once upon a time, i fell in love
the sacred romance by john eldredge & brent curtis changed my life.
In some deep place within, we remember what we were made to be, we carry with us the memory of gods, image-bearers walking in the Garden. So why do we flee our essence? As hard as it may be for us to see our sin, it is far harder still for us to remember our glory. The pain of the memory of our former glory is so excruciating, we would rather stay in the pigsty than return to our true home. We are like Gomer, wife of the prophet Hosea, who preferred to live in an adulterous affair rather than be restored to her true love. Like Helen [of Troy], we participated in our capture, though we were duped into it. And like Helen, our king has come for us, in spite of our unfaithfulness. If it is true that our identity comes from the impact we have on others, then our deepest and truest identity comes from the impact we’ve had on our most significant Other. Listen to the names he has given us: “No longer will they call you Deserted…. They will be called the Holy People, the Redeemed of the LORD; and you will be called Sought After” (Isa. 62:4, 12). In other words, we are the ones to be called Fought Over, Captured and Rescued, Pursued. - The Sacred Romance, John Eldredge (pg. 102)1
Look, others have gone through worse than I. I’m aware of that truth. Suffering isn’t a comparison game—it’s not a game at all. All I know is the pain that I experienced over the last six years is pain enough to be going on with. There are those among us pilgrims and travelers who have undergone broken marriages—either their own or their parents’—, the passing of a treasured person, financial destitution, depression, isolation, crime, and much more that I can’t list here, because the ways in which evil works are endless. But like I said, broken is as broken does. And we aren’t comparing how many pieces we shattered into when we’re on the ground side by side trying to glue our shards back together. I thought I’d preface, to prevent backbiting later on (thanks in advance).
In contrast to virtue-signalling or airing my ‘trauma’, I’m writing from the heart, painful as some of it may be. I pray that the Lord uses my transparency to create a piece that exudes the love of Jesus Christ, no matter the difficulties you may be facing personally or the tragedies you’ve been encumbered with for years of your life. We all have wounds that intersect with one another on our respective journeys and my hope is that by you getting a glimpse into my inner struggles while I read The Sacred Romance, walking with me down this road, you’ll get to uncover your own longings and heartbreak.
A heart in the attic
2024 was a toughie. Not exactly what I’d call a stellar year. Wouldn’t really go back and do it again, although I’m happy (that’s not quite the word) to have walked through the experiences that I did. Neither would I call it a ‘mixed’ bag of a year, as most are. In the eyes of most people, there were some seriously low lows, which took a long time of me falling to level off. Not many highs ‘balanced’ it out. I’m a pessimist, sure. But honestly I’m not ashamed of that. Some people lean one way, others, another direction.
Enchanting moments may have been farther apart and harder to grasp compared to the darkness that I encountered last year, and really, the past six years of my life, since entering into adulthood. Even still, they were there. Always present, keeping me barely alive when at moments, I wanted my life to be done with.
I found them present in reading A Grief Observed in one sitting, when I only meant to flip through it.
Hugging a friend and being welcomed into her apartment, drinking peppermint tea as I sat and beared my heart before her.
Even in those many days when I literally had to get out of bed as slowly as a sloth because I didn’t have it in me to really rise at all.
Going on walks where I lingered near the edge of the lake and pondered what the heck had gone so wrong?
God was there. For a long time, I felt like that. That God was there, but not here.
A visible gap, between a God inside the narrative and a God who orchestrates the narrative, was apparent to me. I couldn’t reconcile the two. It didn’t seem likely that God could really show up inside a person so broken and in situations as tenebrous as my own.
2024 didn’t feel like it was filled with light, and my heart knew it.
For the past six years, since graduating childhood, I’d begun to seek solace in anything just to keep my heart quiet and submissive. Although I have the words to put to it now, I didn’t know then that I was starving my heart, which is to say, the center of my entire being.
Frusturated by our heart’s continuing sabotage of a dutiful “Christian” life, some of us silence the voice [of our hearts] by locking our heart away in the attic, feeding it only the bread and water of duty and obligation until it is almost dead, the voice now small and weak.” As John continues, “But sometimes in the night, when our defenses are down, we still hear it call to us, oh so faintly—a distant whisper (pg. 3).
