In Luke, Jesus tells us that “where your treasure is, there will be your heart be also,” a far cry from that deceitful heart Jeremiah talks about. Augustine puts it a different way: “Love [God], and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”
Our heart is naturally deceitful, just like Jeremiah says. I know my own heart well enough to understand how true this is. But if we focus our heart on the right things—ideals higher than our own emotional whims, right and wrongs higher than manmade rules, a God higher than our own selfish inclinations—something happens inside us. Heroes like Superman and Captain America are dedicated to those higher ideals, those unwritten moral laws. And when Sully knew 155 people were depending on him to get them to the ground safely, the captain was focused on a greater good, too.
Sully made his decision to land in the Hudson based on his instinct. That instinct had been focused by more than 40 years of experience. His “heart,” if you will, his gut, had been trained, over decades, to focus on the right things.
All the rules that Sully disregarded, those were the best rules that could be put together via human understanding. They were good as far as they went, but they, like their authors, weren’t perfect. They couldn’t see into every eventuality. As Sully says, “Everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time.”
We can’t trust our hearts. Not really. And yet there’s something in that heart that, if we’re focused on the right things, points us in the right direction. We don’t need to be told. We don’t need to rely on human understanding. Sometimes, I believe, God speaks through our gut.
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