that heart) is inextricably linked to others. We are thus faced with something like a paradox: we are called to responsibility for our own self but that self (i.e. There is a community of hearts, each with its own identity, which the biblical tradition has attempted to name in a plethora of metaphors and images: the Mystical Body the People of God a chosen race and so on. However, the striking singularity of one’s heart never means that one, in that singularity, is disconnected from all who also bear within them the image and likeness of God. In the sense described above, everyone must take responsibility for his or her heart. “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” (Mt 5:8) The unclean heart stands in radical singularity the clean heart, by contrast, inherits a promise: To evade that center is to create a false self or, as Scripture would have it, an unclean heart. The region of the heart is the most radical form of centering the ego where, according to Scripture, we intuit that we are made in the image and likeness of God. It is within the heart that one knows who one is and in that knowledge also finds the deep center in which one can truly turn in prayer to God. The monk poet Thomas Merton called it by a term he declined to translate: point vierge. The heart is the deepest center of a person. The biblical term for the self is the heart. That aphorism nicely states that solitude is that condition by which one knows who one is. The poet Marianne Moore once said that the antidote to loneliness is solitude. Let us begin with stipulating that solitude is not an exact synonym for individuality. That dichotomy, however, from the Christian perspective, is an insufficient one overly dependent on notions of the autonomy of the individual. The cliché is a testament to the American tendency to prize the power of individuality. The well-worn cliché “I am spiritual but not religious” can be understood as a preference for my spirituality as opposed to membership in a religion. However, that solitary prayer must be seen against Jesus’ pilgrimages to the temple in Jerusalem, his visits to synagogues, his participation in prayer with his disciples, and the other observances incumbent upon a faithful Jew. It is true, as the New Testament teaches us, that Jesus frequently sought out quiet places, often before dawn, to pray alone. At the same time, however, the solitary experience of faith hardly sums up the totality of the life of faith. There is a certain truth in that observation in that one encounters God by a personal reaching out if the encounter is a genuine one. The late philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that religion is what one does with one’s solitude.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |