"My Heart is Full of Nails"

April 18, 2011

In my job, I have a lot of conversations with people who live with serious mental illnesses.  The conversations range from those about the weather with one of my colleagues who is in long-term recovery from bipolar disorder to phonecalls from callers who are in deep psychosis and in need of immediate hospitalization.

Usually, the individuals on the other side of the conversation fall somewhere in between those lines.  The stories that they bring me vary from tragic to uplifting.  I've talked to mothers desperate to get their children into treatment before something horrible happens.  I've listened to a wife struggling to grasp why her husband committed suicide.  I've listened to people locked in their own delusions and paranoia.

All of the people who call or dorp in want answers or directions to someone that can help.  Sometimes, I can point them in the right direction, other times I have to try and decide whether to tell them that there is no one that will help them until after something tragic happens.  They or their loved one have somehow fallen into an abyss of legal redtape and scarce public funding.

The conversations can be horrible and depressing.  They can also be powerful and uplifting.  The conversations can carry messages more powerful than the greatest sermons.  Today I had one of those conversations.

The woman sitting on the chair in front of me was about sixty.  She'd come into the office while I was trying to organize some receipts.  It was forty five minutes later and she wasn't showing a sign of slowing down.  I tried to focus and not think about the waiting receipts.

The woman is a well respected professional in our community.  In our last few phone conversations, I could tell she was struggling.  She was very agitated and listed off more than a dozen local conspiracies that she had reported to authorities ranging from the Drug Enforcement Agency to the Governor.  I couldn't tell which one or parts of those stories were accurate and which reflected a major drift from the perception of reality.

The woman's eyes were wide. Her head haloed in curls.  She was leading me deeper and deeper into conspiracies, explaining how they tied together.  So far I couldn't see anything we could do to help her.  She just wanted to be listened to by someone that cared.  I tried to focus.

Then she looked up at me and said something completely out of contex from the rest of the conversation.

 "I need to forgive them."  She repeated, "I need to forgive them."

I looked up at her trying to figure out if she was talking about the same group of alleged serial wrongdoers or if I'd missed something.

The woman put her hand over her breast.  "My heart is full of nails.  I need to forgive them.  It's just bringing me down."


The conversation continued for another twenty minutes.  The woman made her way out of the office, but I couldn't get her words out of my head.  My heart is full of nails. I knew that feeling too well.  It was the feeling of a heart full of anger, resentment, jealousy, and the sting of betrayal. 

I couldn't help thinking, "How many nails do I have in my heart?" It wasn't hard to think of five or ten off the top of my head: failed relationships, bad business deals, petty disputes that escalated into something bigger, etc. 

Human beings hurt each other in both minor and major ways everyday.  While we can take steps to protect ourselves, bad things will still happen to us and often someone else's actions will be the direct cause of those bad things.

The question is how do we handle it?  Do we let our wounds fester by filling them with angry thoughts of revenge or do we heal them through forgiveness? 

It's a painful process to forgive those who have wronged us, but it's essential daily step on the path to the divine.  In the words of Jesus, your ability to access the Kingdom of Heaven depends on your willingness to forgive those who sinned against you. Matthew 5:44-45 ("love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you."); Matthew 18: 22-35; Matthew 5:22 ("whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment..")

If we cannot muster up that ability to forgive, then we have no one but ourselves to blame for our "heart full of nails."

I learned a lot more from my expected visitor than I ever would have gotten from those receipts.  Hopefully I was able to pass on something in return.