There is at the heart of life a Heart | October 12, 2025 | Rev. Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey

Imagine opening a series of Russian babushka or “grandmother” dolls, in which each successive doll emerges much larger than all of the dolls that contained it.

            Imagine that instead of just an identical but smaller grandmother doll emerging with each new opening, more and more of a real grandmother’s actual network of complex relationships emerges also—relationships nurtured over many decades of life: from the most intimate and confidential to the most outgoing and celebratory; from the most nurturing to the most combative; from those that sustain her to those that she sustains; from family, friends, and community to ecology, society, world, and cosmos; from tending her garden to raising her family; from her direct experiences in the world to whatever faith sustains and guides her; including every direct and indirect influence upon her, from the beginning of time back before her life, continuing through all of the direct and indirect influences that her relationships will have upon others long after her life.

            Imagine that the opening of each doll reveals more and more of the grandmother’s humanity, far more than anyone could see by just looking at her, even with the most perfect eyesight and most detailed observation skills.

            When we are not conscious of these relationships, each doll in the series appears smaller than the one before. But upon becoming conscious, we realize that this is just an illusion, like the perspective relationships in a painting. Opening each doll in succession gradually reveals the immensity of the grandmother’s relationships, and her physical being seems to gradually recede toward an infinitesimal point deep within the massively cumulative spirit of all of these relationships.

            We thus begin to feel the expanse of the grandmother’s spirit, as opposed to just looking at apparent differences or changes in the size or dimensions of her body, which are of course ultimately limited by all sorts of physical constraints. The grandmother’s spirit, however, is not limited by any such boundaries… not even by imagined boundaries between the actual grandmother (whose image inspired the painting of the dolls) and people such as ourselves (who are opening each successive doll, feeling that grandmother’s spirit emerge, and watching her physical image recede).

            In fact, with the opening of each doll, each and every one of the observers enters further into relationship… participates more fully (along with the artist who originally created the babushka dolls) in the revelation of one spirit of relationship that the grandmother and all of the rest of us seem to share.

            At this point, we come to the last doll in the series… the tiny one in the center, which we now realize is so big that it contains everything imaginable, including us. We set the little doll aside or perhaps put the entire series back together with the little one hidden safely beneath all of those layers, because that tiny little grandmother has grown so big and so distracting that it has become impossible to even think in her presence.

            Then we decide to search for a name. We want to name the experience we’ve just had, so that we can categorize it, tame it… confine it somewhere out of the way. We want to come back and draw upon this massive power, a little bit at a time whenever we need it. But we don’t want it to totally consume us in this very moment.

            Suddenly, it turns out that we don’t have to search for the name. The little grandmother’s voice is gently informing us of her name from the center of our own consciousness. Her name is “human responsibility.”

            In Islamic tradition, there are countless “attributes” or names of God or Allah. In Ifa traditions of the West African Yoruba people and of people throughout the African Diaspora, there are countless Orisas. In the Catholic tradition, there are countless Saints. In the traditions of ancient Kemet or Egypt there are countless Neteru.

            In North American Protestant traditions, these same countless expressions of divine temperaments and experiences—that are part and parcel of our own beings and all of our interactions and of all that exists—can be recognized by some as Negro Spirituals.

            None of these expressions can be limited to any of the particular doctrines, disciplines, symbols, and practices in which various cultures characterize and describe them, because what is being so characterized and described is the essence of all of temporally and spatially limitless existence.

            We do not have even have to believe or disbelieve in any the doctrines or dogmas that stimulate and perhaps even awaken our awareness through such characterizations, because what we come into awareness of is as ubiquitous on this particular Earth as sunlight and throughout the cosmos as the light of countless other suns, known as stars.

            That light is the stuff of which we and everything around us is created. That light is resonant energy, and we and all that we create are resonant structures, continuously created of and by that resonant energy—to experience, share, and transmit that very resonant energy of which we and all around us are constantly created.

            We don’t have to believe this. Our very existence and everything that we do, even our thoughts, manifest this simple truth and nothing but this simple truth. For instance, Howard Thurman’s interpretations of the spirituals were intended to connect the “Deep River” of struggle in his time to its antecedents in previous generations and to its continuation in generations yet-to-come—just as so many life lessons came to Thurman from his grandmother.

            His evocative metaphor of a Heart at the heart of life seems to make that connection through the pulsating rhythm of a beating heart filled with compassion, wisdom, and challenge—which in the mythology of West and Central African cultures from which most of the creators and singers of the spirituals were originally drawn—would be represented by the beat of a drum.

