Solemnity of Most Sacred Heart of Jesus June 11th 2010


Heart
Image via Wikipedia

It's not too late to join the last days of prayers and reflections for the Novena to the Sacred Heart at Concord Pastor Comments here


The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality 
Prayerfulness of heart has much to do with finding the Centre then living out of that Centre in everyday centredness. 
Space and time for God are necessary for that centredness to become habitual - the very baseline of one's personal melody in the Spirit.

I once ventured to ask a markedly prayerful married woman how she prayed. She gave a surprising answer: I just putter. 
She worked and accomplished tasks, but with a free interior heart - free for God, free for holy musings, and free for praying for others.
Puttering is rather right-brained; it is not highly focused, not agenda-oriented, and not a charge up a mountain. 

Artists, poets, writers - creative and spiritual people - need non-agenda time in which to putter and live in 'interior space' where inspiration can happen.
They need to cultivate the vessel of the heart: open, empty, and ready for inspiration - gift of the Spirit.

Sr. Donald Corcoran, OSB Cam.

Ron Rolheiser has two articles relating to heart - The Mystical Imagination and A Rich Tradition of The Heart where he says
One of the great complements to theology (and, in the best of times, friends to it) has been the Roman Catholic devotional tradition. 
This tradition doesn't trade on critical thinking, but on the romantic imagination. It aspires to inflame the heart. Admittedly, this is risky. Feelings can lead us in many directions, but faith-without-feeling is perhaps the greater danger. The heart also needs its due. 




A layered reality is part of the Catholic imagination. To possess this imagination is to dwell in a universe inhabited by unseen presences - the presence of God, the presence of saints, the presence of one another. 
There are no isolated individuals but rather unique beings whose deepest life is discovered in and through one another. This life transcends the confines of space and time. ... We - and Jesus and the saints - exist in some essential way outside of the chronology of historical time. We have being beyond the strictures of geographical space. And we can sense this now, in the concreteness of our lives."

 


The Catholic devotional tradition has long been helpful in making us aware of our many layered-universe. 
We need to continue to employ its imagination if we are to help our fleshy hearts feel more really what lies inside the eternal heart of God. 

The mystical imagination is the other half of the scientific imagination and, like science, its purpose is to help us see, imagine, understand, speak about, and relate to reality in a way beyond fantasy and superstition.
But the mystical imagination can show us something that science, wonderful though it is, cannot, namely, it can show us the many grace-drenched and spirit-laden layers of reality that are not perceived by our physical senses. The mystical imagination can show us how the Holy Spirit isn't just inside our churches, but is also inside the law of gravity.

But how do we learn that? A saint might say: "Meditate and pray long enough and you will open yourself up to the other world!" A poet might say: "Stare at a rose long enough and you'll see that there's more there than meets the eye!" A romantic might say: "Just fall in love real deeply or let your heart get broken and you'll soon know there's more to reality than can be empirically measured."

And the mystics of old would say: "Just honour fully what you meet each day and you will find it drenched with grace and divinity."

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments: