Hillside Swedenborgian Community Church

Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room

            When I was a little girl I loved going to church. Every Sunday I’d get dressed up in my fancy church dress and wear my buckle shoes and get ready to go into San Francisco to Sunday School. First, my dad would give us our allowance, a whole dollar! Of which ten cents had to go into the offertory basket. Then we’d get on BART and ride into the city. Sometimes on the bus ride we got pieces of gum to chew to keep us from squabbling, which was a real treat. When we got to church there were friends to play with and coffee hour cookies to devour.

But all of those material things aside, I loved church for church. To me, church was a magical place – God’s own house! The place where we heard stories of miracles! An elderly woman in the congregation, Mrs. Tobisch, told my mother she could see the angels dancing around my sister and I, and I honestly felt them there with me at church, watching and protecting me. I loved watching the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams streaming through the windows of the sanctuary when it was dark inside. I imagined it was God himself beaming down into his house to be with us for the service. In Sunday School we heard stories of miracles, stories where the good were rewarded and the bad either punished, or made to see the light and repent. I loved the stories of Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the Whale, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, and especially the story of Zachias the Tax Collector, hiding in the tree as Jesus came by. We sang songs like “Jesus Loves Me” and “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and I truly felt loved by God. In return, I loved God with all my heart.

Being literal-minded as most children are, I took the words to “Joy to the World” to heart where it says “Let every heart/prepare Him room.” I thought we were meant to prepare an actual room in our hearts for God. So each night before I went to sleep, I imagined my heart was like a house or apartment building. And in the building I would choose out a special room for God to stay in. I would imagine decorations on the walls, maybe a fireplace and a few windows, and a big cozy bed. And I would imagine myself folding back the covers and tucking God into bed in my heart each night. Doing that filled me with an almost indescribable feeling of love. My heart was so full of love each night that I “prepared Him room.” I feel asleep peacefully knowing that God was there in my heart.

 I did that for maybe 2 years before things went wrong. I won’t get into what exactly happened in this sermon, but suffice it to say that when I was about 7 years old my world fell apart. I was a second-grader experiencing a crisis of faith. Suddenly my world wasn’t a place where good things happened to good people and bad people were punished. It was a place where bad and unfair things happened to good people and the bad people seemed to get off scot-free. I no longer felt the angels watching and protecting me, and God seemed to be MIA. The dust motes in the sunbeams were just flecks of dirt, the stories in Sunday School were implausible, and I stopped preparing room in my heart each night for a God that had let me down so completely. By shutting God out of my life, I also shut love out of my life. It was too big a risk to let anyone love me or to love anyone back. There was too great a chance I might get hurt if I took that leap of faith and trusted in love again. Instead of peacefully sleeping I lay awake at night wondering why, if Jesus really did love me and the little children, he would let these things happen to us?

            As I got older I continued to go to Sunday School, but now it was because I was being dragged there, or because I wanted to see my friends. I whined all the way there on BART, I was a pest to my teachers, I questioned everything I was being taught. And not in an intellectual I want to know more about this to fully understand it way, just in a bratty I don’t believe you so I’m going to keep asking why until you give up way. When it became popular in school not to believe in God or be religious, I happily bashed religion along with the best of them. I claimed not to believe in any form of organized religion and loudly complained about how horrible church was. But deep in my heart, I could never completely stop believing in God. I was mad at God, I didn’t trust God anymore, but I still believed he was up there watching me. In fact, believing in God was easy because I was BLAMING God for everything that went wrong.

  Flash forward to last spring. I’d now spent the greater part of my life being fiercely angry at the world and God for allowing unfair things to happen to me and my family – and they just seemed to keep happening. Nothing in my life was going the way I planned it, I was completely untrusting, I had no faith, I was depressed and I was closed off from love. I had been living with a hole in my soul for almost 20 years. And, like many people I chose to fill that hole with anything and everything I could get my hands on. I filled it with acquiring possessions, I filled it with superficial friendships, I filled it with television and computer games, and eventually I began filling it with drugs and alcohol.

And then, in that mysterious way he does, God stepped in to redirect me. After a particularly bad week filled with booze and pills, I went to my boyfriend’s house and, while in a black out, threatened my own life. He panicked and “told on me” to the RA, and when I arrived at school the next morning I was confronted by several concerned staff members. I tried to play it off like nothing had happened, but I hadn’t just scared everyone else that night, I scared myself too. I realized I had to do something to change my life or I was headed to an early grave. I made a vow then and there to get sober and turn my life around.

