Get Yourselves a New Heart and a New Spirit!

Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, all of you according to your ways, says the Lord God. Repent and turn from all your transgressions; otherwise iniquity will be your ruin. Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.
(Ezekiel 18:30-32, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

My mind keeps turning to a line of dialogue from David Lynch’s 2017 revival of Twin Peaks.

Early in the series, Lynch, in his role as FBI administrator Gordon Cole, has a meeting with the Bureau’s chief of staff, Denise Bryson, a transgender woman played by David Duchovny. He recalls that she used to work under him, and notes that he has always expressed unequivocal support for her. “When you became Denise,” he shouts, “I told all your colleagues… to fix their hearts or die.”

It reminds me of the famous line from “September 1, 1939,” W.H. Auden’s poem describing how he saw the world at the outbreak of the Second World War: “We must love one another or die.” Never mind that Auden himself came to reject the imperative; as the British journalist Ian Sansom, who wrote a book about the poem’s cultural legacy, has said, “people want it to be true.” (Although the revision Auden tested before suppressing the line altogether—we must love one another and die—resonates with me sometimes, in my most fatalistic moods.)

Now, some Friends might find “fix your hearts or die” overly judgmental, if not downright hostile. I don’t consider it a threat, though—just an acknowledgement that our hatred has consequences, which some might call karma. “When the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity, they shall die for it,” Ezekiel tells the Israelites; “for the iniquity that they have committed, they shall die.” (18:26) If you refuse to love your transgender neighbor, or the immigrant sojourner, nobody is coming to kill you in retaliation. But your iniquities will eat away at your soul, you will lock yourself out of the eternal blessed community, and you’ll have nobody to blame for that but yourself.

So get yourself a new heart and a new spirit—repent, as the primitive Christians would say.

“Again, when the wicked turn away from the wickedness they have committed and do what is lawful and right, they shall save their life,” Ezekiel promises (18:27). George Fox issued a similar invitation in one of his epistles to the Quaker community: 

“Therefore turn, turn all that are not hardened and past feeling, and hear the voice, that the way of peace and repentance, and the way of life and salvation ye may know, and live in; and upon all your disorderly carriages, walkings, words, and actions, ye may come to receive judgment, and through that ye may receive power to live a new life, in which God is served in the truth, and not the devil, who is out of the truth.”

When the Inward Light shines upon you and exposes the reality of your sins, in other words, fix your heart. Embrace “the life, and power, and wisdom of God,” as Fox puts it, and love your neighbor as yourself. As for “all ye that have known the way of truth, and tasted of the power of the same, and now turn back into the world’s fashions and customs,” keeping company with “all the tattlers, tale-carriers, unclean persons, envious, murmurers and complainers” of the world? “Wo (sic) and misery is for you!” Fox told such backsliders. “Ye had better never have been born.”

“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is unfair.’” (Ezekiel 18:25)

Like I said, some folks might find all this a bit judgmental, perhaps even repressive. Friends today, leaning on the legacy of their predecessors, can have a high regard for their own spiritual discernment and independent spirit. Some can develop strong ideas about who and what to oppose, and they don’t always believe they require God’s input on the matter. 

I’m not talking about acceptance or rejection of Christianity; even the earliest Quakers affirmed that people could answer the summons of the Inward Spirit without recognizing it as Christ. Nor am I talking about the tensions between theism and nontheism; unless we’re dealing with pure materialists, that just strikes me as an ultimately unwinnable debate over the nature of the holy. I’m talking about people who think they know who deserves love and who doesn’t. But transphobia, like racial bigotry, misogyny, or class prejudice, doesn’t come from God. It has no holy origins. It arises, as Fox said, from obedience to the world’s fashions and customs, which men created to keep some in power over others. (Yes, women have contributed to the growth of Empire as well, but in this case the reductive gender characterization does have a certain historical weight.) 

We’ve seen the injustice that the world’s fashions and customs have wrought. As God said to the ancient Israelites through Ezekiel, “Is it not your ways that are unfair?” And once we recognize the truth in this, what else should we do but fix our hearts and love one another?