The Heart of
Things
Moy Hitchen, February 2006
When some seventy Christian Brothers gathered in
Rome in 2002, elected from all the provinces and regions of
the Congregation, they had already set themselves a
specific task – “listening for
God”.
No, the task was listening for
God. The Brothers, and those they had invited to share the
experience, were admitting, without much shame, that they
didn’t know where to look for God. God had
disappeared from his usual haunts, like the lions of Judah
perhaps, now extinct in Palestine and Israel.
Just why God, at the turn of the millennium, had gone
missing is another question for another time. For Jews and
Christians, in that part of the world oddly dubbed
‘the West’ (West of what? is the obvious
rejoinder), the twentieth century had seen God gradually
leach out of the fabric of history and society. For
Indigenous people, world-wide, that particular millennium
just finished was probably the worst they had ever
suffered, and their beliefs suffered along with them. For
the lions of Judah, though, extinction had come two
millennia earlier.
And where did the Brothers and their colleagues find God
speaking? After a month in Rome (from where, apparently,
the East is east and the West is west), they announced, in
a small, snazzily-produced pamphlet, God was at
the heart of being Brother.
Listen for God in our hearts, they said.
Sandra Schneiders has to take some of the blame for this.
In her talks, in the opening days of the Chapter, she used
a throw-away line that really caught on:
“What we do with our heart affects the whole
universe.” She was talking about celibacy,
or, more accurately, whatever it is that keeps us celibate.
More precisely again, whoever holds our hearts
– Jesus.
Of course, that comes from a Catholic Christian tradition
of religious life, she was careful to remind us – and
does not exhaust the mystery of God at work in many other
forms of religious life and spirituality. But for Brothers
in an order who fairly regularly say, “Live
Jesus in our hearts – forever” it was
a happy choice of words.
The rest of the snazzy pamphlet is taken up with our clumsy
attempts, as Chapter participants, to express some of our
heart-work. Heart-work? ‘Heart discoveries’,
‘heart decisions’ are other expressions used.
The incoherence of this section of the pamphlet merely
reflects the exigencies of Holy Week breaking on us, the
end of the Chapter, the beginning of the rest of our lives,
with that peremptoriness only a northern spring can impose.
The sad fact was that the participants bore the message
in their hearts. It’s sad because most
people go to the document, the snazzy pamphlet, to find it.
It’s sad because the participants have gone home with
their hearts riddled with all those things that gnaw at
human hearts, yet profoundly changed. And
‘home’ is less home, after such things happen
in the heart. There’s more of the universe leaking
into the heart, or out of the heart, after Rome 2002.
This is not the usual feeble excuse: “You had to be
there.” Such a statement excludes others. It leaves
them back on the table at Emmaus, amongst the crumbs and
empty cups. I don’t imagine Cleophas and Mary, his
wife (John 19, 25), heard any lions roaring as they pushed
on back to Jerusalem through that long night. The lions had
long gone. But their hearts, inflamed, were driving them
across the dark and dangerous countryside.
As the Congregation Promoter of Eco-Justice, I find myself
wandering the world like the Ancient Mariner “who
stoppeth one of three”. Like Cleophas and Mary,
I can talk of “our hearts” (Luke 23,
32). In universe terms, there is nothing more important to
talk of. Ken Wilber, who’s anxious we (the human
race) keep evolving, says, “We go within, to move
beyond.”
One of the echoing chambers of the 2002 Chapter, where
hearts were speaking to hearts again, was the Kolkata
symposium on Social and Eco-Justice (November –
December 2005). Walking the streets of Kolkata in the early
morning, I saw a Muslim father leading his disabled son
along the street. I was suddenly reminded of that old
Muslim saying, “Only for compassion of heart
God created humanity. For worshipping God, there were
angels enough.”
It has taken God 13.8 billion years to
create human beings (in our time scale). Angels, I assume,
can be created much more quickly (in God’s time
scale). So it wasn’t, after all, for the human
intellect and will we were made. It was for compassion
– a compassion at the heart of the universe. Angels,
classically, aren’t endowed with hearts.
This is what the Brothers discovered in Rome 2002.
“Radical relationships of equality with all
of God’s creation” doesn’t come
near it – but it’s a pointer to where we are
going. The universe has a heart – it beats within us,
and in other places.
Social Justice and Eco-Justice speak from the heart, of a
troubled world, and to the heart – ours. It’s
no wonder that our charism statement says explicitly Edmund
“opened his whole heart”.
It’s no coincidence that, in other cultures, the
shaman experiences the ‘opening of the heart’,
often as a powerful splitting open of the whole chest, as
an initiation.
Will lions prowl the Holy Land again? The image of
initiation brings us back to Amos, quaking with fear, as
the lion rends the night.
“The lions
roars: who is not afraid?
Holy One has spoken:
Who will not prophesy?”
(Amos 4, 8)