Continuing with the heart, we spoke yesterday about the return to the center, the return to the self, the return to the heart, in both an individual sense, the occult conversion, and to return to our own center in order to find the Admin. And in a collective sense, especially in the modern world, where we see a kind of cultural movement away from the center, since the Middle Ages. Now you can see that treated in a negative way, if Berger looks at it in both a negative way and a positive way, because he says that the Middle Ages, although it concentrated the spiritual forces of man, because the Middle Ages was kind of a monastic culture, and that monastic culture of the Middle Ages still exists in some places, like at Mount Athos, and in certain places in Greece probably, although also outside

[01:06]

of Christianity, like the Buddhist culture up to the time when the Tibetan Buddhists were expelled from Tibet was very much like the Western medieval culture, the religious culture which concentrated the spiritual forces of man. But since the breakup of the Middle Ages, since the Renaissance and the Reformation, the great flowering of man's external capacities, even spiritual capacities of a certain kind, aesthetic ones, scientific ones, intellectual ones, all kinds, the center, the core has been neglected, man's movement has been deeply centrifugal, and so man has lost the sense of his own being, the sense of what he is, and so modern psychology has a hard time trying to put it back together again. Because man's center is God, man's center, the core, is the place where he is one with God, or is related to God, or the place where he finds the presence of God, or the place

[02:09]

where he contemplates God, whatever you want to call it, and there are probably a hundred names for that place. And somehow it's man's center, where he originates from, his maker. And we're still somehow in the presence of his maker, or joined with his maker. Sometimes we in the West are too afraid of the closeness of God, we're too afraid of pantheism, and so we make too rigorous distinctions between the creative thing and God. We insist that they be entirely different. And yet, there's something there, which is a bridge between the two. There have been so many battles fought over that question, like the battle about the natural desire for God during the early part of the century. There was contender that if man can have a natural desire for God, then God somehow belongs to man, but there's no such thing as grace, and therefore you can't hold that. But if there's no natural

[03:11]

desire for God, then man somehow is cut off from God, and somehow is independent of God. He has another possible end, another possible scope, and we get into a kind of a, just a forest of meaninglessness. That natural desire for God is a very important thing. The fact that our whole nature is waiting for God, the fact that the whole dynamism of our being is moving towards Him, we need to be liberated into the freedom to think that way, and to be personal with the truth. Man, the creation, the world, everything is in the configure of God. We're the bush in the desert waiting for that fire to come, and speak to us, and tell us our name. The heart is the place, you saw, of the knowledge of God, the place of hearing the word. Once in a while I'll put something up from Uber, because from his Hasidic stories or texts, writing things up a bit. Here's a commentary on the words of

[04:23]

the Shema, remember? Hero Israel. And these words which I command thee, this day shall be upon thy heart. The verse did not say in thy heart, for there are times when the heart is shut, but the words lie upon the heart, and when the heart opens in holy hours, they'll sink deep down into it. He's saying there are times when the heart is open, and there are times when the heart is closed, in sorrow or in distraction, who knows what. And the words are to lie upon the heart, so that when the heart does open, then the words can sink in. Those words that the Lord has sent to Israel, here are the words of God is one thing. There's a very deep word there, the Lord your God is one thing. What does that mean, the Lord your God is one? It's the love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul. The Lord your God is one. If you take the wide interpretation of that, it means that outside the Lord your God there isn't anything. That the Lord your

[05:25]

God is one and there's nothing except him in this world. That's the way the Muslims tend to do that. The Lord your God is one, there's only him. Okay, you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul, with all your strength, with your body and your mind and everything. And as you love the Lord your God, as you obey that one commandment, as you listen to the word and respond to the word which tells you who God is, the word which somehow is God, the word which somehow says everything because it says that God is one and it speaks God to you and it's God speaking to you and it's God saying, I am he and there is nothing outside of me. As you listen to that word, the word does something in you. It does something in your heart. It pulls your heart together and so you are able to draw your life into one act. And the one act into which you draw your life in listening to that word, obeying that commandment is the act of love, is the act of the love of God. And the bush begins to burn. And you begin to discover that that

[06:27]

one thing, that one outside of which there is nothing and inside of which everything dwells, whether it be on fire, whether it or not, is God that is in you. And that, having become conscious of it, in some way you are able to live it consciously and return it to God. So the bush begins to burn. The heroism of the Lord your God is one God. And it's the loving of your whole heart, of your whole soul, of your whole mind, of your whole spirit. Sometimes, in some versions, it's just the Lord your God is one, not the Lord your God is one God. Because the monk is the one who tries to find that oneness, tries to find the oneness which is God. Remember Jesus in John 17, he says, Father, the glory that you have given to me, I want to give to them. So that they may be one as we are one. Somehow the glory is to be one. The glory is to find that oneness. What does that mean? You better not try to analyze it. These things you don't analyze, you try to find, you can't even find

