On Broken Cisterns
“Do you want to be healed?” –John 5:6
Begonias in Palm Springs, CA
This is my final post. It has been a nice companion. What the blank page lacks in generosity, it makes up for in patience.
As my final address, I will reflect on the heart, and where we chose to center it.
Regardless of advances in technology, we are mortal. I am going to die. So will you. We speak of terminal illnesses as if they are a rare curse. In reality, the adage stands true: we are all walking around with a terminal illness – it’s called life.
I am not arguing against the study of medicine. That would be alarming as I allocated considerable time and money to doing so. All the more, it is important to remember that the best remedy, adjustment, or lifestyle will not save us from death in the end.
Lore has it Alexander the Great requested his empty hand hang outside his casket, as a way to communicate even the greatest conqueror leaves the world empty handed. He also asked his physicians to carry his casket, to symbolize the best doctors cannot save from death.
At some point, the healthiest among us face the inevitable – the decay of our bodies and the forgetting of our existence. It’s a painful road to walk, so we don’t.
Speaking for myself, I go about my day as if I were infallible, tending to the mundane, and ignoring matters of faith and meaning.
Instead of confronting my mortality by questioning, challenging, and clarifying my beliefs, I ignore it. I grasp at anything for temporary meaning: possessions, health, wealth, comfort, romance. When will I learn? “My heart was made for you, O Lord, and it indeed is restless, until it rests in you.” (St. Augustine)
Paradoxically, once the desires of the heart are rightly set – on God above all else – then all else becomes far more meaningful. It doesn’t mean everything suddenly works in our favor, that’s an unfortunate misconception. Often the marriage still fails. The layoff still comes. The cancer still spreads.
But despite the hardship and pain, we have what is greater. When we lack life’s temporary gifts, we confront the litmus test of the heart – the opportunity to prioritize the Giver over the gifts.
And when we center our hearts on God himself – truly on the Giver, and not the gifts he provides – then we have the greatest gift of all. We have meaning that surpasses, or at least outlasts, our pain.
Where a garden is cultivated, I needn't toil in wild pastures. Victor Frankl says it best: “he who has a why to live, can bear almost any how.”
It’s a lesson I desire to learn daily and most days, hourly.
In the Bible, there is a recurring metaphor of cisterns, which are reservoirs for collecting water. Cisterns are used to symbolize the human heart, or inner life. The cisterns of our hearts are meant to be filled with truth and love, but instead we fill them with other things – with inadequate substitutions for God’s presence. We have broken cisterns.
Our broken cisterns are lamented over by God himself in Jeremiah: “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” (2:13)
It’s one of many deeper metaphors for idolatry. Unfortunately, idolatry to modern minds conjures thoughts of stone statues and archaic enactments. But idolatry is more prevalent now than ever.
Our reputations, our homes, our bank accounts, our muscles, our feelings, our Instagrams – these are the idols and broken cisterns of today. It’s not bad to invest in them, but they are disordered in their importance when we prioritize their temporary meaning over that which is eternal.
The life of King Solomon is one example. Known for building the temple and asking for wisdom in all his splendor, he eventually took on 700 wives and 300 concubines that were the source of his fall into idolatry.
As his final reflections, Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, lamenting on the emptiness of prioritizing broken cisterns in the end. He uses the famous “chasing of the wind” metaphor to describe his experience of striving for worldly things that are ultimately unsatisfying.
What makes this difficult is that we are largely unaware we pursue idols, and have broken cisterns. As Rumi points out, “if you desire healing, let yourself fall ill,” and in Jesus’s words, “it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Luke 5:31).
In order to seek healing, you must first know you are sick. And we all are sick.
Dr. Timothy Keller says a helpful way to reveal our idols – that we all have – involves examining where our anxieties lay. Do we have social anxiety? Perhaps we’re clinging too strongly to reputation and the opinions of others. Do we have financial anxiety? Perhaps we’re chasing security, or control.
It’s captured most efficiently in the Sermon on the Mount: “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt 6:21). Storing up treasures on earth seems logical and intuitive now, but perhaps there is another way.
I believe the concept of salvation through grace – that we were bought through the substitutionary atonement of God himself, as a radical act of love – fortifies and humbles the heart of anyone who sees it to be one of obedience, joy, and love more than any other doctrine of salvation could.
God doesn’t love us because we are lovely. He loves us to make us lovely. Or in the words of CS Lewis, “the Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
Countless men and women have given their lives to walk this path of faith, and I look to them as tangible examples of bravery beyond my wildest imagination.
To that end, I conclude with the words of Esther, Queen of Persia with the desire that, like her, we too may resist the temptations we will encounter to invest our hearts in the broken cisterns of today. Esther faced the ultimate test of the heart, being uniquely positioned to save her people at the expense of her life, so many years ago.
“So will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law, and if I perish, I perish.” (Esther 4:16)
While Esther was spared, a man came along centuries after her who lived a perfect life, and was not spared. He took the punishment we deserve, and died in our place, so we could be free.
I believe grace can transform the hardest heart, for it did my own, to this degree of confidence and humility. It is the best – in fact the only – medicine that is indeed, lifesaving.
At Columbus Naturopathic Medicine, we provide faith-based care to help you experience God’s design for meaning, purpose, and connection. If you are interested in working with Dr. Leah Gusching, you can learn more and schedule an appointment by clicking the link below.