Sister Briege O'Hare, OSC: The Transformation of the Heart

 

My co-Director (Susan Blomstad, OSF) sent this on to me this morning. She really likes Sister Briege and, through her sharing over some years, so so I. This particular talk is wonderful. It resonates with so much of the theology I have shared here and in other places, and in the formative work I do with Marietta Fahey, SHF. This includes much that I have shared here on the nature of the human heart, the true self, the divinization of creation and incarnation of God in each of us, and the way Jesus' passion on the Cross is not the will of God but the inevitability of a life lived for others; a life lived with this kind of integrity is the work and will of God and allows God to bring good out of what is evil and inhuman. 

Sister Briege begins with two very different views of the heart (true and false hearts) and then moves on to explore what the transformation of the human heart is and how this comes about. At the same time, she shares why contemplative prayer is necessary and an integral part of our own giving birth to Christ within creation --- much as midwives help bring babies to birth. If we can understand the why, the how of contemplative prayer will largely take care of itself. One thing that is especially good about Sister Briege's presentation is the rich collection of quotations she provides on the topics involved.

I sincerely hope you will carve out some time to listen to Sister Briege O'Hare, OSC on the transformation of the heart.

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart: the Human Heart, Living Mystery at the Center of Self (Reprise)

(Preparing for Friday's Solemnity of the Sacred Heart. Note that references to readings are for another year at this time.)

 Today's ordinary (daily Mass) readings use the text from 2 Corinthians I spoke about earlier this week, namely, "We hold a treasure in earthen vessels so that the surpassing power will be of God and not from ourselves." You may remember that in conjunction with that text and the Feast of Corpus Christi I spoke of Sue Bender's experience of seeing a broken and mended piece of Japanese ceramics. (Marking the Feast of Corpus Christi) She wrote, [[“The image of that bowl,” she writes, “made a lasting impression. Instead of trying to hide the flaws, the cracks were emphasized — filled with silver. The bowl was even more precious after it had been mended.”]]

That image has been with me all this week in prayer and also as I have reflected on the various readings, especially those from Paul. It seems entirely providential to me then that this year today, the day we would ordinarily hear a reading about treasure in earthen vessels, is the Feast of the Sacred Heart. The image of this bowl --- broken, healed, and transfigured  reminds me of the Sacred Heart --- traditionally the most powerful symbol we have of the indivisible wedding of human and divine and of the power of Divine Love perfected and glorified (revealed) in both human and divine weakness; thus it has provided me with a wonderfully new and fresh image of the Sacred Heart and (at least potentially) of our own hearts as well.

The heart is the center of the human person. It is a deeply distinctive anthropo-logical or human reality --- at the center of all truly personal feeling, thought, creativity and behavior. As a physical organ it stands at the center of all physical functions within us as well empowering them, marking them with its pulsing life.

At the same time, it is primarily a theological term. It refers first of all to God and to a theological reality. Of course, it cannot be divorced from the human (and that is the very point!), but theologically speaking, the heart is the place within us where God bears witness to Godself, where life, truth and beauty, love and integrity, call to us and invite us to embrace, embody, and reveal them in our own unique ways. As I have noted before, in some important ways it is not so much that we have a heart and then God comes to dwell there; it is that where God dwells within us and bears witness to Godself, (and where we respond to that mystery deep within us) we have a heart. The human heart (not the cardiac muscle but the center of our personhood) is a dialogical event where moment by moment God speaks, calls, breathes, and sings us into existence and where, in one way and degree or another, we respond to become the people we are and (we hope) are called to be.

Everything comes together in the human heart --- or is held apart and left unreconciled by its distortions and self-centeredness. It is in the human heart broken open by love that the unity between spirit and matter is imagined, achieved, and then conveyed to the whole of creation. Here the division between earth and heaven, human and divine is bridged and healed. It is in the human heart that the unity of body and soul is achieved and celebrated.

