It seems we love describing one another by talking about the nature of our hearts. We can be open-hearted, big-hearted, kind-hearted, hard-hearted, warm-hearted, good-hearted, cold-hearted, soft-hearted, whole-hearted, tender-hearted and probably a few more!

Which brings me to a new phrase I’ve been playing with: to be able-hearted. What might that mean?

Well, it’s just like being able-bodied, except we don’t usually talk about how to use our hearts. You might think an able-bodied person is someone who is free of any apparent disability, but in fact the term is meant to connote athletic and muscular and strong. Therefore, we can’t really describe ourselves as able-bodied if we aren’t doing anything to promote our overall physical fitness.

The same is true of the heart. It can be like a couch potato – inactive, living on a diet of bigotry and scorn – or it can be fit and robust and healthy in its capacity to respond to a wide variety of human situations. 

I am speaking here of the metaphorical heart, that place where love abides. If the loving heart’s capacity has shriveled up like a wrinkled old prune, it needs resuscitation in order to respond to people and events with human kindness. I believe that people can, with intention, bring new life to hearts that have become hardened against entire categories of human beings.

Most people retain the ability to be kind-hearted to people and events inside their own families and neighborhoods. The able-hearted extend those reactions to human beings outside their immediate circle, people who are suffering anywhere, for any reason: Puerto Ricans ruined by hurricane Maria, Native Americans fighting to preserve sacred ground, poor people forced to go to jail if they cannot pay a parking fine, Central Americans or Syrians fleeing violence, students who sue their schools to fight for an adequate education.

To the able-hearted, everywhere you look there are situations that tug the heart strings.

Think about what physical fitness means. We do exercises. We work out. We stretch our muscles and train them to make certain movements with ease. We push our muscles to do more than reflexive and ordinary activity. The more we work on physical fitness, the more nimble, resilient and strong our bodies become.

That is what we need to do with our hearts if we are to live as equals. I’m not talking about going to cardio-rehab facilities to work on the physical capabilities of the heart. I am talking about consciously, intentionally, working on the ability to respond to daily news events in ways that exercise and open up the loving capabilities of the heart.

If something in your belief system tells you homosexuals are bad people, then your heart has a particular disability: you cannot respond lovingly to homosexuals. You might look on with a kind of reflexive disdain at the TV news that a homosexual couple was denied a wedding cake or an adoption.

As human hearts go, yours has closed off a piece – which is sort of like strangling one of your toes, deciding you can get by with the other nine. You need to get the circulation moving again before infection sets in. Disgruntlement and displeasure will only harden your heart. It will not change the fact that not everyone is heterosexual. Open up a little vein of kindness and compassion until your toe warms up a bit to the presence of homosexuals in every society.

If something in your past taught you that black people are somehow inferior to whites, then your heart is disabled with regard to black people. You cannot respond with sadness or anger or shame at the number of black people being killed by police, or beaten up by police, or sent to jail for resisting arrest when it was the police who provoked the survival instinct.

To feel anguish at these events is profoundly human. To feel no anguish is a sign that your heart has become gravely disabled, most likely by that insidious belief in white superiority. You might try a few anti-racist calisthenics, like visiting the National Museum of African History and Culture, or the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Do some armchair travels by reading autobiographies of black Americans, or read about the forgiveness crusade of former white supremacist Arno Michaelis.

Something would have to be severely amiss with the love your heart was meant to feel if you cannot relate to the plight of immigrant families at the border. That father being made to go back to Mexico without his son, those mothers pleading to know where their children are, those preschoolers being forced to go to court alone to suffer through a sham procedure of arguing their cases – their hearts have all been broken by the atrocities that have accompanied the policies of this administration.

If your heart doesn’t break in response, your heart is crippled, walled off from the loving response as surely as the border wall tries to keep people from coming here. It’s time to face your fears, get the life blood flowing and bring your loving heart alive again. It’s time to visit one of the immigrant detention centers. If you can’t physically go there, watch all of the available videos and listen to all of the available first-hand accounts of conditions in detention centers.

When we are working on our physical fitness, we pay careful attention to the quality of the foods we ingest, because our diet is closely related to the quality of the physical fitness we are trying to achieve. The same is true of becoming able-hearted. We need to stay away from emotional junk food when we are trying to reclaim the loving capabilities of our hearts.

No heartless news reporters that flaunt their ignorance of facts and their disdain for people of color. No political propaganda, no talk show conspiracy theories and hate mongering. No debates or rallies based solely on personal beliefs and prejudices.

A Native American parable teaches the lesson this way:

An old Cherokee grandfather is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”

He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

A healing heart needs healthy doses of true stories, factual sources and reports that convey the human consequences of events. Hearts that have been stuffed full of messages that our human differences are something to be afraid of need to hear stories that illustrate our common humanity. Most of all, the hurting heart needs a steady diet of love.

We may feel the love when watching others do kind things – in the news, in the movies; people who put their hearts to work in helping those who are suffering. We may feel it when serving those in need – volunteering in a soup kitchen, visiting with the disabled, helping single parents, and so on – letting the loving gratitude of others get inside that stone-cold heart. We may feel it when we gather up our courage and start speaking to someone that we have been scorning, or when we allow ourselves to care about someone whose life is different from ours, rather than tuning out their cries for help.

Each and every one of us deserves an able heart, a fit and nimble heart full of love and compassion.  When your heart becomes numb to human tragedies, when you feel as if you have stopped caring about the suffering of others, it is urgent that you set about reclaiming the loving capacities of the heart that is yours and yours alone.

Work that kindness and compassion response like a muscle. Make yourself able-hearted once more.