Into the heart

Knowing that the true you resides in your heart will save you from a lot of headache, I assure you. Knowing this is the beginning of gaining mastery over your thoughts and emotions. Your brain may crown your body, but your belly holds it together, and there’s considerable distance between the two. Maintaining that distance will save you over and over again. So when the monkeys in your mind try to dominate you, practice drawing them down from their lofty heights and into your heart where Christ waits to tame them.

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Life wasn't poured into you through your brain

What the Bible calls the heart is what we call the gut. More specifically, the spiritual athletes of our history—the praying saints—point us to the navel when they speak of the heart. This is a strange but helpful image for you to keep in mind. When you were in your mother’s womb, everything you needed for life came to you through your navel. Life wasn’t poured into you through your brain, but through your belly. So, spiritually, you draw your life from God from here—your navel, the true center of your body, what the Bible calls your heart.

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What is the heart?

In the Bible and in our spiritual tradition, the heart is not the muscle that pumps blood through our bodies, nor is it the seat of our emotions. No, the heart is the center of our beings, the place within us that belongs entirely to God. It is that point where the image of God resides within us, where God’s Name is indelibly written. It can be covered up, hidden, neglected, but never destroyed. Because it is the seat of God within us it is the organ of true spiritual perception, the faculty of highest knowledge, the place of direct experience.

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Never give up

Here's a lovely example of contemplative living---awakening to the Voice of God speaking through the most ordinary events. Mary shows how remaining attentive to what comes, even through a little child, can be revelation and an awareness to all of life as sacred.  Mary writes:

. . . As I write this, I realize that I’ll never give up, as my darling girl so emphatically advised me. But the thing that I won’t give up on is me. I’ll never give up on me, no matter what might happen in my world and along the journey that comprises my life. Although there will be things I never complete, things I might falter on, things that might cause me to fall---and OH, trust me, there will be those things---the core that binds me here, strong to the universe, is one which will never let go of its grip. So long as I have a warm, pulsing hand to clasp. So long as I have an eye to the smoldering, triumphant sun.

Love that last sentence: "So long as I have an eye to the smoldering, triumphant sun."

The true you

It’s obvious now that you can’t think your way to God, and shouldn’t try. But that doesn’t mean thinking isn’t important. There’s plenty of good you can and should do with your mind, but spiritually, your mind’s always secondary. At some point your ideas, even feelings, must give way to a direct experience of God that is beyond both of them. What a gift of grace this is! If knowing God depended on the quality of your thoughts, then you’d have to be brilliant to taste what you long to taste. If knowing God depended on your emotions, you can see immediately what kind of trouble you’d be in. When it comes right down to it, thoughts and emotions can carry you a good distance along the path (they can also send you on one wild goose chase after another), but they cannot carry you the whole way. Only love can carry you into the dark, mind-numbing cloud of God’s presence (Mark 10.7). Your thinking, even at its best and brightest, is eclipsed by the dazzling mystery of God who can ultimately only be known through your heart.

Your heart is the true you, the deeper you, the you undivided from God by sin.

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