What’s in your Heart?
- Fr Raphael Ma, CR
- Luke 6: 39 - 45
A Resurrectionist Vocation Minute for March 2, 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time
What’s in your heart?
In our age of information overload and escalating anxiety, we don’t hear a whole lot about our “heart” anymore. We hear about breathing exercises, mindfulness, and other practices that can help us calm our minds and become more present to, and get more in touch with, ourselves and what’s is happening within us – which at best can bring us to the threshold of that “place” Pope Francis repeatedly refers to at the beginning of his October 2024 Encyclical Letter Dilexit Nos: on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ – our heart.
Sometimes “heart” is mistaken for “feelings”. Certainly, the heart is the place where we experience our feelings, but our heart is also more than our feelings, just like our mind is more than our ideas. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says in its section on prayer:
“…Scripture speaks sometimes of the soul or the spirit, but most often of the heart (more than a thousand times). According to Scripture, it is the heart that prays…
…The heart is the dwelling-place where I am, where I live; according to the Semitic or Biblical expression, the heart is the place “to which I withdraw.” The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others; only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully. The heart is the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives. It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death. It is the place of encounter, because as image of God we live in relation: it is the place of covenant.”
(CCC 2562-3)
A very common mistake in discernment is to turn it into a purely intellectual exercise, to try and “figure out” my vocation, or a particular decision I am trying to “discern”. As Pope Francis calls it in Dilexit Nos: “a kind of self-reliant moralism.” What is missing from such a self-reliant moralism is the encounter between our hearts and the heart of Jesus.
This Sunday’s Gospel is all about the returning to our hearts – without this being grounded in what is really going on within us, we will be like a blind person attempting to lead others, or a hypocrite trying to take the speck out of another’s eye without being aware of the log in ours.
We cannot come to know our vocation without entering into our heart – perhaps for the first time in a very long time – which can seem like a daunting task. But if we are willing to go there, we will find another heart, the heart of Jesus, who out of the abundance of His Heart, is waiting to speak to us.
“Since no friendship can exist or grow where interpersonal communication does not exist, mental prayer and contemplation have a vital role to play in the development of our union with Christ. We know that God will speak to us within the depths of our hearts, but in order to hear His voice, we frequently need to set aside our activities, to listen to Him and converse with Him.”