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)

Pentecost 2008 -- Cave of the Heart: Word of God, Fire of the Spirit and a World Remade

Pentecost is upon us and we celebrate with the ancient prayer, "Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of the faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of your love!" So many of the images that precede this feast use references to a Christ who leaves us behind while we are left looking forward to him returning "in glory," we are apt to miss just whose Spirit it is we celebrate is being poured out into our hearts and how it is Christ is still present. We are also apt to miss the import of the pouring out of this Spirit or what it is that it is in the process of creating. A Church, yes. The Body of Christ, yes. Perhaps even, a New heaven and a new earth," But how often do we hear these as bits of poetry, mere metaphors we hardly take seriously?



Last week though during vigils (actually it was on the feast of the Ascension) one of the readings struck me with a force that was visceral. The reading was from the letter to the Ephesians, and the passage went as follows: [[It is he who gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers in roles of service for the faithful to build up the body of Christ, till we become one in faith and in the knowledge of God's Son, AND FORM THE PERFECT MAN WHO IS CHRIST COME TO FULL STATURE.]]

Now, isn't that an awesome thought? We as church are to become "the perfect man who is Christ come to full stature"! Poetry? Assuredly, but also a poetry we are to take with a literalness and deadly seriousness that will transform the way we see ourselves, our notion of Church, and the responsibility we have to BE Christ with and for others. Apparently the Christ Event is "not finished," --- even with the resurrection and Ascension --- nor did the Ascension spell the movement of Christ to some remote heaven. Instead, it signalled a new kind of presence, a presence marked by the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Father and Son, the Spirit of Love, with a new power into our midst. Heaven and Earth interpenetrate one another in a new way --- if only we could learn to see it --- and, as Christ's own Body we are now an integral part of the Christ coming to full stature in what will truly be a single reality the Scriptures call "a new heaven and a new earth"!!



The reading continued, [[Let us be children no longer. . . let us profess the truth in love and grow to the full maturity of Christ the head. Through him the whole body grows, and with the proper functioning of the members joined firmly together by each supporting ligament, builds itself up in love.]]

To love we must first be loved; to profess the truth effectively and with integrity we must first be made true; to speak and live with the integrity and maturity of real adults (Daughters and Sons rather than children) our hearts must be transformed in the power of the Holy Spirit that does indeed enkindle within us the passionate and powerful fire of Divine love. The really privileged places we encounter such a love and open ourselves to the Spirit of Christ are in the Scriptures we contend with daily, and the Eucharist we receive similarly. As we move forward from this Easter Season in the power of Pentecost, let our hearts truly become those places where the Word of God is enthroned a living and sovereign reality, where the Fire of the Spirit burns with a passion the world both needs desperately and cannot deny, and, wholly transparent to the light of heaven, transform our world with the presence of Christ "come to full stature" into that place of true peace and justice where God is "all in all."

(Pictures from Sky Farm Hermitage, Sonoma, CA) These pictures of a hermitage chapel (one of the most beautiful and powerful I have ever seen) convey very well what our hearts (and selves) are to become in the power of the Holy Spirit. Beautiful, solitary -- though communal -- enflamed with love and steeped in the Word of God. A "place" where others are always welcome and find a peace and freedom they hunger and thirst for. "Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of the faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of your love! Make us together into the perfect One who is Christ come to full stature!"

Emmanuel, Naming the Communion Which is the Human Heart

How many of us are completely convinced of our need for God? For how many of us is he an occasional visitor we may or may not make time for, but not really someone essential to our own humanity? We are human, we think, without him --- not AS human or enriched as we might be otherwise, but human all the same. We are "just" or "merely" human without him, we think --- poor perhaps, and beset by this sin or that maybe, but still human all the same.

But no! The truth at the heart of our faith is otherwise; the truth which undergirds our prayer, worship, hope, and destiny is otherwise. The option before us is not to be religious people or non-religious people. It is not a choice between a merely richer or more impoverished existence, both equally human. The option before us is really to be human or not, to embrace the truth at the heart of ourselves and to be the responsive word event we are called to be, or to reject this truth, and our deepest selves as well. Mary's response to this call was "FIAT!" and it is the response, the ongoing hearkening which God seeks from us as well.

The image of God coming to us from outside us is a true one. Christmas is indeed a celebration of this kind of coming. But Christmas is also the fulfillment of a young woman's hearkening to the Word spoken deep within her, uniquely spoken within her, yes, but spoken within her just as it is spoken within each of us as well. The nativity of the One who would definitively incarnate God's logos is what we will celebrate at Christmas, but this event is rooted in the altogether human "yes" to God's proposal to wed his destiny to ours; it is a yes which is expected from each of us, and which was uniquely accomplished in Mary's own heart. It is the yes we are meant to be, and which our hearts are meant to sing at each moment and mood of our lives, the yes which will allow God's merciful love to transform the barrenness and poverty of our existence into fruifulness and new life.

