On Soft-heartedness: A Reflection on Amma Syncletica 11

As someone who grew up in the optimistic days of the 1990s, one of the things, among the many, that is surprising and disappointing to me about where we are at as the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws to a close is the lack of what was once considered basic human decency. There’s a hard-heartedness in society that I simply didn’t expect. In a world where we are more linked than ever before, where we can so easily be exposed to the lives and experiences of people not like us, where good teaching on compassion and empathy is everywhere, it seems more and more people are simply saying ‘no’. And, even more shocking to me, having grown up in various churches and types of churches, is that many of these people opting out of grace call themselves Christians.

But of course, this is not at all the way of the God of the Bible, no less that of the Old Testament than the New. As Moses himself related to the Hebrews in his summary of the Law:

If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted towards your needy neighbour. (Deuteronomy 15.7)

The prophet Ezekiel likewise preached against hard-heartedness, imagining a world where the Holy Spirit would soften up God’s people:

Thus says the Lord God: … I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God. (Ezekiel 11.14ff)

And, of course, when asked ‘Who is my neighbour’ — that is, who is the one to whom we are accountable to love and to care for — Jesus responded by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, which defines our neighbour as the person we’d least want, or have the least natural reason to love.

Unsurprisingly, this question was also prevalent in Desert Monasticism. Today I’d like to reflect a bit on a teaching of Amma Syncletica that touches on it in a typically Desert fashion:

[Amma Syncletica] also said, ‘Imitate the tax collector, and you will not be condemned with the Pharisee. Choose the humility of Moses and you will find your heart which is a rock changed into a spring of water. (Amma Syncletica 11)

What she’s hinting at here is an understanding where it is self-righteousness and arrogance that makes us hard — unyielding, merciless, cruel — towards others. In the first half, she references the parable of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee, whose message is oft repeated in both monastic and Lenten literature. It’s a short story, so worth quoting in full here:

‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.’ (Luke 18.10-14)

We see in this story that the Pharisee is not only self-righteous, but also that his high opinion of himself lives at the expense of others, to the point of thanking God that he is not like — that is, better than — ‘sinners’, including the tax collector. (Tax collectors were archetypal ‘sinners’ in the New Testament thought world because they both collaborated with the Romans and were practically required to be corrupt in order to make their living.) This is typical bullying behaviour, as though the only way to be ‘on top’ is to walk all over others.

Amma Syncletica’s second example is a bit more metaphorical, as she plays with the story of Moses and Rock from Exodus 17. In that story, God tells Moses to strike a rock and it turns into a spring of water. Now Moses doesn’t exactly come off as humble in the story, but I think Amma Syncletica is correct to assume this is his general disposition towards God. We see it in the incident with the Burning Bush, in his not feeling up to the task of going up against Pharaoh, and time and time again in the wilderness. This was a man who was not arrogant and who understood his dependence on God. Such a person as this can transform the hardest, densest, least forgiving material into something beautiful, life-giving, and flowing for the sake of others.

So, today, may we take this to heart. May we not think too highly of ourselves, especially at the expense of others, and may our hearts be soft and flowing with the good fresh water of compassion, empathy, love, and grace. Amen.