"And having heard, Jesus said, 'This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it.'"
The daughter of a reader of these daily devotionals just underwent transplant surgery. I told her today's lesson would be especially for them.
On Friday night Texas Tech University hosted the world premier of the opera "Breath of Life", which is about the spiritual mystery of heart transplant surgery. The opera was written by a man named Todd Frazier, whose father Dr. O.H. Frazier is chief of cardiopulmonary transplantation at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston and has performed over 2,000 heart transplant surgeries.
I attended the premier and was especially captivated by one in line in the drama spoken by the surgeon in the operating room just after having attached the donor heart to the recipient's body. It is an intensely agonizing moment, as the work is done and now everyone must wait and wonder and trust that life will indeed come back into the recipient. At the moment of highest drama, the surgeon speaks these profound words: "The heart must remember to beat again."
When I heard that line I thought of my own work in the care of the soul, symbolized by the metaphor of the heart. When I have said and done all that I know to say and do in the care of the soul, there is then the moment of faith: I must have faith that life is still present; and the heart must be trusted to live again.
After the show I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Frazier and I asked him about that line. He said Todd took that line from an interview Todd heard his father give for a PBS special on heart transplant surgery. "I've done 2,000 of these surgeries," he told me, "and though we know a lot about the science, it's still a mystery how it works. The heart has to remember to live and the doctor has to trust that it will remember."
We cannot under our own power make another's heart beat again. If a heart is to beat again it must beat of its own. After all is said and done, at some point we have to step back, take our hands off and trust that the heart can indeed beat of its own and will remember how.
And as the good doctor said, how exactly that works is a mystery -- the mystery of life hidden with God in the very heart itself.
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