            So at this point, all pretenses to linearity must be dropped, to allow the rhythm of a drum—which might more generally be described as the resonance of a resonant structure—to take us into places where the limitations of modern Western discourse would otherwise not allow us to go.

            To reinfuse some semblance of spirit into our day-to-day culture of manipulatively adorned, and sophisticatedly uttered, but still utterly meaningless verbiage, we have to stop thinking in terms of full vs. empty, of sound vs. silence, of light vs. dark, or even of ones vs. zeros. This journey requires looking back at all of our various imaginings based on contrasting the presence of stuff with the lack of stuff and replacing them all with an alternative imagery of resonant structures and resonance.

            A drum is a resonant structure that emits a resonance, often referred to as a rhythm. But if we look closely into the physical resonant structure that we call a drum, we find nothing but resonances. At the subatomic level, we find the resonances or rhythms of probabilistic electron clouds orbiting atomic nuclei full of even smaller sub-nuclear “particles” resonating in and out of existence.

            They also resonate upwards and downwards in energy levels, as they emit and absorb photons, which are often described as particles of light that are also waves of light. At such submicroscopic dimensions it apparently becomes impossible to tell the difference between a resonance and a resonant structure.

            The eyes and minds of individuals and communities that make sense of such incoming perceptions, visual and otherwise, are also resonant structures. They are like drums constructed of subatomic rhythms, receiving rhythms from the drummers, based on rhythms that the drummers learned from their communities.

            The drums also transmit those rhythms and variations on them to other people and other communities that receive and interpret them in their own ways as well. If you are at all uncomfortable with the terms resonant structure and resonance, simply think of a resonant structure as a drum and a resonance as a rhythm.

            Beyond our simple drum analogy however, resonant structures and resonances range in magnitude from the oscillations of subatomic particles that are about the same size as their subatomic wavelengths to the rhythms of human-sized drums. But they do not stop there.

            They continue to range upwards in size to atmospheric-scale reverberations of thunder and lightning and to the cosmic scale resonances of planetary and galactic motion. Resonances create resonant structures that create resonances and so on.

            So we are actually talking about one thing, not two. The differences that we imagine or perceive between resonant structures and resonances are literally no more than indicators of the limitations or boundaries of our particular temporal or spatial perspectives.

            The drum can neither be separated from the resonances that it creates nor from the resonant structures that its listeners create from its rhythms. Neither can it be separated from the dynamically shifting resonant structures of the drummer who plays it, nor from the resonances of the artisan who creates drums, nor from the resonances of the gourds or trees that gives drums shape, nor from the resonances of the animals whose skins gives drums flex. Such perspectives lead us to depart linear discursive space for a story about the Heart at the heart of life.

            Thurman’s metaphorical interpretation of the spiritual “Wade in the Water” offers a socially therapeutic image of people coming together in search of the logic behind a rampant and deadly disease, and somehow realizing in the process of mutually supportive struggle “that at the heart of life there is a Heart.”

            This subtle yet powerful metaphor does not come from a speculative or metaphysical imagination drawn from thin air. On the contrary, it clearly reflects the formative values of Thurman’s upbringing in a strong African American family and community, welded together in constant struggle against a depth and range of insults and assaults that for many may have seemed impossible to ultimately overcome, yet silently aided by a powerfully healing proximity to as yet unspoiled nature.

            Toward the end of his prodigious lifework, Thurman wrote that the courageous struggles of the originally civil but ultimately human rights movement, as epitomized in the life and death of Martin Luther King, Jr., had managed to breach the long-standing and institutionalized barriers to human wholeness in the Americas in permanently transformative ways.

            Thurman wrote:

It is quite possible that a person may work at his life problem over what for him is a total time interval, getting more and more insight as the years unfold, with all the richness and mellowness that such an experience would precipitate; at last it begins to dawn deep within the spirit that God, the creative mind and spirit in the core of the universe, is at work.

            This leads to another very searching insight. Here we are face to face with perhaps the most daring and revolutionary concept known to man: namely, that God is not only the creative mind and spirit at the core of the universe but that He—and mark you, I say He—is love. There are no completely satisfying ways by which this conclusion may be arrived at by mere or sheer rational reflective processes. This is the great disclosure: that there is at the heart of life a Heart. When such an insight is possessed by the human spirit and possesses the human spirit, a vast and awe-inspiring tranquility irradiates the life. This is the message of the spiritual. Do not shrink from moving confidently out into choppy seas. Wade in the water, because God is troubling the water.