The vulnerable and broken human heart is the paradoxical place where everything is brought together in the power and mercy of God's love; it is the place where human life is transfigured and then --- through us and the ministry of reconciliation entrusted to us in Christ --- extended to the whole of creation itself. It is in the human heart that prejudices, biases, bitterness, selfishness, greed and so many other things are brought into the presence of God to be healed and transformed. At least this is the potential of the heart which is meant to be truly human and glorifies God. The human heart is holy ground and despite its limitations, distortions, darknesses, and narrownesses it is meant to shine with the expansiveness of God's creative "Yes!" Here is indeed treasure in earthen vessels.

And if this is true anywhere it is true in the most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Sacred Heart is the symbol of the reunion of all of reality, the place in that unique life where human life becomes completely transparent to the love of God, the sacrament par excellence of the ministry of reconciliation where human and divine are inextricably wed and exhaustively revealed.

Imagine then an image of the Sacred Heart similar to the image Sue Bender described, a clay pot broken and broken open innumerable times by and to the realities it dares to be vulnerable to and allows to rest within itself. Imagine too that God, that supreme potter refashions it, mends it with his love --- a love that allows the cracks to glow with the light of heaven, a light that transforms the entire pot and all who are touched by its transcendent beauty and truth. This is what we celebrate on today's Feast. The scars will remain, but transfigured --- as though mended with brilliant silver. Light and love, water and blood will pour from this heart and, in time, God will love all of creation into wholeness through Jesus' mediation and through the ministry of each of us who allow our hearts to become the Sacred places God wills them to be.  We "hold" a treasure in earthen vessels. In us the surpassing power of God in Christ is at work reconciling all things to himself.

Third Day of Retreat: Question On Matters of Focus

[[Dear Sister O'Neal, If you are on retreat how can your attention be focused outward to "the wider world" as you recently wrote? That's not my idea of retreating!]]

 Well,  you are entirely correct that some of my attention has been so focused and that is mainly because of two things: 1) my heart is profoundly engaged here and that naturally includes people who enrich my life by loving me and allowing me to love them, and 2) this is a natural rhythm for me at this time. I can certainly focus inward and there are times that I have done and in fact must do that to the exclusion of really thinking much about people outside the hermitage (or my room here at the mission), but going on retreat is a sort of paradoxical reality for me. It is a time when I leave the hermitage, meet and interact on  a limited basis with others, worship with those I don't really know (yet), and to a very limited degree when I am out of my room and somewhere else in the mission, answer occasional questions about this vocation, my own ties to Franciscanism and my journey from there to Diocesan Eremitical life and Camaldolese Benedictinism. While my time here is no different from the annual retreat taken by any religious, whether ministerial or not, it is the case that it is a bit more relaxed in some ways (not least that I can check email at noon time if I choose to and read questions like yours!) and that it frees me from some everyday concerns which are part and parcel of my life at Stillsong. Still, it is very much retreat time and I will do my best to simply allow it to be what God wills and thus, what I need it to be (and vice versa!).



Perhaps the first reading from today's liturgy captures this sense of rhythm and the appropriateness of flexibility best (it was because of this that I actually chose to answer your question today rather than next week some time): [[To everything there is a Season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. . . .a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces. . . .A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away. . . .a time to be silent, and a time to speak. . . .He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into [our] hearts]]

You see, I understand retreat as a privileged time to honor what is in my heart because the heart is that place within me where God bears witness to Godself. I do that by allowing myself to be taken hold of by what dwells therein in ways which may differ from when I am home. The different context assures that I perceive things from a different perspective because different things trigger meaningful associations for me and because it is all differently illuminated. I hear texts and prayers proclaimed or recited with new voices and so, in new ways. Similarly, I am vulnerable in different ways, that is, all of this and more serves to open my heart in fresh and surprising ways to our living God who is always new. 


