Much has already been said about the heart.
How many volumes upon volumes have been written to express the many movements of the heart? How many songs have been written to celebrate the goodness of the heart? And how many songs and poems lament the grief of the heart’s weaknesses, darknesses, and failures?
Yet with all that has been documented about the heart, why are most of us still relatively clueless about our own hearts and the hearts of those we are closest to? Why are we afraid of opening our hearts to each other, to God, or even to look closely at our own hearts? Why does the heart remain shrouded in mystery?
We can consider each story, poem, or song is a kind of map that offers us a vantage point to see the landscape of the heart. One map describes how the heart can move here over this mountain. Another shows the heart’s descent over there into a dangerous valley. The difficulty is that these are maps of someone else’s heart, someone else’s interior regions. Here is a terrifying consideration: there is no map available for the unique terrain of your heart. The only way for you to learn your heart is to practice it, to traverse it, to dwell within it.
In Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter, the grandmother says that Thad Coulter “was not a bad man…I believed then, and I believe now, that he was not a bad man. But we are all as little children. Some know it and some don’t.”
When it comes to entering the terrain of our hearts, we are beginners; we are children. Yet few of us are willing to assume the assume a posture of child-likeness, so we feign and hide behind presumption, sophistication, and ego. And why hide? To enter our hearts is to veer into close proximity of the regions where our deepest desires lie. Here we can again celebrate a child who is immediately familiar with her desires. Children are vulnerable, often naked, and are by nature silly and even foolish. The most naïve have not learned to look over their shoulders and worry about who is watching.
Summertime offers some of us a hope of rest and play, a break from the seamlessly never-ending grind, the conveyor belt of daily humdrum we go through in fall and winter. I invite you to join four me and four friends in a conversation about the advantages of spiritual formation in the rhythms of the summer. In this episode, the third movement of the Summer Retreat 2018, we focus on prayers of the heart. This episode can be approached on its own, but you’ll appreciate it more by listening and praying through the first two introductory episodes. We continue through the summer with the prayers of the mind, soul, and strength.
You can find prayer resources at the download page of the Invitation website, an overview of the prayer of examination and a worksheet, as well as the prayer guide, "40-Ways to Spend Five-Minutes with God." And you can also find some of the music used in the summer retreats for free on the music page.
Happy summer-time!
Peace & Love,
Josh