[07:29]

them out in life because they contain everything. To find that oneness is to find God himself, and to find that all things are one in him. And all things are one and are drawn together in so far as they are in him. And this is through learning that lesson of love, which is in the word, which is in the word which is spoken to us. Heroism, the Lord your God is one. So to find that oneness is to find that everything is in God, and we are in God. And to the extent that we find that oneness, remember the word monikos, monk, means one, right? It means solitary first of all, but there are about three or four different interpretations of it, of it all converging on the sense of oneness. So the monk's goal really is to find that one thing. He goes out by himself into the desert, the loneliness of the desert, to find that one thing. What does he go out into the desert to see? And that one thing is this oneness, simply, it's the burning bush. This one thing is the one of God in

[08:30]

which is everything. If he finds it in himself, he finds it in God, he finds it in the world, he finds that God, self, world are one thing in God. So he goes out by himself to find that oneness, you could say to get himself together. But how does he discover it? He discovers it in learning how to love. He discovers it in entering into the emptiness of himself and going into that desert which is his own interior, as it were, his own interior void and being able to descend into that nothingness, that emptiness in himself. We talked about man being kind of grown up for the whole living life. As he descends into that emptiness, into that desert, if he does it with confidence, he's moving towards that burning bush, he's moving towards that fire. Somebody says, learn to see inside of things, to see the flame of all things. The flame of all things appears there. The flame of all things is the same flame. It's a flame with which you can light up this and that and everything, just like a candle flame, which you can spread indefinitely, infinitely, because the flame, the light can

[09:32]

burn one thing just like it can another thing. And that flame somehow is the oneness of things, it's the oneness of God. The Lord your God is one God, and you have to love the Lord your God. But if you get that fire lighted inside of yourself, then you begin to know the oneness of all things, because everything is capable of burning in that flame. But it's not a destructive fire, it's a fire which brings things back to their oneness, their life and their source, because it's the fire which is God. And in God, all things find their life, they find their being, not their destruction, but their being. If you have to go into a kind of a desert, you have to go into that desert, into that emptiness, into that nothingness of yourself. You have to face your own nothingness and your own death in order to find that fire which is life. Our God is a consuming fire, as we heard in Hebrews. Our God is a consuming fire. He consumes you, and when he's consumed you, you find that you're alive in him, you're alive inside the fire, like the three boys in the fiery furnace, remember? So we go into that nothingness, the emptiness, the desert,

[10:38]

the dead, in order to find the oneness of that flame. And when you burn with that flame, you find out that the flame is love. The flame which gives light and warmth at the same time. It's the flame of love. The knowledge which is love, the wisdom which is both life and fire, which is both water from the desert and makes us grow, and light that enlightens our minds and tells us who we are and what all things are. And it's love which brings us all into one by sympathy, by finding ourselves together in God. And with this, of course, comes the transformation of the heart. The heart is where all this happens. Because when you go into that desert, you're going into your heart. You're descending into the emptiness to find the tempest, to find the middle of the world, to find the place where the fire burns. And that's descending into your heart and into your heart. Something happens to us and the heart itself becomes somehow transformed. It becomes transformed

[11:43]

into compassion. Because what was passion before, what was love before, what was anger before, what was things that drew you to others involuntarily or violently or pushed you against others in anger and violence, once again compulsively, turns into compassion so that you feel with others, you suffer with others, so that you find yourself one with others because you feel that same fire. Because you feel the fragility of your nature, you feel your death, and at the same time you feel flowing through that death, through that fire, the light, because the fire is life. And so the fire is at once physical, the water of descending, the water of the knowledge of your own fragility, of your own nothing, of your own death, the water of mourning, and the fire of love. The water and the fire that go together, you find a part of yourself in the water, a relation between the water and the fire.

[12:43]

We'll get to that later on. So the heart is the place where we hear the word and something happens to us. It's the place of discernment, it's the place of prayer, it's the place of the dwelling of the spirit. There are a lot of connections that we can make at that place of the heart, and maybe they'll appear later. This is sort of the central knot to which we get to the heart and then we move out from there to other places, to the things that we do in the monastic life, for instance. To this place we start talking practically about the monastic life. If you look at Cashin, for instance, as Kenneth will do, if you find out that Cashin sums up the goal of the monastic life in the purity of heart, it's in the First Conference of Al-Mahmoud, which probably a lot of you have read. If anybody hasn't, they should, because Cashin is very important to us. At least his central conferences, say the first ten

[13:44]

are pretty important, and that Conference 14 on spiritual knowledge is fundamentally true. Do you remember in that first conference of Cashin, of Abba Moses, how Moses questions Cashin and his friend, his two pilgrims. He said, well what's the goal of the monastic life? And they said, well it's the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God. And that's a good scriptural answer. You can't find a better one. It comes right out of the Gospel. And yet, he says he rejects it. He says, okay, but he's not satisfied. He wants something more concrete. He wants something that you can aim at. He wants something that you can in some way experience. How do you know when you're in the Kingdom of God? You've got to have some sign. He says, okay, that's the goal. That's the ultimate goal, but what's the immediate goal? What can you aim at? What can you use practically as a guide for your life? And then he settles on purity of heart. And that may surprise us, because we may think,