You must admit that superficially at least there is a bit of irony or something just a little "mind-bending" in the idea of a hermit "going on retreat". In any case it hardly makes sense to go from "sitting in one's 'cell'" to sitting in another one and paying for the privilege of doing so --- unless, of course, there is something meaningfully new or different about the situation. You see, most people take retreats to break from their usual surroundings. It's important to do this and I do the same. What may be a bit different is that where "retreat" in the mind of most folks implies a move from busyness or routine that militates against prayer, from the world of noise that prevents silence, from relative superficiality, and so forth, in order to turn or return to God at a greater depth, for me it does not mean these things, at least not generally. (I can certainly relate to the need to move from a routine that can become stultifying or at least less than helpful sometimes in terms of prayer, and also to becoming caught up in some forms of busyness! I can also relate to the need to respond to God more deeply at almost any time or place so retreat does mean an opportunity for that for me.)

But for me retreat generally means an opportunity to take a step back and look at my everyday life from a new vantage point. (It is amazing the way daily struggles and the battles with the demons of our own hearts become less huge and intransigent when one can do this.) Of course it does mean taking time apart from directees and some limited parish commitments, but above all it means providing a new space  in which my heart can breath according to a different time signature and be stretched and sing itself in a new key. In that way I gain more perspective on living my life and hear more clearly the song I am called to be --- free of the muddle and  facile embellishments which sometimes accrue to and detract from it.. When I return home from retreat, I tend to see everything there with fresh eyes and a more truly grateful heart as well. In any case, retreat provides me with the opportunity to better honor all the ways God bears witness to Himself within my own heart.

It is only with the Heart that One sees Rightly

In one of the best selling books of all time, The Little Prince, there is a dialogue between a fox and the Little Prince. It occurs over a period of time. The Fox begins by explaining about what it means to be "tamed,"  and he notes that it involves forming ties with others. He begs the Prince to "tame him" and over time (the prince agrees to "waste time" in this way!) the Little Prince does so while the Fox allows himself to be tamed; in other words the Prince works to become the Fox's friend and the Fox becomes his. As a result the most mundane parts of reality are also transformed. Golden fields of wheat which hold no interest for the Fox ordinarily (he eats only chickens!) now remind the Fox of his friend's golden hair and occasion joy. When the time comes for the Little Prince to leave the Fox is sad, and then he gives the Little Prince his most precious secret, a secret he says most men have forgotten: [[It is only with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.]]

In last Friday's Gospel story Jesus knows that there is more than one way of "seeing" and he equates one of these with a destructive blindness which will lead everyone into the pit together. He warns that an untrained person is apt to harm someone and needs to get proper training before trying to act as a teacher. And he reminds us via this story that we ourselves are often afflicted with a beam in our own eye but that we are equally often one who blindly criticizes and offers to extract a splinter from another's eye. We hear one of Jesus' most damning judgments as he says: "You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your own eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from in your brother's eye!"

Jesus clearly understands several things; he knows what the fox reminds us most "men have forgotten": First, that seeing rightly (compassion) is something we do with our hearts and this requires a kind of training. It is the kind of training one does when, over time, one helps (trains) a child to grow in a certain way. It takes years to "train" a child's ability to stand upright, to help them become persons who love themselves and others, who are capable of giving themselves to the world in a way which makes it better, richer, more holy. It takes years to help a child become responsible for their own hearts as we ourselves are called to be responsible for our own hearts Our hearts are, as I have said here a number of times, the places where we meet and respond to God, but they are also those places within us where obstacles to this meeting reside; for this reason they need to be "trained" (formed, healed, nurtured, strengthened, aided) to see rightly. The responsibility for forming our hearts, for taming them (what Christians call growing in holiness), is a lifelong process of being made capable of compassionate seeing.

