I finished Sue Monk Kidd’s book today and haven’t had time to write the response I would have liked to. Because time is short, this document is also short and (rather) blunt and to the point.
When the Heart Waits is a decidedly mixed kettle of fish. Some of the principles are good and could be applied to the Christian’s life, albeit cautiously; the heart of it, though, I will argue, is distinctly unchristian.
A Response to When the Heart Waits, by Sue Monk Kidd
I finished Sue Monk Kidd’s book today and haven’t had time to write the response I would have liked to. Because time is short, this document is also short and (rather) blunt and to the point.
When the Heart Waits is a decidedly mixed kettle of fish. Some of the principles are good and could be applied to the Christian’s life, albeit cautiously; the heart of it, though, I will argue, is distinctly unchristian.
The Missing Piece in Sue Monk Kidd’s Spirituality
The prevailing sense for me, as I read this book, is that the spiritual journey, for Sue Monk Kidd, is really all about “me.” Christ’s role is incidental. This is problematic for any spirituality that claims to be Christian. One must ask how a process wherein Christ is largely irrelevant can be called “Christian,” in any genuine sense. It is, rather, a “one-size-fits-all” approach which, apart from the Christian veneer, could be wholly embraced by Buddhists, neo-pagans and religious agnostics.
Sue Monk Kidd and the Christ-Self
When Monk Kidd speaks of the “Christ-life” or the “Christ-self” she does so in terms that are essentially pantheistic. While she initially seeks to differentiate the self from the divine life, the rest of her work suggests that she sees the two as one reality [cf. 54, . The true, inner self is the Christ, for her, “the core of God within” (53)]. Thus she can speak both of being birthed by God and giving birth to God, which is none other than “this person God and I had birthed and would go on birthing” (197). Moreover, this confusion allows her to make ontological claims about herself that are only appropriately made of God, who is in himself the great “I AM,” (cf. 57).
Sue Monk Kidd and Salvation
Because Monk Kidd sees the soul as being essentially divine, it is not something that needs to be saved. The one time she makes reference to salvation it is done so negatively. So she writes, “ When I began to see the soul in this light [as the seat and repository of the Inner Divine], the important thing became not saving the soul, but entering it, greening it, developing the divine seed that waits realization” (48).
In saying this, she could be read as providing a corrective, but the complete absence of salvation language elsewhere suggests otherwise. Moreover, if the goal were to point us to a perfectly orthodox definition of theosis, she would have spelt this out clearly. She almost does this on page 47, but she fails to bring it home by focusing our transformation on the person and work of Christ. Instead it’s the inner self that becomes both the venue and the means of our transformation.
Sue Monk Kidd and Original Sin
Part of the problem is that Monk Kidd seems to see the inner self only in terms of brokenness and potentiality. For it to reach its full potential, the broken parts (even the “wrong” parts need to be reintegrated. This is, in a nutshell, her doctrine of salvation. The way to reintegration is through listening to the self and following its lead. The Church has historically understood the self to be deeply impacted by sin—thus Scripture tells us, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9). While East and West might disagree regarding the legal implications of “original sin,” both agree that the human soul is deeply affected by sin, and that, left to its own devices, it steers us away from God, rather than towards him.
This makes it all the more strange that Scripture has no real place within Monk Kidd’s journey of transformation.
Sue Monk Kidd and Scripture
Monk Kidd’s use of Scripture is, to be blunt, appalling. Passages are lifted out of context and twisted around to communicate ideas alien to Scripture (see the “Christ-self” passages, p. 53-54). Even where Christ himself gives a clear explanation of Scripture, Monk Kidd over-rides Christ’s exposition in order to conform it to her own ideas—thus, for example, the “seed” of Mark 4:26-28, which Christ explicitly tells us is God’s word, becomes the “self sowing seed” of the inner self. Nowhere in the book do we see the Bible being allowed to speak with it’s own voice.
Sue Monk Kidd and the Contemplative Tradition
What about the contemplatives who are so often quoted by Monk Kidd? Firstly, the contemplative tradition genuinely values the knowledge of self. In this sense, Monk Kidd and the contemplatives both seem to call us to a true valuation of our souls. Their approach differs, but “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “wrong.” The wrongness is found, though, in where the two paths diverge. For the Christian contemplative, the ultimate goal of contemplation is (and has always been) union with God in Christ (the beatific vision). This emphasis is largely alien to When the Heart Waits. Monk Kidd never actually makes it beyond the self. For her, the spiritual journey is fundamentally about her own growth, her own libertarian freedom and her own self-discovery. The union she seeks is a union of her own individuated parts. This isn’t to say that Christ-language is absent from the book—it’s very much present. But the way this language is used is, as noted above, disturbing.
Sue Monk Kidd and the Golden Rule
While there are two or three comforting moments (where Monk Kidd decides her marriage still has value and the shift from “I” to “We”), there is a cold selfishness to her journey which seems willing to sacrifice friends and family in the pursuit of finding her “true self.” This atomistic, radical individualism owes a great deal to the modern North American idolatry of self and very little to with the Biblical/traditional valuation of the self in relation to the other. Love for neighbor seems to include only those who are still around after the new self is birthed.
Conclusion
The Shell of Monk Kidd’s approach appears to be Christian. The content is a heady mixture of Jungian analysis. new age self-help, contemplative methods and Christ-less Christianity. As I read it I couldn’t help but think of Reinhold Niebuhr’s statement that liberalism gave us, “A God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” There is little to distinguish Monk Kidd’s liberal/esoteric philosophy from that which has been so detrimental to Anglicanism in the West.
It is worth noting, in closing, that Monk Kidd followed up this work with a number of other books that ably demonstrate the logical progression of her thinking. Her feminist re-imaginings of God (not discussed above) have flowered into a promotion of Christ as “Sophia,” and worship of the Goddess. She is also currently the “writer in residence” at Phoebe Pember House, a New Age retreat centre in Charleston, SC.
Given the above, I see the use of this book within the Church as problematic. While some may have the discernment to be able to sift wheat from chaff, it is dangerous to assume that most Christians are in this place. One also has to ask if there aren’t resources with more wheat and less chaff…
David
