Whose Heartbeat?

Le Pichon’s references (in the previous postings) to the heart being educated by relationship, and the idea of our being born not with full humanity but with full potential of humanity drew me into powerful musing, and a powerful experience.

One of the gifts of a lifetime in relationships with Jesuits was the theological garden of delights of Karl Rahner, S.J.    One of his essential ideas is that humanity perfectly developed is divinity, that since we are formed in the likeness of God, it is Godliness that is our true nature. 

Kathy has been out away for three or four days, returning today from a visit with friends in Detroit.  When she is gone, my sleep changes.  I waken at night and do not fall immediately back to sleep.  And so instead of waking quickly and clearly and early, I find myself stirring slowly, doing what most of call “sleeping in”

for an extra few minutes.  As I lie half awake yesterday morning, Pichon’s voice was playing in my head, and his ideas about the heart merged with my feeling my heart beat against the soft foam of the mattress.  I thought of that hear t of mine, the heart that a year ago I feared would burst and now seems misshapen but strong, whose beating pumps a ceaseless flow of blood, and a ceaseless flow of gratitude.  I thought of that heart as God’s heart, and an experience of mystery began to draw me in.

My close friend Fr. Bernie Owens is known for the depth of his spiritual emotion, with the degree that he feels experiences of God.  And the heart is a truth that opens into God for him.  The first Friday of every month is celebrated by Jesuits as a reminder of the “Sacred Heart” of Jesus.  As a kid, I wondered at all of the images of Jesus with his heart showing on the outside of his chest, rays of light beaming from it.  The image was, I think, trying to help us understand that Jesus was all about the heart, all about love.  So on these first Fridays, Bernie’s homilies were often reflections on his experience of the heart of God.  The one that brought tears to his eyes and halted his speech was his way of entering into prayer, into the presence of Jesus by sitting with him and placing his hand on the chest of Jesus, feeling Jesus’ heart beating for love of him.

I’ve written of consoling our daughter Margie when she was facing middle school pressures that God was like a big lap into which we could always climb, and God was always glad when we climbed into it, and embraced us with happiness.  So in that warm bed, Bernie’s words about feeling God’s heartbeat and my words to Margie and le Pichon’s words about the education of the heart toward full humanity and Rahner’s about humanity approaching divinity became a song in four part harmony, each singer bel canto, taken by the spirit of the music, all flying toward the final not of resolution in the final chord, the arrival of what is promised.  I was lying on God’s chest, feeling God’s heart beating in me.  It was not quick, like these mechanical sentences.  It was neither trancelike, lasting for days.  It was a timeless moment of truth.  It was not accidental that I occurred in this bed, the bed that Kathy and I share.  We speak of the “mystics” in Christianity and the sexual nature of mystical union with God, becoming one with him as some of us are blessed to do in marriage.   My better half was not there as she usually was, but the bed that we share reminded me that my life is not my own, nor my heart.  And the love I love is not my love, but the love that is loving from within me, a love greater than I could ever love. 

Those of us who have been blessed with relationships of love know what it is like to feel a heart beating against our chest, to not know for that moment whose pulse it is.  And perhaps we who have been so loved have all the more a calling to join in relationship to the lonely and abandoned, that they might feel the love of God.  Le Pichon and Rahner and Bernie . . . and my Better Half all know the truth – that our hearts are God’s, right here in our chests.  God’s own heart, in love, is multiplied like loaves and fishes, and we are all sustained as we love God’s own love.