[14:45]

well, how can I experience purity of heart? How can I know what it is if I don't have it? But in some way, we're supposed to be able to guide ourselves by the goal of purity of heart. And this is chapter 4. The ultimate goal of our life is the Kingdom of Heaven, but we have to ask what the immediate goal is. For if we don't find it, we'll exhaust ourselves and feel restless. You can go fumbling around looking for the Kingdom of Heaven, but you're not going to find it unless you have a concrete thing to aim at, unless you have something pretty practical to do, unless you have something that's going to lay out a road, a way for you, if not a technique. The old man went on. The ultimate goal of our way of life is, as I said, the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven. The immediate aim is purity of heart, for without purity of heart, none can enter into that Kingdom. Remember in the Beatitude, the Sermon on the Mount, blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God. Jesus doesn't say blessed are the pure of heart for theirs is the Kingdom

[15:45]

of Heaven, but then somehow the Beatitudes are all one, they're all one thing. He said blessed are the poor in spirit for those of you who think you may know it. But probably we have to say that to be poor in spirit is also to be poor of heart, and that the two of us somehow converge in something like humility, although we better not try to give it one meaning. For without purity of heart, none can enter into that Kingdom. We should fix our gaze on this target and walk towards it in as straight a line as possible. If our thoughts wander away from it even a little, we should bring back our gaze towards it and use it as a kind of test which at once turns all of our efforts back into the one path. This reminds me of when we were reading from Pastor Nader yesterday, remember, where he says, how do you decide what path to follow? How do you choose your path? He says, ask yourself one question, does this path have a heart? Remember? How does that come together with passion? Passion is saying, purity of heart is your guide, and Don Juan is saying,

[16:50]

does this path have a heart? And remember he says at the end of that text that we read, if the path has a heart, you'll travel it with joy, and you'll travel it with peace, I think he would say that. If it doesn't have a heart, you'll curse your life, remember? You'll curse your life. Now the sign of purity of heart for passion is tranquility, is peace. I think he's saying about the same thing in different terms. There's a kind of joyful peace which accompanies purity of heart, which accompanies detachment. And something that Fr. Kenneth said to me the other day reminds us of this, that sometimes it's better to talk about freedom than to talk about detachment. Because detachment is a negative, and we've got too many negatives in our monastic tradition. We need to be able to look at the positive side of things. The positive side of what we're talking about is freedom. Purity of heart is freedom. It's the ability to love, it's the ability to move towards God, it's

[17:52]

simply the ability to move, the ability to follow the Spirit when it leads us, when it leads us to freedom from concupiscence. He says concupiscence is the big obstacle. This is a classical monastic premise in the same adjustment thing. We can talk about that later when we talk about detachment. And he gives the example of the archer. In order to win the prize, he has to have a target, an animal. So he aims his scope for the monkey with purity of heart. And whatever can guide us towards purity of heart is to be followed with all power. Whatever draws us away from it is to be avoided as hurtful and worse. This is the interior compass that guides us. But how do you know whether it's leading us towards purity of heart? Once again, it's like the sign for the descendant of the Spirit that came to make us, remember? That peace that accompanies the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

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And the turmoil, the conflict, the violence that accompanies the inspiration of evil. To this end, everything is to be done. Solitude, watches in the night, manual labor, nakedness, reading in the ear of the disciples. It surprises us to hear him say reading in the ear of the disciples, even that. Even things of prayer. We know that their purpose is to free the heart from injury by bodily passions and keep it free. They are to be the rungs of a ladder up which it may climb to perfect charity. And so if we can't do any of these things at a particular time, we shouldn't get upset about it. Because the upset that happens to us disturbs our purity of heart, our purity of mind, our tranquility. And that's a worse evil than the loss of that observance that we were going to do. The loss you incur by being irritated outweighs the gain of fasting. Dislike of your brother

[19:57]

cannot be counterbalanced by reading in the Bible. If your brother takes you away from you and your lecturers, that's fine, because you have to help him. The practices of fasting, watching, withdrawal to the hermitage, eating solitude, meditation on the scriptures, are all subordinate means to your keeping the purity of heart, or charity. In other words, purity of heart is charity. Finally he gets around to equating it with love. And then he's going to pull in the quotations from 1 Corinthians 13, where I think Paul talks in the same language. He's got this kind of accumulation, this kind of amassing of rhetorical phrases, one thing after another, that mean nothing unless you've got charity, unless you've got love. Now, the question of purity of heart, what he's doing is translating St. Paul into monastic terms, translating charity into purity of heart. He also translates it into quiet, that is, tranquility of heart, peace of heart, and he translates it into contemplation. Now, some people would dispute all of that. They'd say, well, don't make

[20:59]

those connections so quickly, let's take a look at that first before you do it. Let's take it the way he has it. We'll look back at it later. Whatever can trouble our purity and peace of mind, however useful and necessary it seems to be, should be avoided as hurtful. This is the general rule by which we can avoid wandering off the right path and keep on a straight line towards our end. Well, what would Jesus say to that? We have to ask that question eventually. I think he might come and disturb your peace of heart at a certain moment. He might say, come, follow me. Get up off your rear end and leave your peace of heart behind for a moment and come follow me. He might have something for you here. Even this rule has to be sort of ruled by that further rule of charity, and charity is not always indicated at the first moment by peace of heart. The word of God, the prophetic

[22:03]

word of God, the demanding word of God, the summons of Christ, can cause a lot of conflict in things, right? But the first moment is not necessarily going to cover us with peace or fill us with peace of heart. So we've got to have that in mind too. Nevertheless, if we know how to limit it, this criterion of passion is pretty precious. And in the end, he brings it, equates it also with contemplation. So this is difficult, and I ask the writers and others. It would be very frustrating for, I don't know how St. Thomas Aquinas could read Passion every day as he did. Passion is one of the two books that Thomas Aquinas had on his desk when he was a kid. I hope one of them is still here. Passion was one of them, but it's very frustrating for the scholastic philosopher, a theologian, to read somebody like Passion because he's lumping things all the time. He's drifting from one thing to another, and it's a global synthetic way of thinking rather than an analytical way of thinking. But St. Thomas Aquinas was devoted to Passion, and that's one of the

[23:09]

reasons why he holds together so well. He was capable of dwelling, of dealing with those global masses of reality and not having to analyze them to pieces. So he's a synthetic thinker himself. But Passion doesn't think in the same way as scholastics do. Passion is in that patristic mode of thinking which lumps everything together under one notion like compunction, or purity of heart, or the heart itself. That's the biblical way of thinking. The biblical way of thinking, the Jewish way of thinking, is synthetic and not analytic. The Greek way of thinking, which eventuates in scholastic theology largely, is an analytical way of thinking and a structural way of thinking. It's more thinking with the eyes than thinking with the ears. Thinking with concepts rather than thinking with words. And when we talk about the heart, we're talking about a very biblical, Jewish, patristic, monastic sense. Rahner calls it a primordial word. He says there are primordial words which you don't

[24:15]

analyze and which exist in every culture, like the word heart is an equivalent for it in every culture. And they're words which are more, somehow richer than the concepts that you translate them into. The word is the important thing. The word is a kind of sacrament to it. He's got a magnificent article on the heart. There's a preliminary study that he's referring to the theology of devotion that he's talking about. We'll get into that a little bit later. I just wanted to get to the end of this where he's given the story of Martha and Mary, remember, where Jesus praises Mary for having chosen the better part. And Cassian says this better part is to sit at the feet of Jesus. This better part is to preserve purity of heart rather than getting excited, upset. Martha was distracted over another thing. And so he shows that Martha's part could be taken away from her. But Mary's

[25:17]

part will never be taken away from her. To minister to the body is a transitory work, Martha was getting a minimum. Somebody had to get the minimum. To listen to his word is the work of eternity. Now Cassian has come full circle and you find out that what he's talking about as purity of heart is related ultimately to the listening to the word. So Cassian once again returns to his foundation in the word of God. Listening to the word, contemplation, peace of heart, purity of heart, charity. For Cassian, for Abba Moses in this sense, I don't know if Abba Moses really wrote this because he was an old robber. I don't think he was that much of a robber. Do you remember? Abba Moses was a big black man who was a robber and then became one of the most famous. Probably with the left arm of Cassian. All of those things are one. It's typical of this global thinking, the thinking which is thinking with the heart rather than with the mind. The thinking which brings things

[26:17]

into one. The mind descends into the heart as you said. Things tend to merge. Things tend to fuse. They tend to all be absorbed into one reality. They may have different faces, different facets, but you can't cut it up as philosophy tends to do. Okay. That's a kind of foundation for the importance of purity of heart in the monastic tradition, but not necessarily for the importance of the heart because that's so biblical and so central in our whole revelation that had there not been a Cassian, it would be here and it would actually be in the same place. It's in greater reality. The notion of purity of heart comes to me from Cassian's book of Evagrius, which you should read. It's a joke. And what Cassian terms purity of heart, according to the scholars, is in Evagrius, apotheos, that kind of passionlessness, which is so easily misunderstood as you make

[27:22]

it the same as the apotheos of the skeleton, a kind of coldness, a kind of indifference. For a Christian it means something else. It means the freedom, let's call it freedom again, or detachment which comes with love, which comes when the heart is full of charity. Even for Evagrius it means that, I think, although Evagrius is kind of a dry intellectual but a contemplative. Okay. A lot of things come together there. Prayer and asceticism come together. We can talk about the prayer of the heart, that's the prayer of Jesus. We talk about the guarding of the heart. We talk about purity of heart as the end of asceticism. So all things come together there. All things converge. It's like everything flows together into one river and that river flows through the heart and that's what the monastic life is about. Not in a static way but in a dynamic way. It's useful to keep a hold of images like that, the image of fire, the image of a well, the image of a stream, of a river. Because that's

