Real-Life Horcruxes--January 7, 2022

 Real-Life Horcruxes—January 7, 2022

“But don’t let the wavering one, being split-souled and unstable in all his ways, think he’ll receive anything from the Lord.” [James 1:7-8—my translation]

Something terrible and insidious happens when we set our hearts on competing loves that point in opposite directions. It’s rather like we split our souls into pieces and send each part chasing after something different.

Honestly, that’s about the best way to describe what James is getting at here. It’s the way we can drape ourselves in the language of Respectable Religion and still send our hearts seeking after other things—and then we wonder why we don’t ever feel satisfied. James’ word for it is powerful: “split-souled,” or sometimes our English translations will say “double-minded.” The idea is that it’s possible for us human beings to divide our deepest selves into pieces, and then we end up feeling, well, less than whole.

It’s funny—I never really found much of the Harry Potter series of novels terribly deep, until I got to the final books, where the author invented a really interesting image of evil. Without spoiling too much (although, come on—you’ve had at least twenty years to read these books!), the arch-villain of the series has found a way to split his soul into pieces, in the attempt to leave pieces of himself in safe locations and objects as an attempt at achieving immortality. In the books these are objects with fragments of soul inside are called “horcruxes,” and they turn out to do terrible damage to a person—after all, to divide your soul into pieces is to lose something of the wholeness of who you are. That idea—that in the interests of chasing after something good, you might split your deepest self into pieces—is curiously enough pretty close to the idea James has in mind here. When we do that to ourselves, we are setting ourselves up for ruin, because it’s tantamount to cutting our bodies into pieces. Splitting our deepest selves—our souls—into pieces is setting us on a course for a slow death.

Well, here’s the thing: it’s not just in the fantastic worlds of children’s novels with wizards and dark magic that such things as horcruxes are possible. We live constantly in a world that teaches us to split our souls up in to compartments, each chasing after very different goals, and we end up wondering why we feel so incomplete… and complicit in terrible things. This isn’t the stuff of fantasy novels. This is our everyday lives in this ordinary world, where we are told to be unapologetically cutthroat and ruthless in our business lives, fiercely dedicated to our jobs, self-centered in our investments, kind to our friends, loving to our family, attentive to our own self-care, loyal to our country (but suspicious of anybody else outside our national borders), and somehow also faithful to God. No wonder we all feel broken into pieces!

The culture in which we live teaches us to make horcruxes out of ever facet of our lives, from work to family to country to wealth to friends to church, and to chase after each of them with equal ferocity. And then we wonder why we end up feeling exhausted and unsatisfied! We are sending different pieces of our deepest selves in different directions, and most of them (to be perfectly honest) are pointed away from the Reign of God and its hallmarks of mercy and justice. In the old days, one of the worst ways to be executed was to have each of your limbs tied to a different horse, and then each horse was set running in a different direction. In another time, it was a terrible punishment to be “drawn and quartered,” and here we live in a culture where we are all taught to cut our souls into pieces and set them each running after different loves. No wonder we feel incomplete, fragmented, broken, and empty. We are constantly taught to do the same to ourselves and told it is the road to success!

This what James is warning us against. If we’re trying to chase the American Dream and the Reign of God, we’re drawing and quartering ourselves—we’re splitting our own souls in the attempt to run in opposite directions at the same time. If we’re seeking more money and a side order of God, James warns us not to be surprised if we don’t end up feeling like we have gotten any closer to the divine. If I’m just using my religiosity as a way to drum up customers at my business, or to get support for my political agenda, or to make myself feel superior to my neighbor, I’m splitting my soul into pieces and making myself less fully alive. If I’m dividing my loyalties between God and my 401(k), or Jesus and my political party, or the Reign of God and my own personal imaginary recollection of some past mythic time when things were “great,” I am unwittingly putting myself to death by drawing and quartering. We live in a culture that teaches us to make horcruxes of ourselves—to split our souls into pieces—and sets us up to think it will lead to success and happiness, while it is in actuality sucking the life out of us. That’s what James is calling us away from.

In this day, then, the challenge is to turn our focus wholly onto the way of Jesus. That doesn’t mean you have to quit your job, burn your possessions, and disavow your family or country. But it does mean that we see our selves in a new way: as complete selves, given completely into God’s way of being in the world. So when God’s Reign runs up against the chance for higher profits, we’ll still seek after God’s Reign. And when the way of Jesus takes us away from old familiar hatreds and prejudices, we’ll do the hard work of letting go of those old habits of bigotry. And when the direction of the Spirit calls us to question the empire in which we live, we’ll give our allegiance to the Spirit rather than the Gross Domestic Product. And through it all, we’ll refuse to let our souls be split into pieces in the attempt to chase after both at the same time.

That’s what James is trying to get through to us. If he seems sharp in his warning, it’s because he knows the stakes are high. If it seems uncomfortable to consider all the ways we’ve already made horcruxes out of our bank accounts, party affiliations, tax brackets, demographic groups, and the like, well, that’s just more evidence of how urgently we need James’ message. Today, for all the ways we have already given in and cut our souls up into pieces, James calls us back to put the pieces back together and to place them in the hands of the One who can heal us and make us whole. That’s what it is to be the people of God—we are people whose fragments souls are put back together in the hands of Mercy. Let’s do that today.

O God, take the pieces we have broken ourselves into, and make us whole again in you.