by E. Louise Williams

If you are very quiet, it is said, you can hear your own heartbeat. Perhaps, by God’s grace, during a quiet moment you have realized that your heart is beating in the same rhythm as God’s own heart. You have been drawn close and rest securely in God’s great love for you. For just that moment, you are aware that you really do love God with your whole heart and trust God with your whole being. For you, in that moment, there are no other gods.

But it is not always so. There may be other times when you slow down and become quiet only to realize that your heart is out of sync with God’s. Instead of coming close to God, your heart is pulled in another direction. Someone or something else entices you to another rhythm, and when your heart embraces it, you have taken on another god.

"That to which your heart clings," Martin Luther wrote, "is really your god." That interpretation of the first commandment might hit us close to home. "You shall have no other gods" isn’t just about worshiping golden calves or following other religions. It is about the things that preoccupy us, the things from which we get worth and meaning, the things around which we shape our lives—the things that our heart clings to as if we could not live without them. Those things, Luther suggests, are our gods, our idols.

Luther also says that we are at the same time saint and sinner. We come out of the waters of baptism as new beings, forgiven, gifted with the Holy Spirit, and able to love and serve God. Still, as long as we live on this side of the grave, we live in sin. Our hearts will cling to gods other than the God who gives us life. To live our baptismal life is to learn to name those other gods, to confess our idolatry, to know that we are forgiven, and to begin again in God’s grace.

Because of the certainty of God’s grace and forgiveness, we can dare to listen to our heartbeat and to be honest about the things that pull our heart away from God. Almost anything or anyone in our world has the potential to become an idol. Many of our potential idols, it seems, begin as God’s good gifts to us, and it’s only when we cling to them too tightly that they become our gods. Others are more clearly insidious. Some of our gods may be obvious and easy to name. We have heard sermons about them, and we have discussed them at length in our Bible studies. Money. Success. Our human relationships. People’s opinions of us. Our own goodness. Status. Roles. Addictions and compulsions. Possessions. We know the list very well.

Some of the things, though, to which our hearts cling are not so obvious and may not be so easy for us to name. Exploring a few examples of those idols here may help us become more honest about those things that tug at our hearts.

The Past and the Future
Does your heart cling to the past? It might just be nostalgia, but it might also be that those days really were golden and good. Hanging on to the past may make it difficult to receive the new thing that God is doing today. Perhaps the past was a time of pain and resentment. Harboring resentment blinds the eyes to the gifts that God offers. Or maybe the past is filled with regret for things done or left undone. Holding on to those regrets means refusing God’s grace and forgiveness.

It is possible, too, to be so preoccupied with the future that it becomes a god. A person who idolizes the future may spin out worstcase scenarios and then live with anxiety and dread in anticipation of what is about to happen. Or someone may be so filled with dreams and plans for the future that they opt out of the responsibilities and challenges of the present. Either way, a heart that is so wrapped up in the future finds little place for the God whose grace comes to us new every day.

Security
Especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, hearts of people in the United States seem to long for a sense of security. We have developed at great cost a national Department of Homeland Security to monitor all possible risks, keep potentially threatening people out of our country, and respond to any breach of security. We have gone to war, it is said, for the sake of our national security. Individuals have become more conscious of their own safety — purchasing personal protective devices and security systems for their homes. People want a sense that they and all they love will be safe and secure.

The kind of security to which human hearts cling is really an illusion. We can never completely protect ourselves from ill-intentioned others, nor can we save ourselves from all accidents, nor can we be safe from every natural disaster. When we make an idol of security, we lose track of where our true security is to be found — in the God whose hands still hold the whole creation — a truth that is well known to so many of our sisters and brothers around the world who live in the face of terror and insecurity every day.

A Warped Sense of Self
A favorite petition in the litany prayed each week by our community of deaconesses reads: "Bestow on us the mind of Christ that we neither think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think nor deprecate ourselves in unbelief, calling common what you have called clean." This prayer suggests two possibilities for gods to whom our hearts cling. The first is an inflated sense of self. Often this form of idolatry comes when we believe that we are in control of the world — or at least our little corner of it. We believe that if anything is to get done, we have to do it. When our heart clings to this god, we might find ourselves excessively busy or becoming workaholics. We dare not rest for fear that the world will somehow come unraveled if we do. We forget that we are part of creation and not the Creator.

On the other hand, it might be our insecurities and low self-esteem that shape us. We can get so caught up in what we are unable to be or unable to do that we are completely immobilized. Or we may keep trying to get it right — always failing to reach that impossible perfection. We might become preoccupied with our failures and find in them confirmation that confirmation that we are not worth much. When we worship this god, we lose track of what God says about us, "You are my precious child in whom I am well pleased."

When we worship at the altar of a sense of self that is either too big or too small, we fail to live from God’s free gift of grace, and we cannot respond with joy and confidence to what God is calling us to do in the world.

Expressions of Religion
Our hearts might even cling tightly to aspects of our religion. We might find a particular way of worship especially meaningful and comfortable, but it is in danger of becoming our god if we begin to regard it as the only way. We might be so attached to a familiar hymnbook that we cannot hear the voices of others who need something differentto nourish their spirits. Even the Bible itself can be our idol. Martin Luther called the Bible the manger that held Christ for us. He cautioned that we take care to worship Christ and not the Bible lest we find ourselves bowing down before wood and straw.

Aspects of our religion are intended to convey to us God’s grace in Christ Jesus and to provide for us avenues for prayer and praise. But even these things can pull our hearts away from the God we seek to love and worship.

To Pry Your Heart Lose
To what does your heart cling? If we slow down and get quiet enough, we can begin to notice those things that become our gods. The list can be long and changing, although most of us have our favorite idols to which our hearts return again and again. As we look honestly at them, we realize that we cannot pry our clinging hearts from them. We can only confess "that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves." Thank God, our life does not depend on what we do or do not cling to. Our life comes from the God whose heart clings to us, for Christ’s sake, and will not let us go.

When we live in the presence of that love of God, a strange thing begins to happen. We may find that our grasp on those other gods begins to loosen. What we once clung to so tightly, as if our life depended on it, we now can hold in open hands. We can begin to offer them back to God. Just for a moment, we notice again that our heartbeat is in the same rhythm as God’s.

E. Louise Williams is executive director of the Lutheran Deaconess Association and part-time adjunct professor of theology at Valparaiso University. She is the president of DIAKONIA World Federation, an international ecumenical organization for associations and communities of deaconesses, deacons, and diaconal ministers.