[28:27]

what our life is like. Because we live in time. We live in time. We're always dying and we're always being born. We live on a river. So when the scripture talks about sitting down by the river of Babylon and weeping, it brings us up face to face with that. We sit down and we weep by the river of our own mortality, the river of our own dying, as we realize our exile to that heavenly city. The heavenly city which is in the heart, which we can't lay our hands on, which is ahead of us. Other things that come together there in the heart are, as I said before, and as we're reminded by that Psalm 137, a longing for the city, a grieving over the city, a grieving for what is behind us, as it were, for paradise lost, for a sinless state, grieving also for our sins, grieving over the opportunities that we've missed, grieving over the graces that we've neglected,

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grieving over still the uncertainty of our salvation, knowing our own fragility, and the longing for the city which is ahead of us, and which is already in our heart, longing for the heavenly Jerusalem, longing for blessedness, longing to see the face of the risen Christ, which is the light of that city, which is our homage of this day. There's also a kind of, something else that happens in the heart, on the level of psychology or anthropology, in other words, the coming together of the different parts of our nature, coming together of, call it the strong side or the hard side or the soft side, I believe, as the old prophet used to say, the old psychologist, the irascible and the contradictory, the masculine and the feminine sides of our nature somehow come together in the heart, and so the heart is the place where we talk about tenderness, the heart is the place where we talk about compunction, grieving, mourning, all of the tender sentiments, desire and so

[30:33]

on, and the heart is where we talk about courage and strength, take heart, take courage, the word courage, where does it come from? It comes from core, it comes from core in Latin, core, core, that's heart, so courage, strength itself, that deep strength is the quality of the heart, just as well, just as the tenderness and the joy and all of the other things which make life worthwhile, but really worthwhile takes place in the heart, everything else is sort of accidental, everything else is kind of fringe. So our problem is to find that place and grow in it. The heart contains the city to which we move, the heavenly Jerusalem that we heard about in the Eucharist this morning, so we're not just going back, not just a return but a progression, going forward with the fire of the risen Christ in our hearts. A letter to the Hebrews says that we're not moving towards that mountain that's on fire,

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but the mountain that we're moving towards, the city that we're moving towards does have its fire, and if it weren't for that fire we couldn't move forward, and that's our motive challenge, that we're burning inside of us to keep this going. Once again I'm reminded of Emmaus, do you remember? The disciples on the road away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus, and they're sad, they're sad, they're grieving, and then Jesus comes along, moving away from the holy city, and Jesus comes along and begins to walk beside them, and they were talking about how they'd expected big things to happen, and yet he was crucified, and he was buried, and that seemed to be the end of it. Nothing had happened. And Jesus comes along and walks beside them, and he begins to remind them of the scriptures of the Old Testament, and their hearts begin to burn, that city begins to awaken within their hearts. That city begins to catch fire in their hearts. And they go along, and then he reveals himself to them in his eucalystic dress too, and then he vanishes, and then what happens?

[32:38]

They go back to Jerusalem. They turn around and they go back to the holy city. And there they find the disciples rejoicing because they had seen the risen Lord. So somehow they go back and they discover that new city, the real Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of the risen Christ, beginning being born in the old city. The old city was somehow cracked open to give birth to this new Jerusalem, which was just a church. And now they have that fire in their hearts, and now they have the eucalyst to keep that city among them, to continue to dwell in that city. Old men, in some way, have their city inside of their hearts. I wanted to read something from that paper by Donald Nichols. He's trying to find a kind of wisdom of the heart which is common to old men.

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I think he's a little too ecumenical about it, a little too uncautious about it. But nevertheless, there's a lot of truth in what he says. Here he gives, towards the beginning of the article, he gives an experience of his own. No, it's another chapter. I wanted to see the famous man in Benares, in India. A sagacious philosopher, he is by many a merciless critic of Christian theology. I had my own reasons for paying him a visit. He was polite, invited me for tea, and then mounted the attack. He began to attack this calamity. I let him talk his fill, without saying a word myself. Then I began to talk about the things I had begun to understand within the dialogue, quite positively Christian. We got into a sincere, good, deep discussion. He talked about the things the other person had said, and with which he had spoken before. Not about the things that divided them, but about the things that united them. We got into a sincere, good, deep discussion of this fierce enemy of the theologian.

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He had intended to send me away after ten minutes. When I left after two hours, he had tears in his eyes. If we insisted on our theologies, you as a Christian, I as a Hindu, we should be fighting each other. We would have fought one another because we chose more deeply towards spirituality. We will be using the example of the discovery of the experiential court, the knowledge of the heart, to generate them. The truth, and what it depends on, is something one has to say. Because the theology is not just vaporized when you agree with someone on the level of the spirit. When you find yourself in rapport with someone of another belief, that doesn't mean the differences cease to exist. It means you've reached a level of communion in which you can begin to validate differences, in which those differences, while you're on that level, don't make any difference. Because you're able to be one just the same. And you're able to go back into those differences and somehow build a temple of them, prove those differences, somehow, without giving up your own faith.

