With the words that sound in the Gospel: “Take care that your hearts are not weighed down by intemperance, drunkenness and worldly cares,” the Lord Jesus shows us how important it is to protect your heart and spirit. God created our hearts out of love and for love, and nothing else can fully satisfy our hearts but God. Augustine’s statement from almost seventeen hundred years ago – “for yourself, God, you created us, and our heart is dissatisfied until it rests in you” – remains valid even for today’s people.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that the desire for God is inscribed in the human heart because man is created by God and for God. Only in God can man find the truth and happiness he seeks. Since man comes from God and goes to God, he lives a fully human life only if he lives freely in union with him. But a person can forget about it, ignore it, or even explicitly refuse it. Such an attitude can have various causes, for example, rebellion against the evil that is in the world; religious ignorance and indifference; concern for worldly things and wealth; the lousy example of believers, anti-religious currents of thought, and, finally from the attitude of a sinner who hides from God out of fear and runs away from his call. (Cf. KCC No. 27-29)
Our heart is in all of this. That is why the Lord Jesus warns us and says: “Take care of your heart and your spirit.” The danger for us is that we do not listen to the deepest and most beautiful desires of our hearts and let ourselves be deceived, thinking that our hearts can be filled with the joy of enjoyment – as it is often offered to us by the media. But we are not created to enjoy, but for the love of God, who loves us and calls us to love.
Our misfortune is that we allow ourselves to be seduced by the narcotic happiness of alcohol, money, drugs, and passions… that seems so easily accessible. But it just as quickly leads us to catastrophic consequences; it eats away our sense of everything beautiful, accurate, valuable, honest, reasonable, and fair; it empties us and robs us of the true meaning of life. Lost lives, disrupted, even destroyed health and relationships, marriages and families; fraud and corruption, disrespect and lawlessness… all these are the fruits of letting our hearts and spirits be filled with anything but the love of our God. This is also why the liturgical season of Advent invites us to pray and watch. We know what is knocking on the door of our senses, hearts, and spirit – from the media, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, and the internet. Therefore, not letting anyone or anything enter your heart is essential.
The Lord Jesus will say it in a parable: “If the householder had known at what hour of the night a thief would come, he would surely have been on the watch and would not have allowed him to break into his house.” How many thieves do we allow ourselves to be robbed of today? Whether he is a thief of time and reputation, thief of good relationships, understanding, forgiveness, respect, faith, hope, or love; the thief of peace, marital fidelity and inseparable love; a thief of purity of heart, spirit, and body; a thief of legal certainty and justice, of mutual love in families; a thief of prayer, obedience, and respect for Christ’s Church, etc. Let us remember that vigilance in our lives is nourished by constant supplicating prayer, so we do not fall into temptation and lose faith in the Lord’s faithfulness. For all things pass away, but his word endures forever.
“Take care of your heart and your spirit,” reads today’s Gospel. God always cares about our hearts. Jesus knows that where our treasure is, there our hearts will also be. He knows that good and evil come from the heart. He does not want us to harden our hearts but to obey his voice. He wants us to be close to him with our hearts and not with our mouths; he wants to create a new heart for us. During Advent, it is often said: “Prepare the way for the Lord.” We could also understand it as a challenge: “Create the necessary silence in your life.” Not as emptiness, but as a condition to hear our God, the other person,d ourselves. Silence serves to help us learn to understand ourselves, others, and our God. Why do we often not understand each other? Why don’t spouses, parents, children, or politicians understand each other? Because they don’t know how to listen to each other, or to be quiet. How do we want to experience this year’s Advent?
I want to quote the encouraging words of Pope Benedict XVI, which he addressed to parents: “Dear parents, always try to teach your children to pray and pray with them, lead them to the sacraments, especially to the Eucharist; introduce them to the life of the Church, do not be afraid to read the Holy Scriptures to them in the family, illuminate family life with the light of faith and praise God as Father. Be like a small supper table, similar to the one created by Mary and the disciples, in which one lives in unity, community, and prayer!”
If we want to prepare the way for Jesus into our hearts and lives, we must find and create the necessary silence in which we let God enter our heart’s aheartsirit. It can be the silence of prayer, the silence lived in the Eucharist and before the Eucharist, in reading or listening to the word of God. It may be silence from the received sacrament of penance, the silence we give to another when he needs someone to listen to him. It can be the silence of our little acts of love.
The writer Ivan Kadlečík wrote before Christmas: “It seems that everything is moving towards manipulation as if this is the primary interest of our social establishment. The media, authorities, business chains, political parties, insurance companies, banks, energy companies, transport, and telecommunications manipulate us. All of them are narrowing the space of our freedom for their benefit and the interest of profit and power. We become their hostages, subjects, and serfs. For a serf, even Christmas becomes almost a natural disaster. The Bolsheviks suffered these holidays as a kind of folklore appendix; today, the inner essence of the holiday is massively destroyed, liquidated by all possible means. The time of joy and cheer for the world had come now, when Money was born for our eternal salvation. And that’s why let’s celebrate…
Save Christmas Eve, you save your soul when a thieving hand reaches for your freedom. Otherwise, we would slavishly plod along here senselessly, floundering and stumbling along like salaried employees of a monstrous machine that takes everything from us. Heroism today is not to acquire and subjugate the world – heroism is not to let your tiny territory be taken, defend it, or let in a degenerate large pile of thoughts, feelings, things and pe, and people. Perhaps it is the last human asylum. At least one day or evening a year. Day of mystery, silence, birth, life, light, tenderness, word, inner freedom, respect, humility, and future. With an unused morse code, I am sending an SOS signal. Let’s save our souls!” But we need silence, which conveys the most beautiful thing about ourselves.
Good God, protect our hearts and our spirits. Do not let our hearts become corrupted and fall away from you, living God. Fill him with living desire and love for you. Please help us find time for silence, in which we will meet you, listen, and thus find the way to you, the other person, ourselves, and the depths and beauty of life.