The image of the human heart as a communal reality has been very rich for me this Advent, and I cannot let it go at this point (this blog has taken on the shape of a theme and variations, I know). The sense that I am not human alone is a freshly startling insight for me. It is not simply that I need others, nor even that my being embraces others as threads in the weaving which is my life. These things are true enough, and I can recall the times I came to understand these things, and the theological quandries they resolved. The truth goes deeper, is more profound, however: I am myself ONLY INSOFAR as I am a communion with God (and with others in and through him).

Communion with God is not simply something I am made for in the future --- as though I have the capacity for this relationship, but could, if I chose, forego it and still be myself. Communion with God is the NATURE OF my ESSENTIAL being. I AM --- insofar as I am truly human --- communion with God. My truest I is a "we".(Remember e e cumming's poem, we're wonderful 1X1? cf post for October 26, 2007 to reread this poem) To the extent God and I are a we, I am truly myself. This is true for each of us, no matter our vocation or state of life. For us, the choice is between a false autonomy which is really inhuman, and (as Paul Tillich would put the matter) a theonomy which constitutes us as truly human. Unless this exists, and to the extent there is no communion with God, there is no "I" --- not in the truest sense of that pronoun.

The circumcision of our hearts, the making ready "the way of the Lord" is not only the making ready for Christmas. It is the preparation for our own continued nativities as well. With Mary, we learn to say "Fiat" to the God who would be God-with-us as part of our very being. Prayer is indeed not something only specialists or the really religious do; it is the essence of being human, the activity which allows the God who would REALLY join his destiny with our own to be the One he WOULD be, and to be the persons he makes US to be as well. Therefore, we pray for two reasons: 1) because we are MADE for it and would not be authentically human selves without it, and 2) because GOD needs us to do so if he is ALSO to be the One he wills to be. Once again, our's is a God who has chosen and determined not to remain alone; he has chosen and determined that his lfe and our own are to be intimately linked, inextricably wed, in a Communion of shared destiny.

God-with-us certainly refers to the infant in Mary's womb as we approach the baby's nativity, but it also very much refers to the Communion God desires be born in our own hearts. Emmanuel, God-with-us, is the name given the truly human heart. It is the name given to anyone who fulfills their truest destiny, by allowing God to be God for, with, and within us.

Week 3: Advent 2007

I have continued thinking about the human heart as a relational or dialogical reality. I have also been thinking about the clear contemplative sense that we are called to be taken up into the very life of the Trinity itself,that is, into the very heart of God, where deep (God within) calls to deep (God without), and our lives (as words of this one God) become ultimately and definitively contextualized, and so, ultimately significant, ultimately meaningful. With regard to the human heart, Advent speaks so clearly: we are to make ready this dwelling place of the Lord, for the One who will dwell in the relative barrenness of our lives, and make of them a flourishing garden, wills to live here in smallness and obscurity --- often unrecognized even by the one who's heart it is.

It is striking to me that Benedictine spirituality is so strong regarding hospitality. It is a nonnegotiable element of the Rule of St Benedict and of Benedictine spirituality --- even for hermits! And yet, it is all rooted in the centrality of the Incarnation to our faith, and to our very being as well. We recognize that our monasteries or hermitages are meant to be places of authentic hospitality, not merely of other people -- though of course this is true since others are Christ's presence and imago --- but of God himself, for our's is a God who wills to dwell amongst us. Of course, we know that in our prayer we do indeed create (or allow the Spirit to create!) a climate or environment of hospitality where God may dwell, but before our monasteries or hermitages become places of authentic hospitality, our hearts must first be transformed into cells of attentive love where God is entirely at home.

In Advent, we look towards the beginning of the "definitive incarnation" of God among us. We focus on the fact that he comes to dwell with us and becomes embodied in human flesh, and we refer to the second coming, but do we look enough at our own lives, our own hearts as the PLACE where that second coming is realized? How often do we consider that our own hearts are the wombs where God will become(or will be prevented from becoming) newly incarnated in our world, and where in fact, we "make up for what is lacking" in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus? Afterall, these are the places, the events where God speaks himself and us/our names --- looking for the responses we will be as we allow him to be God-with-us. These are the mangers in which new nativities are birthed, the arenas in which new martyrdoms are born and acted out, new missions discerned and motivated, and the sovereignty of God transformed into the Kingdom of authentic freedom and peace which will eventually transform the whole world. It is our hearts that are the contexts for genuine Christmas, and in Advent we focus on their preparation, purification, healing and capacity for hospitality.

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.