April 2009 The Road to Daybreak A Spiritual Journey by Henri J M Nouwen

Continue from ...... The Heart What is the heart? It is the place of trust, a trust that can be called faith, hope, or love, depending on how it is being manifested. Pere Thomas sees the trusting heart as the most important characteristic of the human person. It is not so much the ability to think, to reflect, to plan, or to produce that makes us different from the rest of creation, but the ability to trust. It is the heart that makes us truly human. This vital observation helps explain why we respond with our hearts to our surroundings long before our consciences are developed. Our consciences, which allow us to distinguish between good and evil and thus give us a basis for moral choice, are less in control than our hearts. Pere Thomas is convinced that much of the crisis in the life of the Church today is connected with a lack of knowledge of the heart. Much Church discussion today focuses on the morality of human behaviour: premarital sex, divorce, homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and so on. Many people have become disillusioned with the Church because of these issues. But when the moral life gets all the attention, we are in danger of forgetting the primacy of the mystical life, which is the life of the heart. Quite often the suggestion is made that the mystical life, a life in which we enter into a unifying communion with God, is the highest fruit and most precious reward of the moral life. The classical distinctions among the purifying way, the illuminating way, and the unifying way as the three progressively higher levels of the spiritual life have strengthened this suggestion. Thus we have come to see the mystical life as the life of the happy few who reach the prayer of total surrender. The greatest insight of Pere Thomas - an insight in which the best of his theology and the best of his pastoral experience with handicapped people merge - is that the mystical life lies at the beginning of our existence and not just at its end. We are born in intimate communion with the God who created us in love. We belong to God from the moment of our conception. Our heart is that divine gift which allows us to trust not just God, but also our mother, our father, our family, ourselves, and the world. Pere Thomas is convinced that very small children have a deep, intuitive knowledge of God, a knowledge of the heart, that sadly is often obscured and even suffocated by the many systems of thought we gradually cultivate. Handicapped people, who have such a limited ability to learn, can let their hearts speak easily and thus reveal a mystical life that for many intelligent people seems unreachable. By speaking about the heart as the deepest source of the spiritual life, the life of faith, hope, and love, Pere Thomas wanted to show me that human affections do not lead us where our hearts want to lead us. The heart is much wider and deeper than our affections. It is before and beyond the distinctions between sorrow and joy, anger and lust, fear and love. It is the place where all is one in God, the place where we truly belong, the place from which we come and to which we always yearn to return. I now realize that my "simple" question about my affections required a fuller response than I had expected. I need to relearn the central place of the mystical experience in human life.

- To Be Continued - © Copyright Shalom 2009. All rights reserved.