“They’re Being Bombed Right Now” Take Heart, Son! Take Heart, Daughter!
It is a truth few “professional” religious – I know I can speak for some really great, genuinely holy, profoundly spiritual priests, Sisters, ministers, rabbis and imams – will admit: Sometimes we just get “prayed out.”
Unable, no matter how late it is at night or how badly we need sleep, to turn off the phone because we are afraid of missing the call from a drug addict on a life-threatening run or because death is imminent for an individual or family we’ve worked with forever and we’ve promised to “be there” for them.
And we’ve prayed for them so much we just can’t pray any more
We’ve exhausted our ability to pray even one more time.
That’s when I call “the Powerhouse” – the Maryknoll Sisters’ “Contemplative Community,” once called “the Cloister” because they were cloistered.
“Powerhouse” – a name bestowed on them by one of Florida’s all-time fiercest crack cocaine addicts. He’d get recovery. Then relapse. And repeat the cycle. When I could pray no more, I’d call the Cloister and – through very questionable, circuitous routes – inform him “the Sisters are on it.”
“Well, I guess I have to stop,” would the response. And he did. Until he didn’t.
On Easter Sunday – actually, Holy Saturday evening - he’ll celebrate thirty-years in recovery. He marks Easter – not a date – as his “recovery date.”
Long ago, as their numbers dwindled and they aged, the Sisters gave up the walled-in and separated-from-the-world cloister at the top of the hill that is Maryknoll; four now have their own special (and separated from the world) wing in the Sisters’ Motherhouse.
[A favorite story: Once, during a call, I asked “How many of you are there in the Cloister now?”
“Well,” the quiet voice on the other end of the call responded. “There’s four in the cloister in the Philippines, four in Central America, four of us here in New York, and three in the Sudan and they are being bombed right now.”
“They’re being bombed right now.” As calm and quietly as if she were talking about the candles on their chapel altar.]
Almost certainly, when asking for prayers for one of my counseling clients or friends or myself, the best part of calling the Sisters in the Contemplative Community is their response: “Tell him we will place him in the heart of Jesus” or “Oh Skip, we will place you in the heart of Jesus.”
“We will place him in the heart of Jesus.”
It is as though, even before Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis, my friends in the Contemplative Community, were writing his latest encyclical – Dilexit Nos: He Loved Us.
An encyclical is a papal - especially pastoral – letter from a pope to the bishops and faithful of the Universal Church. Published on October 24, 2024, Dilexit Nos is Pope Francis’ fourth in the twelve years of his papacy.
In it, he focused on the heart of Jesus and the Good Friday reading from the Gospel of John – the trial, crucifixion and death of Jesus – with special emphasis on the words
“When [the soldiers assigned to the crucifixion] came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.” (John 19:33-34)
Pope Francis encyclical is just shy of 10,000 words. Much of the second half is filled with reflections on Roman Catholic saints through the centuries. (We’ll skip them.) For your Palm Sunday through Good Friday meditations, we will let Pope Francis talk.
“HE LOVED US”, Saint Paul says of Christ (Rom 8:37), in order to make us realize that nothing can ever “separate us” from that love (Rom 8:39). Paul could say this with certainty because Jesus himself had told his disciples, “I have loved you” (Jn 15:9, 12). Even now, the Lord says to us, “I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15). His open heart has gone before us and waits for us, unconditionally, asking only to offer us his love and friendship…
…[L]iving as we do in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart…
…The heart is also the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place. It usually indicates our true intentions, what we really think, believe and desire, the “secrets” that we tell no one: in a word, the naked truth about ourselves. It is the part of us that is neither appearance or illusion, but is instead authentic, real, entirely “who we are”…
…Instead of running after superficial satisfactions and playing a role for the benefit of others, we would do better to think about the really important questions in life. Who am I, really? What am I looking for? What direction do I want to give to my life, my decisions and my actions? Why and for what purpose am I in this world? How do I want to look back on my life once it ends? What meaning do I want to give to all my experiences? Who do I want to be for others? Who am I for God? All these questions lead us back to the heart…
…The failure to make room for the heart, as distinct from our human powers and passions viewed in isolation from one another, has resulted in a stunting of the idea of a personal centre, in which love, in the end, is the one reality that can unify all the others.