[35:49]

That's another story, that there does exist this level of communion on which, without saying a word, we can find ourselves longer than we know. And Thomas Norton had that experience, and her experience of that level. In the light of his statement by Carsten, on social morality, one has his grant. He sets a glimpse of how one might penetrate to the heart of other spiritual traditions and achieve a real pietà according to the science of the heart towards which all of them converge. A lot of people are dreaming about that kind of a universal spiritual tradition. And I don't think it can really happen because of Christianity. Christianity is the one that will not enter into a kind of cosmic spiritual tradition, a planetary religion. Now why? Because Christ is Christ. And because heaven is his heaven. Because of the infirmity, because of that stubborn fact that God has become man,

[36:51]

the world has become spoken. And because the faith exists on earth. And that is true fact. And we don't compromise with anything else. We will know, on the judgement of the heart, we can find ourselves longer than we are aware of our beliefs. The primary thing to notice, he says, is that he was the fiancé of Curtis who, in the proper sense of the word, is science. And here's his thesis. That the authorities in the fiancé of Curtis were in substantial agreement on all fundamental issues. I can't go along with that. The one fundamental issue on which there is no agreement is whether Jesus Christ is the center god of salvation in the world. That's the rest of the foundation stone. That's the rock of the fundamental issues. The fundamental issue is a historical issue.

[37:52]

It's not only a psychological issue. It's not only one that has to do with who we are, with how we are, with the state of illumination and not illumination, the ignorance of the insight. It's one that has to do with the salvation of the world. It's a historical thing. And then it's a question of our acceptance of it. It's a question of faith. Faith in Jesus Christ. There is this communion on the level of the heart. Okay, we talked about Caspian. If you look in the Rule of Saint Benedict, you'll find that he returns time and time again to this notion of the heart. I made a whole collection of those places where he doesn't, but if you look just in the prologue, you'll find a good half-dozen of them. Incline the ears of your heart. Do not harden your heart. He speaks the truth in his heart. We are to prepare our hearts and our bodies. That's towards the end, the end of the prologue.

[38:55]

And then with expanded hearts, expanded with the sweetness of the Lord, we're running away with the way the Lord's coming. That is the end. Chapter 7, there are many mentions to it. There's a good version of Chapter 7. And the chapters on prayer also, you'll find the heart. We're going to be very, not for our many words, but for our purity of heart through our tears. And we have some chapters on that, on how to pray. Chapter 49 on Lent. We're to give ourselves to compunction of heart. Chapter 52 on the Lord's Day. We're to drink and pray in lacrimas and in pensionae corvis, with tears and with intensity of heart, a devotion of heart. And so it goes in the rule. There's a Benedictine sister named, Benedicta Rasch, R-A-S-C-H,

[39:58]

who wrote a series of articles on purity of heart in monastic tradition. She died a few years ago. Those articles appeared in Studio Monasticism. You know that publication put out in Montserrat. The articles were all in English, and they were really thread-through. They were how I got on to this whole business of the heart, and the Benedictine heart that came to us. I couldn't say that it changed, but it left that as a legacy. The article was really precious. Unfortunately, we never collected it. But what she does is pick out this notion of heart, this notion of purity of heart, and trace them back to their beginnings. And actually, before the confession, in Judaism and in the Old Testament, and through the New Testament, the Fathers up to Cassius. Unfortunately, they retreated back to the New Testament because they were too busy. Luke also, of course, is focused continually on this notion of the heart.

[41:01]

The biblical notion of the heart, however, is not the same as our common every-day notion. Let me read you something from this dictionary of biblical theology. The article on the heart, it may, by the way, be worth reading. It's a good exercise sometimes. If you were to pick up a report and take that word heart and just follow it down through the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, you'd be amazed at the sort of thread of theology that falls together around that notion of heart. Sometimes the whole of the core of the heart of the Scriptures falls together on that spinal cord of the heart, Old Testament and New Testament. But the meaning of the heart in the Scriptures is a bigger and deeper meaning than what we usually mean when we say heart. This is from the dictionary of biblical theology. The connotations of the word heart are not the same in Hebrew and in English. For us, the heart is related to the affect of life, the life of feeling alone. From his heart, a man loves and hates, desires and fears, but the heart has no place in the intellectual life.

