Vocations Blog

Michael Casey on finding your heart

04 May 2010

The disciple came up to Abbot Pambo and said “Father - how may I be saved?” and the response was: “find your heart and you will be saved.”  - Get down to this level of the heart… go deeper within you, live from the heart.  So many terms from monastic spirituality have the word heart in them; compunction of heart, purity of heart, affectus cordis, intention of the heart.  It all involves living from this deeper layer within ourselves.  We find a similar text in St John Chrysostom when preaching on the kingdom of God; he says, well, the kingdom of God seems like a wonderful place but how do we enter how do we find the key to the door of the kingdom of God?  And his response was “Find the key of your heart and you will see that it opens also the door of the kingdom.”
...The key of our heart, to get down to a more interior level of our being.  To act, to make choices, not from external pressure, or from internalised social norms and taboos, but from a deep inward sense of what is good and what is true.
The choices that we make – where do they come from?  Are they simply the result of the pressures to which we are subject on the outside, what everybody else is doing, the current fashions…trying to live a quiet life as it were, or do they come from the super ego, from internalised social norms… or do they really come from our heart?  It should come as no surprise to us that the early Cistercian fathers had a lot to say about conscience - learning to live from our awareness of the presence of God within us.  Find your heart; go deep within, move away from this world of external pressures and make contact with your heart. 
It is easy to forget that Cistercian Spirituality is fundamentally a spirituality of freedom.  In a number of texts this is stated quite explicitly - the whole idea that we become free.  That our hearts become free; that we are liberated from the pressures of sub-personal forces, from the vices that everybody has, from the pressures that society exercises on us, so that we become real persons:  we are people who make a choice.  It is only when we possess ourselves that we are able to give ourselves away.  The person who is not yet in contact with themselves, much less possessing themselves, has nothing yet to give away. 
This is the fruit of Cistercian discipline; that it liberates us from all those things that boss us around and force us to act in a way that is unworthy of our dignity as children of God and from our vocation as Cistercians.  It is only in being liberated from these influences that we become real persons, able to love and be loved, able to understand God’s will, and to grow in wisdom.  Wisdom is often described simply as “a taste for the things of God”, developing an affinity with the things of God, developing a comfort with the spiritual world where we no longer feel aliens, where prayer and liturgy and quiet and lectio were strange things like medicine or therapy or something that was being forced upon us for our good but didn’t feel so good.  But rather the progress of our life is the progress in making contact with the world of our heart, with the deep interior world of our spirit… and perhaps that is not a bad definition of what wisdom really is; it’s only when we possess our hearts that we are able to give them away.
We should be prepared to live an interior life, a contemplative life.  The contemplative life is fundamentally about pouring the self out,  about the gift of ourselves to God – what God wants to do with that gift is God’s business, but our part is to give ourselves as fully as we can, out of love, to Christ.  That automatically, without our trying, without our conscious effort, fills the house with fragrance, fills the Church with new light and ultimately does something to the whole cosmos.  If one person is good, then it must have an effect on the whole and if one person is less good or evil, then the same thing is true.  The contemplative life is a life in which we live from the heart, but it is not a life which we live for ourselves but a life which fills the whole Church with fragrance.

extract from community Retreat with Fr Michael Casey
Glencairn 2010

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