The Troubled Heart

The Tragic in Life

In the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Mt: 13:24-30) Jesus captures one of the deepest aspects of  Thomas Merton, as is so often the case, has a powerful statement on this brokenness that pervades our reality. our human experience. Trouble will be there until the end. We see this mixture of good and evil in all levels of reality: the family, our community, our parish, our society and most of all within ourselves.

“Let us frankly recognize the true import and the true challenge of the Christian message. The whole Gospel kerygma becomes impertinent and laughable if there is an easy answer to everything in a few external gestures and pious intentions. Christianity is a religion for persons who are aware that there is a deep wound, a fissure of sin that strikes down to the very heart of the person’s being. They have tasted the sickness that is present in the inmost heart of each person estranged from God by guilt, suspicion and covert hatred. If that sickness is an illusion, then there is no need for the Cross, the sacraments and the Church.” (Contemplative Prayer, p. 107)

Self -knowledge is fundamental to Carmelite spirituality. It deals with the depths of deceit and deception in our heart. It brings a new awareness that only happens with an openness to life that is guided by prayer and a reflective attitude.

This pursuit of self-knowledge is not a pleasing process. We come face to face with our personal darkness that Merton talks about in a slow, gradual process. Our addictions, attachments, illusions and prejudices bubble up to reveal a false self that has been steering us away from walking with Jesus. The temptation is great to forsake the serious and difficult issues and immerse ourselves in the superficial. When we reject the call to face ourselves truthfully, we become the source of our own evils and our own suffering because the heart is disoriented. The gift of the Troubled Heart is to see and embrace life’s many burdens as a passageway to God.

Once again, we need to look to Jesus to grasp this life-giving truth.

The Gold in the Debris of Life

Despite the evidence of evil that is so pervasive in our daily experience, Carmelite spirituality testifies that God’s love is always present even in the debris of life, the time of our deepest trials.
In the early stages of prayer, we start out seeking an answer to life’s problems. This search is done with a beginner’s faith. However, as the faith increases, we learn that today’s answered prayers all too quickly give way to an avalanche of tomorrow’s new problems.

Eventually, it becomes clear that we must change our approach. We must accept God on God’s terms rather than trivializing our faith journey by thinking of God as someone who is only there to solve our problems. This change is no small task. A great perception comes when we finally realize that the problems are not the problem. Our approach to life’s difficulties is what needs to change.

The three great Carmelite Saints and Doctors of the Church are St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and St. Therese, the Little Flower. They each arrived at a point in their lives where they accepted God on God’s terms. This acceptance led them to great wisdom. The result, in their lives and in their messages, is a passionate love story. They are deeply grounded in the real. They recognize the depth and the consequences of the struggle between good and evil, the weeds and the wheat. They reject the shallow and deceitful “Make me feel good Jesus” approach of much of today’s organized religion. The popular practice of seeking only the comfort of religion and avoiding the challenging part, creates a world based on the crumbling foundation of our personal, social and cultural illusions.

What is real is real, however, and our little world will never be free of the universal consequences of the human condition. The Carmelite Doctors are the great spokespersons for the dimension of suffering and darkness as the avenue to God in our broken world. Their message is that the answer lies in how we deal with this fragmented situation. They invite us to find the gold in the debris of life.

Most people eventually come to the awareness that they need a spirituality that addresses the tragic and broken elements of life. Jesus was clear about this in his call to join him on the road to Jerusalem.

We are creatures, limited, but called to the infinite. We are summoned beyond our little dreams to a God of unlimited and unconditional love. We have incredible energy and creativity to deny that we are sinners, even though we are loved and saved and called as sinners.

In the endless human encounters that flow from our brokenness, we hold the seeds of peace or conflict, reconciliation or division. Teresa’s teaching about this is clear. Prayer at the moment of our crisis is important. More important is the habitual practice of prayer that is deep and personal. This creates a reservoir of patience, insight, and prudence to help us with the unplanned eruptions of the debris of life.

God’s mercy is always on the prowl, always seeking us. A mystic of the Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich, put it beautifully when she said, “First comes the fall and then the recovery from the fall. Both are the mercy of God.”

Light In the Darkness

The grace is in the struggle. Life is never complete. It is always messy. It is the nature of things that all relationships are incomplete. There is a built-in change factor. We cannot stop the clock. The kids grow up quickly, and even more rapidly, middle age passes on to old age.

John of the Cross has good counsel for these inevitable crises of life. He says that God’s love is hidden in the turmoil and one is not able to see or experience this love at the beginning. John’s response is simple: patience, trust and perseverance in the apparent darkness that is truly light. Things are happening during the unrest. The idols are being exposed and released from the clinging heart.

The gods are dying in the night and the soul needs to undergo a grieving process. The wrong path would be to artificially solve or heal the condition, or deny it altogether. John encourages us to face the condition, entering it with patience, and there, where the heart is struggling hardest, to be alert for the approach of love. John calls for a “loving attentiveness” in the dark; it is time to be a watch in the night. Contemplation is openness to God’s transforming love, especially when it comes in such a disguised manner. Only when we pass through the purification we need, do we gradually see the beauty that is God hidden in the darkness.