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One more set of thoughts from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, friends. (Find part one here.) At the very end of the novel, the protagonist, Theo, shifts from what’s been a narrative mode into attempting to summarize all of the years that the book has captured. As long as it's earned, I don’t mind a volume's turn from the diachronic to the synchronic in order to tie a bow on things.

Throughout the course of Goldfinch, Theo has veered from various periods of sobriety and sensibility into runs of substance abuse, wild risks, and dangerous decisions—and then back again. Contemplating these swings, Theo begins to wonder, “Which is the real me? The true me? The best me?” Even more to the point, is our truest self necessarily our best self? Theo reflects:
Because—isn’t it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.” Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

Those are good questions, grasshopper. Yes, truisms like “be yourself” and “follow your heart” are as close to axiomatic in our cultural moment as anything. Still, are we sure it's actually good advice?

The Scriptures certainly wouldn’t say so. Follow your heart? Sure, but as the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it” (17:9)? Additionally, from the Bible’s perspective, I think we can say that the advice to “be yourself” is merely begging the question, Which self? As the apostle Paul remarks in Romans 7, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand” (vv. 15, 17-21).

Paul isn’t exactly supplying us with happy thoughts from Romans 7 here, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true. Aren’t we all, at some level, like Theo in at least occasionally feeling the pull toward “a beautiful flare of ruin”? The older I get, and quite sadly, the more damage that my mistakes accrue over time, the more grateful I am that Jesus enables me to rely on resources for the good above my own and grants forgiveness when I fail to recognize that all too often, following my heart leads straight to harm.

Should you listen to your heart? Of course. But should you follow it? Slow your roll.

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