Heart of darkness

John’s lesson this past Sunday referenced David’s appeal to God to “create in me a clean heart.”

Sometimes we forget just how badly we need God to do that. In his book Heart of Darkness, one of my favorites, Joseph Conrad uses a steamboat voyage into the heart of darkest Africa as a metaphorical vehicle for transporting readers into a region no less dark and savage: the human heart.

The idea is that if you look deep inside yourself — beyond the make-up and stage props, past the civilizing effects of law and social convention, right through to the real you, your innermost self, what you discover will frighten you. It’s a jungle in there. Sinful desires that could swallow a man whole prowl there freely.

A common conceit we Christians, and most everyone else for that matter, indulge in is that because we keep the law, work hard and provide for our families we must be generally good people. But Conrad’s nightmarish images are sobering. They remind us what we’re really capable of — what we must look like to God and what he finds after he takes up residence in our hearts when we put on Christ.

Scripture tells us our heart becomes the sanctuary of the Spirit. It also tells us that some major changes are in order, if we let the Spirit work.

About those sinful desires that could swallow you whole: The cage of law and social convention we erect and maintain to keep them at bay does permit civilization to continue functioning. But external restraining devices like laws and social norms lack real transformative power. For that kind of change to happen, someone has to descend into those deep-down scary places and drive out the dark things personally.

Hence David’s appeal to “create in me a clean heart.” The Man After God’s Own Heart had to face a bitter fact: After all the triumphs God had granted him, after all the time he'd spent in His presence, he was still, in his weaker moments, capable of unimagineable evil. And he was powerless, by himself, to change that fact.

That’s the way it works. We can follow the motions and rituals to perfection, but real change must occur on the inside and it must come from another Source.

Joseph Conrad didn’t believe in that Source. But his insights into life without it were prophetic; his book essentially forecasts the coming 20^th Century, a time when humankind’s capacity for evil would prove not only fathomless but capable of endless reinvention.