Turning Hardness of Heart into Purity of Heart

Recently I was called upon to teach a formation session for my Carmelite community, a task that doesn't typically fall to me. Given the circumstances, I essentially listened to a teaching on CD by one of the Carmelite friars, digested it, followed his outline, and presented his talk myself. The subject of this talk was the sixth beatitude from St. Matthew's gospel: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

It is one thing to read a teaching, and another to hear a teaching. It is an entirely different animal to give a teaching, and to really meditate on it. It was a gift to be able to do so.

And now, several days later, something is jumping out at me from the teaching that I think has application to the current social turmoil which Christians are not immune from. 

Fr. Kevin Culligan, OCD, taught that there are two things about the heart that are involved in becoming pure of heart. First, there are the matters of impurities which arise from the heart, such as those Jesus enumerates in Matthew 15: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. These things which come from the heart, and not the ritual purity and obedience, is what makes a person impure, because the "heart" in Scripture is the center of all that we are: our emotional, spiritual, moral life, our desires, passions, our thoughts, will and choices. 

So part of having a pure heart is our own choices, flowing from all this stuff going on inside us.

But the other part of having a pure heart has to do with that which Fr. Culligan states is that which Jesus laments the most: hardness of heart. If our hearts are hard, they will not be pure. Why? Because having a hard heart closes one off from the Word of God. Hardness of heart isolates you from love/Love. And how does hardness of heart develop? Through becoming overly absorbed in one's own agenda. The beatitudes, after all, are, if you will, Jesus'  plan of blessedness, of happiness, and not that of uninformed human striving to fill itself. 

Religious people know not to pursue big commandment-breaking matter. But religious people can get hot and heavy over their own agendas without necessarily realizing it.

This is why St. John of the Cross's teaching on detachment is so vital for us. He presumes that someone pursuing the Christian life will leave behind attachments involved with breaking the Ten Commandments. He teaches us, though, the dangers entailed in remaining attached to anything, even good things, even spiritual things. He is relentless.

And the point is not austerity for the sake of austerity, or detachment out of some kind of psychological aberation that leaves one wanting to grind one's own self into powder to win some divine approval. 

The point is that the beloved longs to see her lover, and God longs for us. To see Him, we must have soft hearts. We must not be overly absorbed with our own agenda, even if our own agenda is something we think is great: service to the Church, loving my family, prayer, being holy, speaking the truth. If it is mine, if I grasp it tightly, if it becomes my identity, if I've forgotten God in the midst of trying to serve Him, then we risk hardening our hearts. We risk what we perceive as our own steadfastness, our own faithfulness becoming that which actually closes us off from the Word and isolates us from Love.

But a beautiful thing happens then. God meets us then with a gift that St. John calls the Dark Night. The Dark Night of the Senses (very generally speaking) is when we are left without the external helps and supports that once held us up. The Dark Night of the Spirit is when we are left without the internal and interior helps that once held us up. This is the time when God is at work within us in a mysterious way. It hurts like the dickens. It is God's purifying action in us, which we cannot produce ourselves, and in which the only way to move forward is in faith. We don't tend to get to understand much of anything or feel like we can see where He leads. 

What might it look like practically? It might entail facing having our doctrinal or religious certainty shaken deeply. It might involve a public humiliation, or someone close to us embracing something which we deeply oppose, thereby challenging how we love them. Losing a job or having a business or a venture fail could trigger this. Facing a sudden and drastic health change... anything that throws our hearts open in a way we could not have anticipated, that leaves us thinking, "How did I get here," and where nothing we knew before quite fits. And these things might all be interior so that no one else would even know anything is going on. 

But what God does in this is call us to have faith in His goodness with us, His presence with us, and His leading, even though we may feel nothing, or animosity, or even doubt that He exists, because we thought the things we lost were where He was. It is here that God softens our hearts, takes our agendas, and gives us His.

But we can't make the Dark Nights happen. They are a gift. We can't give ourselves this kind of purification, but when we have tastes of it, we can say yes. We can ask the Lord to soften our hearts, to take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.

When we have soft hearts, the Word of God speaks to us easily. When we have a soft heart, love flows to us and through us easily. When we see Jesus hanging on the cross (in the person of the least, here with us) we can look on with sorrow. We can empathize. We can feel His pain. Our love is not cold. We are not caught up in the thinking that standards must be met before love is given. We are also not caught up in the thinking that evil in any form can be winked at, because all that matters is that everyone feel comfortable. Primarily we experience God's love flowing to us, and then through us as He would give it, without bitterness, unforgiveness, resentment and other corrosive elements. 

Having that in which we trusted shaken is messy business, and it is painful. Broken bits fly. But we need not lose everything. We can tell the Lord, "not my self-righteousness, but Yours; not my understanding, but Yours; not my will, but Yours. And I'll leave behind all my acts of uncleanness." Our trust that He is good will be rewarded, and like the men in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3) we will lose only that which was bondage for us.