ourselves, the heart. In fact, the heart is used in this context more than a thousand times in the Bible. It is in the heart that we make our most fundamental decisions and commitment. The great prayer that we all need so much is in Psalm 51: “A clean heart create for me O God, renew in me a steadfast spirit.” (Ps 51:12)
In his book, Seasons of the Heart, Fr. John Welch, O. Carm. presented a beautiful vision of the Carmelite tradition of spirituality. In this text, he looks at the heart from five different perspectives. Each view enlightens some important aspect of how we experience God. In my next five blogs I am going to present a summary of this simple but truly profound vision of our encounter with the divine. We will start with the Long Heart.
The Longing Heart
All human beings share a common hunger for what we, in so many diverse ways, identify as happiness. Life’s journey is filled with the human saga seeking that elusive goal of satisfying the unyielding longing in our heart. Eventually, we come to discover that the search is loaded with deceptive leads that come up empty. C. S. Lewis described it this way, “Our whole being by its very nature is one vast need, incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered.” Gradually, we come in touch with a semblance of what the heart is longing for when we find love in its many open and hidden manifestations in our life.If there is any authenticity in our life, it is rooted in our discovery of love. This love, no matter how genuine, is only a shadow of the true love that is God. If we are open and faithful in our search, we will come to realize that the elusive longing that is the decisive definition of our reality is a hunger for God.
It is a long and painful journey to learn the viewpoint of love. This point of view changes the “It’s mine” approach to “It’s yours.” This is the opening to achieving some success with the quest for a happiness that does not wilt in the struggle of life. Most people never grasp that the hunger is satisfied by giving not receiving, by sharing rather than clinging. Emptiness not fulfillment is the key to moving forward in this mysterious search for God.
The desires for more create a basic frustration that most of us try to avoid. We buy into the consumer mindset that what we need is in the next big sale. We are victims of an industry that spends billions of dollars to turn our wants into needs. We struggle with this great lie.
Whether it is Christmas or graduation, the new house a new car or the new job, they all eventually come up short. The truth we find so hard and so threatening remains the same. Our heart is made for God. It will remain turbulent and restless until it possesses God.
On the other hand, there is a great freedom in identifying and embracing this truth that ultimately, we are searching for God. All that is good, all that is beautiful, all that is real for us, needs to drive us toward this deepest emptiness, the hunger for God. All else is simply leads to a sense of incompleteness and frustration.
The choice is clear. We can use the great gift of life to tune into this truth flowing from the depths of our heart: we long for God. The alternative is that we can continue to walk in the valley of deceptions and illusions. We can make this sacrifice of going beyond self-absorption or we can continue living the lie that we will find happiness in our possessions and our power to control and direct our destiny.
Any authentic spiritual life will deal with the true longings that define our reality. If we are dedicated in our search, our heart will discover a deeper dimension of our broken condition. God is seeking us. The God we pursue is the true seeker. What keeps us separated is not the distance from God but our distancing ourselves from God. We live with the hidden fear that in having God we will have nothing else. We need to stop running and let ourselves be caught by the Hound of Heaven.
In our search for God, we undergo a series of conversions. In this process, we learn what Jesus said so often: to save our life we must lose it.
In these transformations of our mind and heart, we purify and renew our desires and longings. A sense of direction emerges. The correct path allows God to come into focus as the goal of the longing heart.
In the reflections on the next four seasons of the heart we will delve into other dimensions of this search for God. We will discover the true GPS that is programed to bring us home. These topics are: the Enslaved Heart, the Listening Heart, the Troubled Heart and the Pure Heart.
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