it happened in 1997. He is even unsure how it all happened, perhaps it was the alcohol and tuberculosis, or perhaps he fell victim to the genocide that overtook that African country, Gasore tells a story of armed men taking his father away.
However it happened, he became a street kid and scavenged for a living, collecting up bits of potato or onion, if he was lucky he got a banana. What he did mostly – at least it sounds to me like it’s what he did mostly – was survive. Once he was old enough, the local potato dealers hired him to help fill sacks with potatoes, and he began to get a coin or two or three. Because he could live on nothing already, he put the money aside.
He graduated to carting potatoes around on a wooden bike. Everything, including the wheels were carved from wood, some pieces rough hewn with machetes. Finally he began loading the potato trucks and was earning 500 Rwandan francs a day, the equivalent of 50 pence.
There was only one thing he would spend his money on, and he would save to be able to do it: he got bike lessons. Early memories of riding on a bike with his father lingered, but even more an early fascination with the machine, how it worked, what it could do inspired him. He had watched the riders who took part in the Tour of Rwanda, a multi-stage bike race modelled on the one in France, but in Rwanda’s rugged terrain, and dreamed of being one.
He saved enough over time to buy a sack of potatoes. One hundred kilos for just 10,000 francs, just over £10. The only thing that he had from his father was a small plot of land, and he planted it with potatoes. The harvest gave him four times what he had before, and he immediately thought of buying himself a bike. This became his new means of making money, his bike a taxi for both passengers and cargo. The Rwandan bike team set up their training camp near to where he lived just before he began his taxi service, and when coming upon them, he would race to keep up with them no matter if he had a passenger or cargo with him. And he began to train in earnest, discovering the joy of giving your all to a pursuit, those moments of flow when your whole being is taken up with the task.
Encouraged by one of the bike team members, he entered some local races, went on to district races, and finally to a national race. He showed up with this old, heavy, re-welded, single speed battered bike, and did well enough for the coach of the team to take notice. They invited him to join and gave him a proper racing bike. That was in 2009, just less than a year after he’d bought his first bike.
As I noted earlier, I think at least in the early part of his life, his only real work was staying alive, and somewhere and somehow in the midst of it, he discovered something that he turned his heart toward, set his intention toward, and that led him to the life of a professional athlete.
And lest you think that this focus has made him a driven man with a single focus on winning, know that last November when the trials were being held to determine which seven African road racers were going to be allowed to enter the Olympics, Gasore rode with incredible intensity, taking the lead in the early part of the race (that is, for 45 miles). He fell back finally, for a breather, and another Rwandan colleague started to take the lead only to have his chain break as he stood to make his move. Gasore immediately traded bikes with his friend. He made up much of the lost time, but not enough to make the cut. Adrien, the colleague and his country’s best hope for winning in the Olympics, did thanks to his sacrifice.
Human beings, the human spirit sometimes leave me breathless.
There are some people in the world who are simply different from the rest of us. Gasore Hategeka is one of those kinds of people. He is like the Mother Teresa of biking, the kind of person who can direct his attention to something and hold it.
The rest of us, I suspect, live somewhat different lives. Straying in one direction or another, forgetful, distracted, we make our way through our days, get done enough of what needs accomplishing and bump along.
This isn’t to say that most human beings are bumbling creatures, but only that there are surely fewer of us who have this kind of clarity of purpose in our lives. It isn’t to say that we don’t have times of great focus. It is to say that it takes practice, ongoing practice in our lives.
About six weeks ago, I stumbled upon a spiritual practice developed by poet Merle Feld. She reworks a Jewish custom of prayer in morning, afternoon and evening into a writing practice with some questions and suggestions for focus in writing. The morning practice is described like this: ‘Mindfully entering the day, setting your intention, your kavannah, for the day.’
New words always excite me, so I searched out what kavannah meant. It is Hebrew, and is mostly translated as ‘intention’, but most sources I read also suggested that its meaning was something closer to ‘direction of the heart’. One sets a kavannah when donning the prayer shawl, taking a moment to remind oneself of the purpose of the next moments. Rabbi Marsha Falk says this about it:
For me, ‘directing the heart’ is less about the willed or deliberate focusing of awareness than about the alignment of thought and feeling. It has to do with authenticity, by which I mean both honesty and sincerity. I cannot pray with my heart if the words I am saying do not ring with truth for me; at the same time, sometimes all words are wrong, and one must allow the heart to speak with silence.
‘The alignment of thought and feeling’, bringing honesty and sincerity to the moment. This is one of those things that are simple but not easy. How is it that we align ourselves, and bring what is most authentic into the moment?
Seeking some sort of mindfulness is a practice that can be found in some way in all of the world’s religion. Each has a different slant, each has its own way to encourage paying attention to the moments.
The Buddhist tradition is perhaps the most familiar in our age, and Thich Nhat Hanh is likely the most prolific and known proponent of it. What he suggests is also simple but not easy to do. His description of washing the dishes is a classic statement of what it means to be mindful in our lives. How many things do you do with without really being present? How much of your life is spent not doing what you’re doing at the moment, but working on auto-pilot – washing dishes, or hoovering the steps or driving – while in your head reworking the past, or worrying about the future? As Hanh has commented, being in the moment is a matter of practice. It isn’t something we do naturally, but it is something we can learn, and keeping at it, can live more and more in the present moment, not taken away from what is here, now.
But mindfulness – which is increasingly used as a companion treatment to heart disease, cancer, and even mental illness – means something more than just looking to the present moment. It’s also about what we bring to that moment, and what comes from it. Laurel Hallman, creator of the ‘Living by Heart’ process that some of our members went through last year, talks about the discovery of spaciousness in her life when she began to set aside time each day to set her intentions, to remember the words of wisdom that inspired her, and to notice the world around her. Somehow, when she was further into her day, when caught by whatever dramas and worries came along, she found room to make choices, to not simply respond out of reactivity. She found how to bring her best self to the moment, to act deeply from her heart not to move thoughtlessly out of anger or hurt or disappointment.
To follow the direction of the heart: to be intentional in your life, authentic in what you do, that’s the point of it all. It’s about what might be called holy living, increasingly bringing your best self into all you do.
Simple, but not easy. And this work of the heart, this directing of the heart is arduous, but worth every bit of the effort. For with each time we move from within our hearts, we touch the world with healing, with hope, with peace with love. And while I am moved by stories such as that of Gasore and astonished by his intensity, the focus, the purpose that has transformed his life, I am equally left breathless by any time one of us is able to shift from anger to love, from bitterness to forgiveness. I am left breathless by the human capacity to transform the dross of life into something golden and dear. And you do that every day, I know you do, every one of you.
This gift of life, this breath, this miracle of human love that comes to us unbidden and undeserved is ours each moment. May we each direct our hearts to treasure it and expand it moment to moment, day by day, world without end.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life
as we prepare to go out
into the world
with all its worry,
with all its beauty,
attend us,
you who are never far.
Keep open our eyes
that we may see the shape of our lives
in all it is in sadness
in love and hope
in loss and difficulty
and peace and contentment.
If our hearts are narrowed
by the events of our days,
open us again, we pray.
If we become lost
in the forest of what has been,
lost in the hurts and traumas,
gently guide us to see
the threads of love and hope
remind us we pray.
The days pass,
and sometimes we forget,
so be with us,
open us,
guide us,
help us to centre our hearts
and live,
as much as we can,
in the light of love.