[42:04]

The Hebrew uses the word heart to indicate a wider range of meanings, including all that is within a man. It stands for sentiment, but also memories, thoughts, reasoning and planning. And this is a superlative thing. It was in fact the source of the whole personal life, in which thought, volition and will, feelings merge as one, the center of personal life and also of the interior life, the inner man. Somehow it seems to be the place where you experience deeply, okay? But it's also the place where you make your decisions. Now those are two fundamental ways of thinking of the heart. Think of the heart as the place where you have your deepest experiences, your experience of natural things, your experience of beauty, your experience of love, your experience also perhaps of fear. The place also where you make your decisions, where you are confronted with reality and with the demands of life on the deepest level, or confronted with the word of God on the deepest level,

[43:06]

and where you decide, where you respond to it. So both sides of our nation, as it were. And ultimately, of course, in Bible and in theology, it seems the place where we're in the presence of God, the place where the boundary line where God and man meet, the place where our creaturely nature rests, finds its common surface with transcendence. The place where the here and the beyond come together. The place where we stand still in the hand of God, where we're rooted in the ground of God. I want to finish this morning, I'd like to get further, but I'd like to finish this morning with a quotation from Rahner, who, as I say, wrote this beautiful stuff on the heart. This is in his theological investigation. If you like many volumes, I'll show you everything. It's an article called Behold This Heart. It's in No. 3 and No. 4 of that series.

[44:06]

This is just part of it. He's talked about heart being a primordial word. It is one of the words in which man, knowing himself, expresses the mystery of his existence without solving that mystery. When a man says that he has a heart, he has told himself one of the crucial secrets of his existence. For when he speaks in this way, he is speaking of himself as the one self-knowing whole. When you talk about the heart, you're talking about yourself, but sort of centered at its core. He is evoking the unity of his being which is anterior to the dichotomy between body and soul, action and thought, external and internal. You get the idea? Picture yourself as a tree. And this is the root or the trunk of the tree before it's split up into those various branches, the branch of body, the branch of soul, the branch of spirit, the branch of mind, the branch of exterior, the branch of interior, and so on.

[45:08]

It's the branch of thought and the branch of will. It's all together in the heart where man is one, anterior to that division, as the cubit in our heart. He is evoking what is original in the genuine sense of the word. What does original mean in the genuine sense of the word? Not just that which is different. It means that which is in touch with the origin, that which is first, that which is prior, that which is the foundation, the source, or in touch with the source. And so the heart of man is origin, in touch with the source of our being, in touch with God. That in which the manifold human reality is still freshly one, with freshness that gives you an idea of a flowing force from a well, from a source. That in which, as Hedwig Conrad Marcheson wrote about it, the whole concrete being of man, as it is brought forth and unfolded and flows away in soul, body, and spirit, is taken and grasped and remains as one,

[46:10]

as though knotted and fastened at its pinpoint. Now there we get two other images converging with our image of truth. One image is the image of a stream, the idea of water coming forth from the stream and then flowing away in all these different streams, body, soul, and so on. The idea of a bunch of threads that are held together at one knot, at its point, before they're separated. This unity of man, original, originating, holding together where it originates, is a personal unity. That is to say, one which knows itself, ventures forth, and freely makes its own choice. Which answers, and in love, affirms itself and denies itself. This is where you make a fundamental response to life. You say yes or you say no, and you say it in your heart. It is the point where man borders on the mystery of God, the point where man, whose own origin is from God, as God's partner,

[47:11]

either leaves himself and gives himself back to God, but I think I better let it go and pick up maybe with this discussion now. So long as man has a heart, he will have to speak of it with this precise word, heart. That is to say, always. He will always speak of the heart whenever at once simple and wise he recalls himself from multiplicity to his one source. Always, whenever he gathers the permanent essence of his time into the eternity of his existence. Remember we spoke about eternity being within time, as it's in our hearts. He will say that he has stored it in the storing place of his heart. Always, when he renounces himself completely and utterly, he will say, I give you my heart. That's all. It's one of Ron's virtues, although he's very philosophical, he's very metaphysical,

[48:13]

he's able to take these concrete symbols, these very real things, and stick with them, and really just circle around them and try to get all the insight out of them he can. He has a deep sense of the symbolic. And the heart is, if anything, a symbol. It's the real, existing, material symbol. But we're talking about the physical heart, and we're talking about everything else that goes with it. Not just that piece of muscle, but somehow, at that center, behind and in that symbol, that material thing, are all the other dimensions. And of course, how we're most familiar with this is in the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now, what we've done with the Sacred Heart of Jesus however, is to put it outside of ourselves. Now, we need to get it inside of ourselves

[49:13]

to find the heart of Christ within ourselves. That would be to move ourselves back towards the central mystery, back into the pastoral mystery, into the Eucharist, and also into the place where we join the Eastern Church. Okay, that's enough this time. I'll save you. Question. Yes, please. Go ahead. Thank you. The piercing of the heart. The piercing of the heart. Sometimes, in the heart, too,

[50:19]

even in a sense of the physical, they're not quite physical. There's a book, a big book, in French, at Études Carmélitaines, that was written by some Carmelites and a bunch of other theologians probably 30 or 40 years ago about the heart. It's called Le Cœur. And they treat many of us, many of the experiences in this book. Yes, ma'am. Yes.

