«Give me your heart! »

• About WordPress
•  
• predication.ne

The scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, mystics, poets, and the vernacular of the nations all speak of the heart of man. There is

its centre, its main activity. Man is as he is his heart. Love resides in the heart. Paul Claudel writes: “Lord, he says, ‘Give me your heart!’ (cf. Proverbs 23, 26). That means: Son, give me what your centre, your origin, the guiding principle of your life, your sensory, emotional, and intellectual rhythm, and the source of your being is… The prophet says: ‘I have found my heart.’ What a discovery! Your heart, nothing less than a heart! The core of your personality! … Something could compare to a burning bush, to a forest that will not burn! »

God’s love and human love

We have eyes, ears, and other senses to contact the visible world and people. But they see God only in those who have a pure heart (Mt 5: 8). The Holy Spirit resides in the heart of man (Gal 4: 6). Prayer is the uplifting of the soul to God. Nevertheless, it is precisely this concept that is difficult to explain. It is difficult to fit into our psychological categories. Other, better-known ones often replace it. Some (intellectual direction) replace it with the mind: God pours us a gift faith to reason. Others (voluntaries) think that the heart means that, instead of free will, we can decide for good, so we connect with God. However, some speak of religious feelings that are like a “barometer” of our spiritual condition.

And yet we want to say something with the term “heart” more than reason or just will, less a kind of superficial flare-up of emotion. We want to express the whole person, undivided. The German mystic put it nicely: Eckhart: God is true, so we know him by reason; God is an activity; we imitate him by our action. God is, above all, He who is (Ex 3:14), and we must connect with him with all our strengths and abilities, that is, to love him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind (Mt 22:37).

Russian theologians and spiritual writers have identified the center almost exclusively with «feeling». They openly declare that “Religion is not a matter of reason, but of emotions (J. Nikolin, N. Malinovský), that it is not the true prayer that is in the head, but only that which is in the heart,” and that it is the task of the heart to feel everything that is happening in us and in the presence.

THAT LIFE IS THE LIGHT OF PEOPLE 

The Holy Spirit, therefore, is “a barometer of spiritual life (Teofán Zatvornik). And yet it would be a misunderstanding.

if we (and many Western mystics) suspected them of banal sentimentalism. The term «heart feeling» here means instead what the Greek authors call “spiritual meaning”. It is the subtle voice of conscience, direct understanding of reality, the real purpose, and meaning of life. Even scholastic philosophy distinguishes double knowledge: discursively and intuitively. The first means to think, to explain concepts, to look for reasons. Intuition is direct knowledge.

clear as if it were a vision. This is how we know the first principles, so is the experience of conscience: “feel” directly that something is good or bad. This knowledge tends to be so bright and penetrating that rational reasoning just curls behind it. (Pores, Pascal’s famous sentence: «Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît pas – The heart has its reasons, which reason does not justify.) Such a “feeling”, direct knowledge of truth, mothers have for their children. No wonder their son is honest. Even a spiritual person acquires direct knowledge of God, the good and the meaning of life. It is, after all, natural. St. Thomas Aquinas states that man knows what is true according to the condition of his heart and his entire being. Therefore, we can wish nothing better than that God, as the prophet said, removed the stone heart from his chest and gave us a new heart, sensitive to every shudder of grace. According to Teofán Zatvorník, this living sensitivity to spiritual values ​​is “the first manifestation of the revival of the soul from the numbness of sin.” “The heart”, writes B. Vyslavcev, “has a central place in mysticism, religion, the poetry of all nations … A man without a heart is a man without love for religion.

Atheism means ultimately being heartless.”