Secondly then, he knew that the way our attention is avidly drawn to the splinter in another's eye SHOULD lead us to suspect the beam in our own; that is, we should suspect the real obstacles to accurate vision, to compassion, exist in our own hearts. They represent ways of seeing we have made our own whether they have come from our culture, from peer pressure, from our own needs, successes or failures, from the hurts of childhood, or wherever. Because of this I think Jesus understood very well that we ordinarily operate from habitual ways of seeing and behaving which are less than Christian; we operate from characteristic attitudes of the false self that serve as lenses which distort our own vision and prevent us from seeing rightly or compassionately with the heart. In terms of the Gospel, and the story of the Little Prince, they are the lenses which prevent us from making neighbors of those we meet or know, the lenses which prevent us from loving others, from letting others "tame us," and therefore from becoming friends.

 Two pieces of monastic truth:

Monastic life encapsulated Jesus' teaching in a number of ways, but there are two pieces which are especially important here. The first is the monastic teaching on what are called "the passions."  The passions are obstacles to humility, that is, they are barriers to recognizing and celebrating the truth about who we are in regard to God and others. Thus they are also obstacles to compassion, to seeing others with the same kind of loving truthfulness. They are most often the beams in our own eyes and hearts which cause us to overreact to the splinters in our brother's or sister's eyes. They are the symptoms of woundedness and disease in our own hearts which cause us to project onto others and fail to love them as we ought and as they deserve. As Roberta Bondi reminds us, "a passion has as its chief characteristics perversion of vision and the destruction of love." (To Love as God Loves)

Common passions we are all too familiar with include perfectionism, a kind of habitual irritation with someone or some situation, anger, envy, depression, apathy or sloth, gluttony (which often has more to do, Bondi points out, with requiring novelty than it does with eating), irritable or anxious restlessness, impatience, selfishness, etc. In each, if we consider their effects, we will notice these habitual ways of relating to ourselves and our world cause us to see reality in a distorted way (this is one of the reasons we think of seeing reality through the green haze of envy, or the red film of anger, or the black wall of depression, and so forth). Further, they get in the way of being open to or nurturing the truth of others --- that is, they are obstacles to love.

Similarly they are destructive of sight and love because they cause us to project onto others our own flawed expectations, values, failings and woundedness.  We know this by its psychological term: Projection. It is a serious disease Jesus apparently understood well, a result of our own brokenness and sinfulness, and it assures not only that the person being projected onto CANNOT be heard or seen for who they are, but also that the one doing the projecting becomes more and more locked into their own blindness and inability to love the other as neighbor. The wisdom of Jesus' admonition, "Remove the beam from your own eye before you attempt to remove the splinter from your brother's" as well as the appropriateness of his anger in calling others on their hypocrisy is profound.

The second piece of monastic wisdom here we should remember, and one which is closely related to the importance of dealing with our passions has to do with the nature of really seeing another truly. In our own time we are very used to acting as though we only know someone really well when we see their flaws. We approach people and things "critically," searching out their failings and weaknesses and when we have discovered them, we believe we have discovered their deepest truth. How often have we heard someone say something like: "I thought I knew him, but the other day, he acted to betray me. Now I really know who he is!"

But monastic wisdom is just the opposite of this notion of knowing. It is strikingly countercultural and counterintuitive. In monastic life we only really know someone when we see them as God sees them: precious, sacred, whole, and beautiful. We only see them rightly when we look past the flaws to the deep or true person at the core. We only see them truly when we see them with the eyes and humility of love. As we were reminded by Saint-Exupery and as tomorrow's Gospel implies strongly, "It is only with the heart that one sees rightly," --- and only once we have removed those distorting lenses monks call passions, that is, only once we have removed the beams from our own eyes will we be able to do this!

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart (and Feast of St Romuald!)

Today is ordinarily the Feast of the St Romuald, founder (after Benedict) of the Camaldolese Benedictines, but June 19th this year is also the Feast of the Sacred Heart. Thus it is a special day for me in several ways, for my former congregation was dedicated to the Sacred Heart and my present congregation (as an oblate) is Camaldolese. Further, my first real meeting with my former Bishop took place on the Feast of the Sacred Heart and I remember it with special vividness. Evenso, devotion to the Sacred Heart was not important to me; theologically it made little sense to me, and neither was it particularly appealing. It seemed to have to do more with the overly emotional or too-sentimental spirituality and private revelations of a 17th Century French nun, and less with the Jesus I personally knew and loved. Nor did it help that the usual pictures of the sacred heart were sort of garish and hard to relate to.

