Where is My Heart?

By Scott Ferrier, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth…but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Mt 6:19-21).

The Dominican Fr. Jean Corbon in his classic book The Wellspring of Worship, tells us: “Only in the heart are we ourselves; only there do we become ourselves. The heart is the place of the authentic encounter with ourselves, with others, and above all, with the living God.” As he says, “We pray as we live, and we live as we love; everything depends on the place that is our habitual focus and around which everything acquires meaning.”

We live far too much in the peripheral dwellings of our own “ego” — our conscious self — the place of our own importance and our self-esteem, conditioned by the influence and surroundings of the culture, our biological temperament, our life experiences. But here we are only visitors and not in the authentic place of encounter with ourselves — the heart. “It is our very person in its point of origin, its irreducible mystery, its inviolable freedom.” There, in our solitude, we discover a yearning for a presence and a creative response towards a presence—an inclination towards the good and the true. But the heart that seeks its satisfaction in created things which are passing eventually suffers “the exhaustion of death.” 

God created our hearts to be the image of the trinitarian communion in search of its likeness, the divine communion. This divine presence is the true life of man and Jesus alone can fill the heart’s yearning and deepen its desires. The heart is the true place of our prayer and from which the wellspring of the ‘river of life’ flows. But the Lord is to be found only where men and women consent to encounter him—“Rabbi, where are you staying?” (Jn 1:38). 

The Eucharistic liturgy is the liturgy of the Word who has taken our flesh. Corbon says that the sacramental celebration expresses this “coming of the Father’s word into our humanity by having the Gospel, that is Christ, make its way in procession into the community that celebrates him.” In what should be the corresponding ‘liturgy of the heart’ the Holy Spirit endeavors constantly to bring the risen Christ into the heart that is awakening to prayer.

As lay people, created in the image of God, we share by our work in the activity of the Creator and we share, too, in His Sabbath rest in communion with Him. When Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise after the original sin, they would suffer and their work would be a punishment and a toil. But the Paschal mystery has inaugurated into history the Kingdom of God which will endure on earth until the Lord comes. United with the Cross of Jesus, the work of our human hands becomes a redemptive, sacrificial offering. It is our sublime dignity to participate in Jesus Christ’s priestly, kingly, and prophetic mission as members of His Body, the Church.