It was no easy task. After 10 years of drinking and using, you can’t be cured overnight, and my intense fear and lack of trust were such that I couldn’t get sober by simply going to meetings and taking it one day at a time. I checked myself into a treatment center in Southern California for six weeks to work through my issues and have around-the-clock support during my first chunk of sobriety. In treatment, they take you through the first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous is a spiritual program designed to help the alcoholic to achieve sobriety through working a series of twelve steps. They are founded on spiritual principals, and the ultimate goal is to find a connection with a higher power who can relieve you of your addictions.

I had no trouble with the first step, admitting I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable. My life had been unmanageable since I was 7 years old. And I was clearly powerless over alcohol. No, my first step was no problem. My difficulties started with the second step. The second step states, “We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” A power greater than ourselves. They were talking about God! Here I was in treatment and suddenly my old adversary was back to haunt me. I was even more mad at God now for letting me get myself into such a mess. How was I supposed to believe that God could restore me to sanity? They told me I didn’t have to choose God as I’d been raised to believe in him, I could even choose the doorknob as my higher power if I wanted to, I just had to believe that there was something greater than me that could lift my obsession and restore my life to sanity.

But I couldn’t choose a doorknob, because deep down, as mad as I was at him, I still really and truly believed in God and knew that he was the answer to my problem, I just had to find a way to trust him again. And that’s when it hit me. I was sitting outside staring at my blank second step workbook pages, trying to come up with something, and that line from “Joy to the World” started running through my head again. “Let every heart/prepare Him room,” over and over. I wasn’t sure what it meant at first, but then the memory hit me. I had completely forgotten how I used to prepare Him room every night. I thought to myself “this must mean SOMETHING…but what?” That night before I went to bed, I found the lyric running through my head again. I was still mad at God, and I didn’t want to let anyone into my heart, but I also wanted to recover, so, as silly as it seemed, I closed my eyes and imagined a little room in my heart. I imagined the bed and I pictured myself tucking God in under the covers.

I’d like to say I woke up the next morning and was magically full of faith and love again, but it didn’t happen that way. I spent a few more nights pushing through my resistance, but imagining a room for God all the same. And then, on the third or fourth day it happened. As I was imagining a room for God in my heart, I saw my 7-year old self doing the same thing in her bed, and my eyes welled up with tears. I remembered that loving feeling that used to fill me each night, and I longed for it to come back. I realized how much I missed having that love in my life. It felt like my heart was cracking open, but not in a painful way. More in the way that an eggshell cracks open and a fluffy new chick emerges. I was swamped with love and gratitude, and felt wholly accepted for who I was, and forgiven for all of my misdeeds.

When it came time to present my second step, I still felt anxious about calling my higher power “God” because I had created so many negative connotations with that word, so I named my higher power “Unconditional Love and Acceptance.” And after all, that’s what God is, just without a label. As time has worn on, and I’ve learned to pray again, I’ve become comfortable using the name God to address my higher power.

The most amazing thing about all of this, though, is how love has come back into my life. Something that most people take for granted was very scary to me for a long time, and living without love is like being in hell. When I let God back into my heart, he brought back my faith in the power of love. I have been able to express my love to other people for the first time in years, and it feels so good. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how much I love my family, or my fiancé, or my cat, and I want to squeeze them until they feel the love pass from my body to theirs. Of course, they tend to say “Not so tight honey” or they scratch me, but I think they understand where I’m coming from. I’ve also been able to accept love from other people. There are so many people in my life who love me, and I never realized it until recently. There’s nothing better than going to sleep at night and being able to count on both hands the number of people who love you.

          Today I have just over one year clean and sober. One year and two days, to be exact. I’ve reached my 11^th step, which is through prayer and meditation to seek conscious contact with God, as we understand him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. I’ve begun a daily ritual of praying when I wake up in the morning and before I go to sleep, and I still make room in my heart each night.

So where’s the spiritual message in all of this, you’re asking? It’s simple. Let every heart prepare Him room. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to be sure you believe, you don’t have to know all of the answers, you can be scared. All you have to do is prepare room for Him. He’s waiting for you to make space. If you have a hole in your soul like I did, it’s because that’s the place where God belongs. All you have to do is let him in and that hole will fill up with love and joy.

In the bible the disciples prepared a room for Jesus where they had the last supper, which was the first communion. You don’t have to wait until Sunday morning to have communion with God. You can do it any time by preparing a little room in your heart for him. In Swedenborgian theology, the Lord’s heavenly kingdom serves as the heart, so by making room for God in your heart, you are making room for God in the heaven inside yourself. And by filling your heart with love, you are creating your own heaven on earth. It’s very simple really. Let every heart prepare him room!