But this year I have spent some time on the notion of heart, on the idea that heart is defined theologically as the place within us where God bears witness to himself, on the startling idea that it is not the case that we have a heart and God comes then to dwell within it, but rather that the heart is first of all the place WHERE he dwells and speaks, loves, breathes, and sings us into existence moment by moment; it is therefore the "place" where we learn to listen or else close ourselves to this dynamic presence and power. More, it is also the broad or narrow reality which is created by that listening, or alternately by our refusal to hear and respond generously. It is, as I have written before, a dialogical reality or event which constitutes the very core of who we are.

Further, if you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that I have also spent time this year thinking about the hermit's vocation to love and the absolute imperative that our hearts must become ever wider as the dialogue between God and ourselves which constitutes that heart becomes deeper, more intense and pure, and more extensive as well. The struggle of the hermit to balance solitude with ministry is always a struggle to allow 1) the deepening of genuine interiority in solitary dialogue with God, and 2) to let the fruit and grace of this to spill out in the way God wills for the good of the rest of his creation. Finally, I recently (this week) lost someone whose long-patience and faithful love worked to heal me and empower my own capacity for love, and as I think about her life and work, I believe I have come to genuinely BEGIN to understand and appreciate the Sacred Heart.

We hear time and time again in the Scriptures, "If today you hear my voice, harden not your hearts!" The Greek words used for harden is the root of a medical term applied when tissue which has been wounded or injured in some way. It is the word we translate as "indurate" and it points to a failure to heal properly (or at least to return to normal), a subsequent lack of flexibility and sensation, tissue that has been damaged and never fully recovered having been replaced by scarring and simply by hardness. Unfortunately, I think so often this induration (or callousness) --- this hardening --- is precisely what happens to our own hearts when life wounds us in so many ways. We are hurt by others, by loss and bereavement, by failure, by betrayal. We are wounded precisely where we are most vulnerable and so we sometimes become both hardened against such injuries and wounding and less responsive, less vulnerable, and more fragile in the process. (Remember that fragility lacks vulnerability while vulnerability is a sign of strength and resiliency.)

And here I think is the key to understanding the Sacred or "pierced" Heart of Jesus. It is, precisely as it should be, the place where God bears witness to himself, the place where he summons Jesus into full humanity and responsive, loving existence. It is the center of Jesus' being, the event (for, despite my using the word "place", heart is really more an ongoing event than it is a place) constituted by the loving dialogue between God and man, the core of who Jesus really is in himself and of who he is for us. Further, of course, it is also a wounded heart, wounded in the mystical sense by the love of God as people like John of the Cross describe, but also wounded in the more prosaic sense of having been pierced by rejection, betrayal, cruelty, indifference, and the like. Yet, precisely because it is is the "place" where God's love dominates (that is, where that love is sovereign), where his creative and challenging Word is embodied ever more fully articulate, and where that Word is responded to faithfully in spite of all of the exigencies of life, it is a tender, flexible, strong and (for these very reasons) vulnerable heart untouched by induration or callousness. It is a heart which pours itself out for others even (and especially) as it receives the love and life of God ever-anew and more abundantly.

