BILLTESKA

I don’t know if any of you remembers my favorite Gahan Wilson cartoon. It shows the typical clueless geke driving down the road, as seen from the back seat. You also see the rear-view mirror, which is entirely filled with what appears to be the iris of a gigantic eye. And across the bottom of the mirror the usual words are etched: things in the mirror are closer than they appear. Forgive me for comparing the horrifying joke to God, Who is closer to us than we think ~ than we can even imagine. The One Who calls all the stars by name is closer to us even than our own thoughts. We are used to regarding ourselves as our thoughts. How could anything be closer to me than my own thoughts. But we are not our thoughts. There is a deeper ~ or higher ~ at any rate a vaster self, which tradition calls the heart. Now, this definitely does NOT mean a center of passion or emotion or feeling. This is NOT the heart of the Valentine’s Day card. It is not heart as opposed to mind, but a deeper kind of consciousness, which includes mind. It is the place you take it when you "take it to heart." It is what is broken when you "break your heart." It is what is hardened when, God forbid, you “harden your heart.” In the scriptural and traditional sense, the heart is the center of our selves, our core (which, after all, just MEANS heart in Latin). The heart is our deepest being, of which all else, mental and physical, is an expression. Our thoughts come and go. So do our physical cells, most of which are supposedly replaced every seven years or so. What is permanent is the heart.

I may do as I wish with my heart. I may harden it: shutter up its vastness, try to close off its openness to God. I may forget it altogether and waste my life in imagining that my thoughts are my self. In that case, my heart is likely to produce all the kinds of defilements our Lord enumerates in today’s Gospel. Or, I can open my heart, soften it, and practice the subjection of my thoughts to it. Or, better, I can learn to house my thoughts in my heart. This is what the Orthodox call standing with the mind in the heart before God, and it is the very definition of prayer, which they call the Prayer of the Heart. This is the quieting of the mind. Not turning it off, but quieting it. The kind of mind we pray for when we ask that we may serve God with a quiet mind: the mind sheltering in the eternal vastness of an open and softened heart. Today, we pray in the Collect for that quiet, that hesychia, and for its fruits in our active lives and in our society. For quiet is not the opposite of action, but its proper ground.

My favorite prayer. We ask that God’s Love be grafted into our hearts ~ that God’s love be joined to us organically, and that God Himself (for that is what is meant by God’s Name) come to dwell inside us. God’s Name also refers to Jesus, and we ask that Jesus graft His love in our hearts. An organic metaphor: to take one living thing and fuse it with another so that the two become one life. Graft in our hearts the Love of Your Name. The Name of God is also God’s Word, the Logos, what Ephesians calls the Sword of the Spirit. The sword which, in another place, is described as piercing between the bone and the marrow:

But that same Word is also the Love, that we ask to be grafted in our hearts. So near is God to us when we call on Him, that is, when we remember Him. And even when we don’t. God is in each of our hearts even when we don’t remember Him, even when we are distracted by out thoughts and imaginings. God’s love is grafted in our hearts, as we have asked.

We also ask for the grace of remembrance, that it may increase. For that is the meaning of true religion: the remembrance of God. Not the truth of correctness but of genuineness. And religion meaning not institutional form but strong and reïnforced tying to God. Increase in us true religion. Increase our genuine bonds to God, our remembrance of God. The Tree of Life that has been grafted into our inmost selves at Baptism must be nurtured, fed. It must be nourished by that which is Wholly Good, Most Holy ~ the Bread of Life, the Heavenly Manna, the Body of Christ, the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. The Bl. Sacrament represents all the nourishing, life-giving, divine Goodness of Love Himself. Nourish us with all Goodness.

The tree thus grafted and thus nourished brings forth good fruit; good works unto the transfiguration of the world into the Kingdom of Peace and Justice. This fruit is God’s work in the world, and not our own, because it comes from the fertility of God’s Love grafted in our hearts: God’s love for us as persons, and God’s love for the whole world. The Love of God’s Name is not our love for God, but God’s Love for us. Our reception of this Love transforms us. Just as the graft transforms the fruitless stump, we become new beings ~ or rather, we are joined to a New Being, immortal, no longer limited in possibility, not limited in generosity, since the Love of God is inexhaustible: the more of it we give away the more it increases in us. Inexhaustible and invincible.

The human heart, softened and opened by Divine Love, the heart of stone turned into a heart of flesh by the graft of God’s Name, is immortal, invincible, inexhaustible and unlimited in its capacity for joy.

Lord of all power and might, the Author and Giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

# posted by billteska : 5:21 PM