If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter…
…[T]he heart makes all authentic bonding possible, since a relationship not shaped by the heart is incapable of overcoming the fragmentation caused by individualism… A society dominated by narcissism and self-centredness will increasingly become “heartless”. This will lead in turn to the “loss of desire”, since as other persons disappear from the horizon we find ourselves trapped within walls of our own making, no longer capable of healthy relationships. As a result, we also become incapable of openness to God…
… We become ourselves only to the extent that we acquire the ability to acknowledge others, while only those who can acknowledge and accept themselves are then able to encounter others…
…In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart.
This profound core, present in every man and woman, is not that of the soul, but of the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity. Everything finds its unity in the heart, which can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic and even physical dimensions…
…[O]ur fulfilment as human beings is found in love. In loving, we sense that we come to know the purpose and goal of our existence in this world. Everything comes together in a state of coherence and harmony. It follows that, in contemplating the meaning of our lives, perhaps the most decisive question we can ask is, “Do I have a heart?”…
…Where the thinking of the philosopher halts, there the heart of the believer presses on in love and adoration, in pleading for forgiveness and in willingness to serve in whatever place the Lord allows us to choose, in order to follow in his footsteps. At that point, we realize that in God’s eyes we are a “Thou”, and for that very reason we can be an “I”. Indeed, only the Lord offers to treat each one of us as a “Thou”, always and forever. Accepting his friendship is a matter of the heart; it is what constitutes us as persons in the fullest sense of that word.
Saint Bonaventure tells us that in the end we should not pray for light, but for “raging fire.” He teaches that, “faith is in the intellect, in such a way as to provoke affection. In this sense, for example, the knowledge that Christ died for us does not remain knowledge, but necessarily becomes affection, love.” Along the same lines, Saint John Henry Newman took as his motto the phrase Cor ad cor loquitur, since, beyond all our thoughts and ideas, the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart…
…Reconciliation and peace are also born of the heart. The heart of Christ is “ecstasy”, openness, gift and encounter. In that heart, we learn to relate to one another in wholesome and happy ways, and to build up in this world God’s kingdom of love and justice. Our hearts, united with the heart of Christ, are capable of working this social miracle…
…I once more ask the Lord to have mercy on this suffering world in which he chose to dwell as one of us. May he pour out the treasures of his light and love, so that our world, which presses forward despite wars, socio-economic disparities and uses of technology that threaten our humanity, may regain the most important and necessary thing of all: its heart…
..Christ showed the depth of his love for us not by lengthy explanations but by concrete actions…
…He seeks people out, approaches them, ever open to an encounter with them. We see it when he stops to converse with the Samaritan woman at the well where she went to draw water (Jn 4:5-7). We see it when, in the darkness of night, he meets Nicodemus, who feared to be seen in his presence (Jn 3:1-2). We marvel when he allows his feet to be washed by a prostitute (Lk 7:36-50), when he says to the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you” (Jn 8:11), or again when he chides the disciples for their indifference and quietly asks the blind man on the roadside, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mk 10:51). Christ shows that God is closeness, compassion and tender love.
Whenever Jesus healed someone, he preferred to do it, not from a distance but in close proximity: “He stretched out his hand and touched him” (Mt 8:3). “He touched her hand” (Mt 8:15). “He touched their eyes” (Mt 9:29)….
If we find it hard to trust others because we have been hurt by lies, injuries and disappointments, the Lord whispers in our ear: “Take heart, son!” (Mt 9:2), “Take heart, daughter!” (Mt 9:22). He encourages us to overcome our fear and to realize that, with him at our side, we have nothing to lose…
Our Easter prayer…
That you will take heart and allow yourself to enter into and dwell in the Heart of God.