The whisper, is none other than the voice of God. Like Samuel struggling to know if he heard rightly, it has taken me years (and many sessions in professional counseling) to even be willing to acknowledge it. Rather than accept Jesus Christ into my heart, the most vunerable part of me, I accepted Him into every other area. Into my speech, my head, my hands and feet. In other words, into my areas of information and action.
The heart does not respond to principles and programs; it seeks not efficiency, but passion. Art, poetry, beauty, mystery, ecstasy: These are what rouse the heart. Indeed, they are the language that must be spoken if one wishes to communicate with the heart. It is why Jesus so often taught and related to people by telling stories and askig questions. His desire was not just to engage their intellects but to capture their hearts (pg. 7).
I sang alongside Taylor Swift, “I keep these longings locked in lowercase, inside a vault.” Before TTPD was even released, my heart knew these lines like the back of my own hand, but I ignored their pleas.
Not until recently was I forced to reconcile how emotional of a human being I was with the way the world was trying to snuff it out of me. There was a painful awakening to my huge heart and why I was personally struggling so cruelly with these repressed longings. It took my therapist explaining that my heart was little more than a chip off the old ice block for me to see an issue (although it was more kindly put. Much love, A.)
What could have been an immense asset in my life became my own worst enemy and victim at once. So much love could have been poured out and recieved in my relationship with God and others was missed.
Even after I began to recognize the voice inside, I doubled down religiously, and prayed that God would just discipline my heart more to be focused spiritually, not wander while I was praying, and all in all, make me some sort of animatronic saint. All the while, my heart was languishing because I was caught up in other Christians telling me things like, “The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). I wasn’t sure how to reconile verses like that with others like Proverbs 4:23.
Worshipping a wild God
Something else that came up as I was reading through the book was this very real impression that the God of my imaginings was not precisely God in actuality.
I was thrown by this, more than somebody should be after having read through Job recently and grown up on Narnia. Lewis depicts God as Aslan the Lion. Neither tame or safe, he roams when or where he wishes, nobody expecting him to make their problems disappear or keep them in a saran wrapped bubble. Four children went to war without him (he did show up at the tail-end of the affair). Another child was allowed to wander around creepy desert tombs for a few nights. Yet another was physically harmed by the lion himself. Doesn’t seem like quite the kind of King anyone in their right mind would want to engage with, let alone lovingly follow.
We haven’t yet gotten to Job. Famously, God thunders, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know!” Ouch. Come on, God. I’m suffering here. Can’t I get some answers? sums up the whole scroll of Job’s story. Heck, the guy wasn’t even an Israelite, part of God’s chosen people. Job never got answers. He was never told why everything was stripped away, neither was he given an explanation of why he was returned twice the amount he lost.
I’m tempted to side with Brent as he writes, “I am filled with no small outrage as well as an anxiety that wants to ask for a much smaller part in the play than Job had; or probably even a role in a more off-Broadway production that I could help direct. You know, something like God Helps Brent Pursue Money, Wealth, and Fame While Living a Quiet Life. There is something frightening about being in a play in which the director may allow the plot to descend on my character from a totally unknown direction, a direction that may cause me deep emotional or even physical harm.” (pg. 57)
Hearkening back to last year, I’d say it was a wild one. Six months into the year and onwards, events happened in rapidfire succession that felt like some whirlwind romantic adventure film straight out of the 70’s or 80’s, like Indiana Jones or Star Wars. Steven Spielberg knew how it was done. Except large parts did not feel so romantic or comedic. They didn’t even feel harrowing, like this great hunt for an ancient magical artifact. Somewhere along the way, the romance died off, superceded by some sort of horror film. The Exorcist quickly replaced Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan.
The authors pose a question in chapter 5: does God care for us?
Does God care for me? I asked myself, reading as I wept.
A sort of revelation was taking place inside of my heart, and it felt dark at first. With my mind desparately wanting to be fixed on the light, the pinprick of sun seemed very far away as I realized the God I’d been praying to for years of my life wasn’t real. He was a figment of my fantasies, nothing more. The consequences of believing in the real God started to loom before me like great walls I had to scale in order to get to the other side.
God is a pretty ironic Being, though. He graciously deigned to show up in the ‘false’ version of Himself that I’d been leaning on as a crutch.
Returning to Lewis’ description of Aslan, I had never really understood the dichotomy between ‘safeness’ and ‘goodness’. How Aslan couldn’t just be safe and good all at the same time.
When I finally had the courage to glance behind me and allow my heart to ponder all the wild adventures that had rocked my boat, the ones that were rocking it now, and needless to say, the realization that more were on the way, I closed my eyes, and allowed myself to fall.
It was the most formidable experience I’ve encountered thus far in my faith journey. All of the Christian platitudes, ‘promises’, and phrases crumbled into ash beneath my feet as my entire ‘faith’ gave way. Sitting at the bottom of a pit, the only hope that remained was that pinprick of light far above me. But it was real, persistent, alive. In other words, nothing like the falsity I’d been standing on before. I accepted in that moment, that God is utterly and completely wild. He does not bend to our ‘Christian’ bubble. He may be gracious enough to meet us in our half-truths, but if He really loved us, He wouldn’t leave us there. And He does care. Deeply. So there’s not a chance in hell He will let us linger in the panic room. If we stubbornly refuse to follow, John says, “…we are forced to give up our spiritual journey because our heart will no longer come with us.” (pg. 4)
Goodness does not equal safety.
But if we can trust that God is good, there’s no need to worry if He will keep us safe all the time.
I cheated on God?
Chapter nine of The Romance begins with a brilliant quotable from Aristotle: “It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most human beings live only for the gratification of it (pg. 133).
Cue my entire adolescent life leading up into adulthood.
Anyone who’s been a lovelorn teenager will understand that indomitable longing to just always be in love. Some of us are naturally born to be the romancers of our society, others the rather analytical ‘thinkers’, although we all have longings in our hearts, no matter our personality leanings.
On page 142 of the book, Brent talks about two ways in which we ‘handle the wildness of life and of God.’ As a romantic to the max (enneagram 4, INFJ, etc. etc.), the second of the two results happens when I pursue an affair outside of my marriage to Christ:
The second group hang out in emotional nightclubs of Vanity Fair choosing a different kind of control: indulgence. We put our hope in meeting a lover who will give us some form of immediate gratification, some taste of transcendence that will place a drop of water on our parched tongue. This taste of transcendence coming as it does from a nontranscendent source, whether that be an affair, a drug, an obsession with sports, pornography, or living off of our giftedness, has the same effect on our souls as crack cocaine. Because the gratification touches us in that heart-place made for transcendent communion, without itself being transcendent, it attaches itself to our desire with chains that render us captive (pg. 144).
How many of us are emotional nightclubbers? I’m admitting it out here on the internet, so can you. Some of us stuff our emotions away as if they were inconvenient. Others become outrageous hedonists.
Brent shares a story with us of a client who was seeing him about a yearlong affair. The man was struggling to leave her, not because he had wanted her more than his wife, but because he was fearful that a beautiful and intrinsic facet of himself would be lost forever in the ending of the relationship.
And this is the power of addiction. Whatever the object of our addiction is, it attaches itself to our intense desire for eternal and intimate communion with God and each other in the midst of Paradise—the desire that Jesus himself placed in us before the beginnning of the world. Nothing less than this kind of unfallen communion will ever satisfy our desire or allow it to drink freely without imprisoning it and us. Once we allow our heart to drink water from these less-than-eternal wells with the goal of finding the life we were made for, it overpowers our will, and becomes, as Jonathan Edwards said, “like a vipor hissing and spitting at God” and us if we try to restrain it. “Nothing is less in power than the heart and far from commanding, we are forced to obey it,” sad Jean Rousseau. Our heart will carry us either to God or to addiction (pg. 144-145).
For many years, something crucial was replaced in my heart as a young teenager, and from twelve onwards, my heart was longing for a physical manifestation of adventure, romance, and desire. It often visited me in the form of books, which I’d been ‘reading’ long before I even learned the skill. As a young child, I would pick up books and pretend that I could read the words, all the while making up my own stories as I flipped the pages. I imagined whole fantasy worlds with brave knights and princesses to woo (I talk more about the healthy side of childlike imaginings here).
As I grew older, it was hobbies. I loved to journal and found countless things to paste into empty notebooks. I dabbled with digital art, graphic design, and even crocheting a stuffed golden retriever. It was never enough.
But larger than hobbies or stories, I had always longed to be in a loving and committed relationship. Seeing my parents’ decade’s long successful marriage hardened that resolve to achieve a relationship someday. Eventually, someday turned into wanting it right now. And a pattern emerged of ‘being in love’ with guys who I wasn’t really in love with at all. It quickly overrided my other less-wild lovers and became my personal heroin (thanks for the sappy line, Edward Cullen). I obssessed over dating books, podcasts, and social media resources. Consuming video after video of these model Christian couples made me work even harder at being the wife material of every man’s dreams. I dated people I shouldn’t have, searching, searching, always searching for that Numinous, that otherness of God that I had touched when I was a young child.
