Listening

"Acquire a heart and you shall be saved." These are the words of Abba Pambo, a desert father of the fourth century. According to the desert tradition, the focus of ascetical practice and prayer was ordered to the acquiring of a heart, achieving purity of heart. Finding one's heart rendered one permeable and available to God's mystery. Historically there is a tension between the mind and the heart, which calls to mind an Orthodox phrase: we must learn to stand before God with "the mind in the heart." It suggests the profound unity that we are called to express in our lives as Christian persons.

The heart is not simply a physical organ or seat of emotions; it is the core and center of our personhood as well. According to Jewish tradition, the heart is the throne of God's glory, which is the place where the shekhinah, the presence of God, most deeply is to be found. Therefore, when Paul in the letter to the Romans speaks about the love of God being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us, he is speaking of God's reality breaking through to the inmost chamber of our own reality. We experience it then as a unified and transfiguring and transforming love.

The effect of the heart's becoming the home of God's glory is wonderfully described by another ancient, St. Isaac of Nineveh. Writing in the seventh century, he describes what happens when the heart is rendered permeable to God's presence and God's mystery. It becomes compassionate. It becomes merciful. What is a merciful heart, St. Isaac asks?

It is a heart that burns with love for the whole of creation, for humankind, for the birds, for the beasts, for the demons: for every creature. When a person with such a heart as this thinks of the creatures or looks at them, his eyes are filled with tears. An overwhelming compassion makes his heart grow small and weak, and he cannot endure to hear or see any suffering, even the smallest pain inflicted upon any creature. He never ceases to pray with tears -- even for the irrational animals, the enemies of truth, and those who do him evil -- asking that they may be guarded and receive God's mercy. For the reptiles he also prays with a great compassion that rises up endlessly in his heart until he shines again and is glorious like God.

In other words, to be given the gift of a merciful heart is to be transfigured, is to allow the mercy and compassion of God not only to find a home in us but through us to extend outward, embracing all the disparities and contradictions and paradoxes that exist in the world around us, even the demons and the reptiles. (The reptiles here are meant to stand for everything that discomforts us and makes us uncomfortable.)