In many ways, I think, Devotion to the Sacred Heart is therefore devotion to what God desires to achieve and, in fact, does achieve on an ongoing, never-ceasing basis at the very center of ourselves; it is especially devotion to the One through and in whom this is achieved in a definitive way. Certainly it is devotion to a symbol of human fullness and that abundance of life which has the love of God as its center and driving force and to the Christ in whom that was exhaustively embodied. More, it is all these things in spite of the times and ways life wounds us and tempts to induration or hardness, inflexibility and callousness, and it is these things precisely for the sake of God, our truest selves, and our neighbors. Devotion to the Sacred Heart is devotion to a truly human heart whose very life blood is at the same time the Word and Spirit of God. It is devotion to the pierced heart which is also whole and tender, and lies at the service of mankind, devotion to one who loves without limit and embodies the Word and love of God without diminution or diffusion.

The Feast of the Sacred Heart celebrates God's love for us, a love which God offers without condition, and which he poured out without ceasing, kenotically and at his own expense -- not only in creation as he looked for one who would be a true counterpart, but as one who would therefore share it exhaustively with the whole of creation as well. It celebrates the embodiment of that love in a human life, and marks the vocation of each of us to do likewise. As well, it is a symbol of truly human love then, a love which flows through us and out to the world, out of our interiority in spite of our woundedness and brokenness, our callousness and fragility, but also out of our wholeness, our flexibility, and our strength in light of that love. Our God, in Christ, is the original wounded healer and I find that both immensely comforting and hopeful, as well as tremendously challenging. For that reason too, I find the symbol of the Sacred Heart freshly meaningful.

(Painting of the Sacred Heart by Salvador Dali)

Week 2, Advent 2007

It is true that the human heart is the "place where God bears witness to himself", and that therefore there is an ongoing dynamic and unremitting hallowing going on in the very core of our being. This profound reality seems a tremendous miracle and an awesome picture of what constitutes the human person. And yet, wondrous as it is, it is only a portion of the picture, a part of what constitutes us as human in regard to God, a portion of how it is we are related to the One who wills to dwell with us and to reconcile all things in and through himself. For it is not only true that God dwells within us, but it is also true that he exists outside of us, and in fact, is that ultimate reality within which we move and have our being.

Many images may be used to refer to this ultimate context of our lives, but the most intimate remain "womb", and "heart." We often have the image of a God who remains distant from us, remote and hard to reach or hear. In the sense that God is wholly other than we are, there is some truth in these images. And yet, what is also true is that God is the communion of being and love IN WHICH we are called to exist and out of which we are called to reach out to others. Whether we envision this reality as a womb, or a heart, or even a Word or story which we are allowed to enter and which calls us to rest securely within, ours is a God who in this way also has chosen not to remain alone.

When combined with the image of the Word or song of God dwelling actively within our own hearts, we have a really awesome portrait of human existence: we are made for divinity both within and without. God calls to us, and to Godself within us, from without; he summons us to greater and greater degrees of communion, greater and greater degrees of identification with himself. Word calls to Word; it seeks its own completion, reconciliation, or perfection in this way. And so too do we reach our own completion and perfection in this way. Just as an isolated word has no meaning without context, so too do our own lives remain senseless unless the Word spoken deep within our hearts, that Name by which God calls us to be, also comes to rest in the Word/Story which comes to us from outside. Augustine said it more simply: Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.

Advent is a time of preparation. We prepare our hearts, not only that God has a wider or more spacious place to dwell within them, but so that they may accept a place we are each offered in the infinite heart of God as well. We prepare our hearts so the Word God speaks within us will be able to be more perfectly attuned to the Word he speaks outside us. We prepare our hearts so that they may be more able to embrace their own place in the story which is God's Kingdom, their own seat at the Wedding banquet, their own role in the nativity of God-with-us in our world. In our own hearts the Word of God looks for an opening into our world; in our hearts God seeks a way to become personally present to his creation. But at the same time our hearts are summoned to rest in God's own heart, to allow deep to call to deep, and to be the everyday, day-in-and-day-out, kinds of mystics Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were. It is this double relationship to God's own Life that constitutes authentically human existence --- a kind of parabolic (parable-ish) existence which witnesses to and introduces others to the drama of communion we call Trinity --- and it is the birth of this kind of existence our continuing Advent preparations envision and facilitate.