Over the course of years of traveling and preaching everywhere in the United States as well as other countries, and ministering to thousands of people in many different personal, social, and cultural situations, it has become clear to me how difficult it is for virtually all of us to accept the truth of our baptismal identification with Jesus. Why? We daily experience the difference between our own hearts and the heart of Jesus. What goes on in the heart of Jesus is all love and holiness, but what goes on in our hearts is not. Awareness of this can make it difficult for any of us to believe in “Christ in you” (Col 1:27). We commonly lack the traits of the friends of God and his adopted children: “parrhesia,19 straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved” (CCC 2778). Lacking such traits to no small extent, we hesitate to surrender to the mystery. The issue is in the heart.
The human heart stands in need of healing, and the good news is that the grace of healing and transformation of the heart is at hand. Among the most moving prophecies of the Old Testament were God’s promises of the day when he would radically renew the hearts of his people (see Ezek 36:26–27), and among the greatest proclamations of the New Testament is the announcement on Pentecost that the promised day has come (see Acts 2:14–36). The Spirit has been poured into our hearts and has set about transforming us (see Rom 5:5). Renewal has begun. Thanks to the grace given to each of us in Baptism, Jesus Christ himself is now the “hidden man of the heart” (1 Pet 3:4),20 and the divine Life of Jesus is meant to grow in us more and more.
The path to healing is the way of friendship with God in the Church. On the way of friendship, the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts is the iconographer who carves the image of Christ deeply within us. As the Spirit does so, the Christian heart becomes increasingly aware of “riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you” (Col 1:27). The more we grow in awareness and acceptance of this mystery, the more our hearts turn with Jesus and like Jesus to the “Father of lights” (Jas 1:17). Ultimately, our calling is to live under the gaze of the Father who loves us, and to worship him in spirit and in truth (see Jn 4:24). It all begins, however, in the heart.
The Mystery of the Human Heart
What is the deepest thing in a human person? Modern science generally, and certain schools of psychology in particular, seek to explain human beings exclusively in mechanistic and materialistic terms. Under their influence, many people now spontaneously think of the depths of their own being in terms of impersonal forces. This leads many people to think that, though we might experience our conscious life as something very personal and rich, at the center of our being the primary factor is either chemical processes, psychic drives, or various sorts of conditioning. Now, it is important to affirm that human beings are physical beings, human beings have psychic drives, and human beings are susceptible to conditioning, but the primary factor in the human person is no such impersonal thing. Rather, at the center of the human person is that which is most personal of all—the human heart—and the heart is irreducible to something impersonal. The heart is “the dwelling-place where I am” (CCC 2563, emphasis added). Your heart and mine are deeper than all our psychic drives and, in fact, deeper than anything conceptual reason can fathom (CCC 2563). Only God knows what is in a human heart (CCC 2563). It is high time for all of us to think of ourselves and one another in truly human and personal terms. It is time for us to think of human beings primarily in terms of the heart.
Every human being has a heart. The heart is a given of our inner experience. Who would ever want to be called “heartless”? Although we all experience various depths and complexities of the heart every day, our hearts are also hidden from us in many ways. “More tortuous than anything is the human heart, / beyond remedy; who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9 NABRE). Though our hearts are mysterious to ourselves and others, it is possible nonetheless to gain a basic sense of our hearts. Indeed, it is essential to do so.
The way to do so is to ponder the heart in light of other factors in our being. According to the teaching of the Church, a human being is essentially a unit of body and soul. The term soul, according to ancient tradition, signifies the source of life in living things, and the presence of soul is what differentiates living organisms from corpses. Our own human souls too are the source of our life in the biological sense. But no small part of the overall life form of human beings is our inner life or all the things going on within us: our sensations, images, passions, thoughts, memories, intentions, choices, etc. In its proper sense, the word heart signifies the organ beating in our chest and pumping blood, but according to a nearly universal figure of speech, the word heart also signifies the whole inner life of the human soul. Such is the broadest sense of the word as it is used by biblical authors as well as the Fathers of the Church and the saints and mystics of every age. In this broad sense, Pope Saint John Paul II said that the heart is the “inward mystery of man.”21 The heart in the broad sense of the term, the inward mystery in each of us, is vast and deep. Each person is, in a sense, a world. Yet it is possible to distinguish different layers of the heart or different regions in the depths of life going on within each of us. The Fathers of the Church sometimes compared our inner life to a church. In every church, there is an area where the people gather, called the nave. There is another area where the altar and tabernacle are situated, called the sanctuary. In the nave, people come and go day and night. In the sanctuary, however, the eucharistic Presence remains. So too it is with our inner life. Like the nave, there is a superficial place within us. Just as people come and go in the nave continually, so in this superficial region within us there are sensations, images, and passions that come and go in a fluctuation of impulses and moods and various considerations. Yet there is also a deeper place within us at the center of the soul: the interior sanctuary. Like the sanctuary of a church, in the interior sanctuary at the center of the soul the Presence of God remains day and night. For thanks to Baptism, God dwells in our hearts by grace and is always available for us.22 He is ever present to us even though we are often not present to him.
In order to say more, certain saints and spiritual writers use more descriptive terms. Saint Diadochos of Photiki calls the interior nave the area around the heart.23 Archimandrite Zacharias calls the interior sanctuary the deep heart.24 He follows Scripture in doing so (see Ps 64:6 LXX). In the area around the heart, sensations, images, and passions combine and recombine in endless movements of impassioned imagery and automatic reactions to people, circumstances, and events. In the deep heart, however, something more profound is going on. In the deep heart is the awareness of God, spiritual love, conscience, freedom, relationship, prayer, and many more mysteries.
- Parrhesia is a Greek word that means the ability to speak freely or boldly. In this context, it means the ability to speak freely with God based on the confidence that one is accepted and loved.
- Translation by author.
- Pope Saint John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, no. 8.
- A qualification is important: the Presence remains within the interior sanctuary of the soul so long as one is living in a state of grace. Mortal sin destroys the grace of the indwelling, but for those who are baptized, the sacrament of Penance restores it.
- Saint Diadochos of Photike, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination” in The Philokalia, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, vol. 1 (New York: Faber & Faber, 1979), 263; One Hundred Practical Texts of Perception and Spiritual Discernment from Diadochos of Photiki, trans. Janet Elaine Rutherford (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations, 2000); “Introductory,” St Diadochos of Photiki, Gnostic Chapters, December 24, 2011, http://timiosprodromos8. blogspot.com. The Palmer translation refers to what is within the person but “outside the heart” and the Rutherford translation translates the same expression more literally as “the area around the limbs of the heart.”
- Archimandrite Zacharias, The Hidden Man of the Heart: The Cultivation of the Heart in Orthodox Christian Anthropology, ed. Christopher Veniamin (Dalton, PA: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2008),
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Excerpt from:
The Father’s House: Discovering Our Home in the Trinity
By James Dominic Brent, OP Foreword by Sister Bethany Madonna, SV
Copyright © 2023, Dominican Province of Saint Joseph
Published by Pauline Books & Media, Boston
Image: Deposit photos