Not until later on, when I experienced vulnerablity through relationship with God and others’ healing love, did I begin to see a pattern emerge. A pattern I couldn’t put words to until I read John and Brent’s book. All of these loves—people or things—were foreshadowings of the Great Lover himself. Treating them like the source only screwed me and the other people involved, over. It left me high and dry, aching for more, every time. It was just never enough.
Through discovering the Wild at Heart podcast and written prayers on their app by the same name, and then reading The Sacred Romance, my heart began to take a journey toward God in a way that it never had before.
We usually think of maturing in faith as a time of acquiring better habits and virtues. But inviting Jesus into the “aching abyss” of our heart, perhaps has more to do with holding our hearts hopefully in partial emptiness in a way that allows desire to be rekindled. “Discipline imposed from the outside eventually defeats when it is not matched by desire from within,” said Dawson Trotman. There comes a place on our spiritual journey where renewed religious activity is of no use whatsoever. It is the place where God holds out his hand and asks us to give up our lovers and come and live with him in a much more personal way (pg. 148).
Last year was the beginning of the giving up. The holding of my heart in partial emptiness. There were a few months in there that I felt my heart to be actually missing, not even be there in my chest, anymore. I was searching for it, half-heartedly hoping it would return on the wings of my less-wild lovers. Of course it didn’t. It had to be revived, wooed, called to, by God. No room was left in my hands, to hold both my lesser lovers which I demanded too much of, and the Lover of my soul, who was whispering constantly through the longings of my heart. As Lewis famously said in The Weight of Glory, we are altogether too infatuated with our slum mud pies to look up and be dazzled by a holiday at the seaside. It’s not that I was desiring too much but too little.
Once again, Ms. Swift sweeps in with her timely lyrics, And that's the thing about illicit affairs // And clandestine meetings and stolen stares // They show their truth one single time // But they lie and they lie and they lie // A million little times and Take the words for what they are // A dwindling, mercurial high // A drug that only worked
// The first few hundred times.
Because our hearts weren’t made for affairs. They were made for the adventure, wooing, and fulfilled desire in relationship with our Beloved. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine (Song of Songs 6:3).
Healing is now takes time
I’m learning that although healing is available anytime we reach for it, it still takes time for new narratives to replace old ones. Past wounds, the Message of the Arrows (explained in the book), and less-wild lovers still plague us.
It’s a journey. One we are all one, religious or not.
But when we accept the calling of Jesus’ heart, we don’t need to journey alone.
All of a sudden, our hearts come alive with light and burning love. We are able to fully embrace the love of others and revel in what they provide us with: touches of the Divine. Earthly loves give without fear of us backing away, and our wells of affection, kindness, care, and passionate love have no bounds because we are on the adventure of a lifetime with the Lover of our souls.
Our marriage to the Lamb allows for true transformation in our relationships with others around us. We are connected to the beating heart of Christ and thus our own hearts can beat for others.
I don’t pride myself on saying “I’ve arrived!” Like I said, it’s a journey. Thank God we’re all on it together with Him.
We find ourselves once again at the intersection with the road that is the way of the heart. We look down it once more and see what appears to be a looming abyss between the lovers we have known and the mysterious call of Christ, which we now realize is coming from the other side. Jesus appears to be holding out his hand to us even as he calls to us. He tells us he will provide a bridge over the chasm if we will abide in him. We hear his words, but such language is strange to us. We pull back, Many of us return to Vanity Fair and mortgage our heart to purchase more of what is religiously or materially familiar. A few of us arouse our spirit and take a step toward the chasm…. We strike off down the road feeling much more alive than we have in a while. We are clueless as to how we will cross the abyss, but we feel relief and gladness to be on our way. (pg. 149, 154)
Will you journey with me, my friend? Become a pilgrim on his journey home to his heart? I’d be happier with a fellow wanderer at my side. There’s nothing to fear, for He is our guide.
For the quotes used in this article, I am using the updated edition that can be found on Amazon. I highly recommend you go read the book itself. In fact, do yourself a favor, stop reading my think-piece on it, and just go read the book.