The restless heart

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Matthew 6: 19-23) gives us a series of injunctions from the Lord, but this time concerning our hearts and minds. First, He tells us not to treasure those things that do not last but rather to lay up our treasures in heaven. Second, He tells us something vital about the eye being the lamp of the body, but in this case the eye is a kind of metonym, standing for the way in which we look at things. It is our perspectives that can make the difference between light and darkness in our souls.

The juxtaposition of these commands about the heart and the mind in Jesus’ teachings are a reminder to us that, as St Irenaeus says, the glory of God is man fully alive. For what is the foundation of that fullness of life, except a heart which is fixed on the Lord himself and a mind which is full of the light of Christ? As Saint John Paul II taught, there is kind of anthropology in Christian doctrine that tells us as much about what it is to be human as it does about our path back to God. And the heart and the mind are vital in this respect.

To take the heart first, the greatest of the theological virtues is charity for, as we noted recently on this blog, our faith and hope will one day pass away, but the charity that is now in our hearts is the same charity that, please God, we will live in for eternity. The light of faith will one day become the light of glory, and the hope of possessing heaven will be fulfilled in its possession, but the love of the Lord which began in our hearts at baptism is unending for it is a kind of share in the very life of the Eternal One who made us and calls us to share His happiness. Herein lies the mystery of the wayward human heart which is so distracted, so attracted to the things of this world; not merely the physical things but the immaterial ones as well; not just the gaudy trinkets, the flash cars and holidays, but reputation, esteem, and the gratifications that feed our worst instincts. You cannot begin to serve the Lord until you have lost your reputation, says St Teresa of Avila somewhere, but she could equally have used some of these words from today's gospel: you cannot begin to serve the Lord if you are storing up treasures on earth.

In the end, this waywardness comes less from the attraction of this earth and more from our failure to cast our minds upon the Lord. Here is where the second part of today's gospel extract is important.

The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.

And there is our problem in a nutshell: our eyes are not healthy. We need a whole education in shedding the limitations and the blind spots that the wounds of original sin and those caused by our own faults impose on us. We recognise such blind spots perhaps in people who are palpably depressed or anxious, and yet they themselves cannot see these problems – the intervening of a diseased mind in their perception of truth. They have to make a conscious effort to challenge the unhealthy perspectives that their minds cast upon the world. But the same is true of those who are neither depressed nor anxious, but in whom the eye – the mind – is wayward. And that is all of us. Ignorance is one of the wounds of original sin, but through our personal sins and faults, through our useless excuses, and through the repeated lies that we comfort ourselves with, we render our minds dull to the light. Lacking discernment, we too easily imagine that our fantasies are God’s appointed will, or in our pride we strike and miss but fail to learn the lessons.

The healing of the mind in the light of Christ, the healing of our judgement through the theological virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit: these are vital elements in our Christian journey. Love is the greatest of the virtues but ours must be a love that is founded on truth: truth about God and the honest truth about ourselves, read every day in the Scriptures, and reflected on in prayer. The Father's forming action in our daily lives is not only a reshaping of our hearts but it is a reshaping of our minds and a healing of our blindspots and errors. Four of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit - wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and counsel – are precisely gifts of the mind, designed to bring our minds to health, so that our hearts will be full of light and not darkness.

Some people want to make religion only a matter of the heart, and our spiritual activities an endless hamster wheel of devotions or noisy pedagogies. Yet, in truth, to come close to the Lord is to become still, to be filled with His silence and His love, so that His light might shine in our hearts. For our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.

Our model in this is, as ever, the Virgin Mother who kept all these things in her heart, and no doubt meditated on them night and day. Hers was a mind, therefore, full of light, and her treasures were not of this earth. Her fiat was to the truth of the call of God who answered her yes by ravishing her heart.