[51:45]

Sometimes our wrong way of thinking needs to be simplified a little bit. Because, particularly in the monastic life, if we get too analytical, we somehow can no longer get ourselves back together again. If we analyze continually into intellect, memory, will, ever since scholastic theology, we've been doing that sort of thing pretty much. Maybe even before that. It's very difficult for us to be one again and to get into a simple relationship with God. Somehow there's a time to be there and a time to be analytical and there's a time not to be analytical. And the difficult time not to be analytical is when you're in prayer. Okay? When it's a matter of just trying to orient your heart, that is, your whole being at its center towards God. And without being one bit analytical, without worrying about where he's touching you, what part of yourself is responding to him. But our fundamental experiences and reactions

[52:49]

are unitive in that way. I think they touch the whole of our being. It's a little like the Trinity, in a sense. If man is the image of God, the Trinity acts as one, doesn't it? Father, Son, and Holy Spirit always will move as one. And so it is with us. The heart is where memory, intellect, and will respond as one. So, when we're on that line of our experience of God, but also our relations with other people, we need not be analytical. We know that the whole organism somehow is going to throb as one, is going to beat as one. Because they're all one in that place, even though they beat separate, distinct particles. That's the appeal of the philosophy, too. Yes, sir? When you're talking about Christianity, you're having to have,

[53:51]

you have to have the right and the core information in order to talk to someone on a global level. Yes. I was thinking, isn't, isn't it, can't you see the Christ is talking at every heart? You know, in these, and, you mentioned the Father, and the Father and the Holy Spirit. Yes. So, what's practical, you know, if everything is graced at least potentially, I mean, the whole cosmos is, so, so I can't, Christianity, even as they're on a cosmic dialogue, you know, simply linking to their systems. I think of the old scholastic term, the law of nature. Yes. The natural law. And how everybody has, it's an old way of thinking about it, everybody has natural laws in them which, which leads to God. You know, if, which would be the heart, I guess, again, which would bring that concept down to the,

[54:54]

the heart of everything that man has made for God. So the natural law, as you see, is pushing it on. So that, even if we can't, we can't return a dialogue with, with the monsters, with the hippies, or simply nature of people, even if they could enter on, you know, in the heart type, why, they could begin, maybe, ruling their living as law. Right. You know, and there's nothing to start from there. Well, in dialogue, we certainly have to do this. In fact, like I was saying yesterday, you, you, we don't even have to try to tell them anything sometimes. All we have to do is communicate on the level of the heart sometimes. We don't, and then, when they're ready, or when they're asking, when they're seeking, then is the time to, to respond and to tell them what we have to say. We don't have to be worried in dialogue, except when we begin, there's one thing we have to avoid,

[55:56]

and that is reducing our own truth to a common denominator. Okay? Taking our own Christian theology and saying, okay, it's the same as the rest, and there's nothing additional there. If we do that, we, we make a fatal mistake. And so sometimes it's better to say less, so that we don't take the risk of trying to please people by shaving down our own truth to be no better than theirs, simply because we don't want to hurt them. Sometimes it's better to say less and just keep it inside. And then, when they're ready to take the, the size of the Christian truth, then one can speak the word. But until then, it's very difficult to speak it without a kind of friction, without a kind of, simply because the truth is so arrogant, in a sense. It's a mountain. I mean, the Christian thing is a mountain. To present somebody with it is bound to, likely to arouse some kind of feeling of austerity. How can you talk about Christianity

[56:59]

without somehow, somehow be complying if you've got the final answer? But usually we do. Christ is, he's a, he's a powerhouse. The one who comes gently, but the one who comes with his absolute, I mean, dominion, power. He is the one who does this. If he can, if he's the one who does this, he's Christian. Somebody was telling me about a concentration camp. All the prisoners came in. He was talking about the partisans. And all the prisoners out there were hanging, hanging, hanging, prostitutes, whores. And one guy said, where's God? I mean, this is the kind of stuff you can talk about. So, that's something that's definitely

[58:00]

worth talking about. So, he came up with a band of prostitutes, prostitutes, whores, and he said, well, you can say how does God permit it, because after all, God is stronger than man is, right? God doesn't have to permit evil. He doesn't have to permit that little Jewish kid to be hanged or to, to, to bang her for half an hour so then she'll rest. I remember that story. The way that it is, the fellow finally answers the story, or there's a voice from behind and somebody else says, among the spectators says, He's right there hanging. He's right there hanging. That's Him. That's where God is. In other words, God has become man. God has come into our suffering. He hasn't taken us out of our suffering, but He's put Himself into it. And so somehow He's transponded from inside. So that no matter how deep the horror is, no matter how bad the evil is, still God

[59:03]

has come into that. And inside of it is light. Inside of it is liberty and joy, despite the fact that it's so awfully dark. It's so terribly dark. I mean, what happened to the Jews and the concentration camps? What sort of brutality? Inside of that is the light of God, because Christ has, in other words, descended into the depths. Descended into hell, as they say in the old language. Okay? And descended into our hell as well, our psychological hell, our depression, our misery, even our sin. He's descended into our sin without sin. Without sinning, He's descended into the consequences of darkness of our predicament. So there's light in there. And God is in there. But boy, it's hard to take it in a sin like that. Questioner 2 You mentioned about one God. Questioner 2 Yes. Questioner 2 Yes.

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