Distilled to Their Essence – Br. Keith Nelson

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“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” (Matthew 5:8)

 

Throughout Hebrew scripture, the heart stands for the hidden essence of our humanity. The soft or tender heart is receptive to wisdom, spiritually pliable, agile: it can bend, turn, and change. The hardened heart is defiantly unreceptive. It is no longer made of flesh, but of stone. It has calcified by its own volition, choosing itself over God.

In his own teaching, Jesus elaborates upon the heart-wisdom of his ancestors. In his parables and sayings, the heart is a source of good or bad treasure. It is soil that receives seed. It is the arena of our inmost thoughts, imagination, and faith. The heart is an abode for the indwelling Holy Spirit given to us.

For his disciples, Jesus is the heart of the God we worship, and in Jesus this God has a human heartbeat.

What Jesus calls a pure heart is an icon of this humanity in right relationship with God. This pure heart is alive to itself and therefore rooted in a real interior life. And it is alive with compassion and connection to others, created in God’s likeness. Each mysterious creature is endowed with their own miraculous heart, different from our own, yet fashioned by the same Maker and set on fire by the same Lover.

But pure can be a hard word to swallow. Did Jesus not name and denounce a fixation with purity in the dominant religious culture around him? Purity cultures in the church look suspiciously Pharisaical, imposing impossible and often inhuman ideals. Sadly, they often end up driving sincere disciples (or would-be disciples) away from the God of mercy.

The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist offers words I find helpful, about purification in relation to the mystery of Christian prayer: “Our love must be purified and tested by many times of darkness, loss, and waiting” (Chapter 21). Of course, you don’t have to be a monk or nun to know what this is like. Any serious disciple learns soon enough that making decisions based on the gospel will set us at odds with neighbors, employers, politicians, or even friends or family; that there will be seasons when prayer is clouded by distraction, boredom, or the agony of feeling nothing; that the confident trust we felt when we entered upon a vocation or made a vow will be shaken in ways great and small. There is a purity God grants in and through our patient, faithful endurance, but it is more akin to integrity or wholeness than an immaculate conscience.

Blessed are those distilled to their essence by the ups and downs of sticking with Jesus: collected, recollected, concentrated, condensed, made real, and offered up to God upon the altar of the heart.

When the response to God’s love that we call prayer becomes the center of who we are, many other dimensions of our carefully manicured and cherished self-identities fall away. With each layer, a new response of freedom is possible. And a new vista of God’s infinite love opens before our astonished and tearful eyes.

What do those eyes see?

More of God than we thought possible, it seems. On the whole, the Hebrew scriptures agree with God’s words to Moses in Exodus 33:20: “You cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” Yet seeing God – however partially or imperfectly – would become a major Christian image for the transfiguration of our spiritual perception, begun in this life and coming to fullness in eternity.

What opens our eyes – and what those eyes see – is “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). This is seeing with the eye of a purified heart. Tradition has come to call the fullness of this sight in the bliss of heaven the beatific (or “happy-making”) vision. It is fitting that the term for this consummation of our spiritual seeking and beholding shares a root with the word beatitude. Both teach us where true joy is to be found, and how.

 

For Reflection

Where do you feel your heart to be receptive or hardened today?

How have you felt yourself distilled through experiences that have called upon hidden resources of patient, faithful endurance?

What does the phrase “eye of the heart” evoke in you? How do you feel that eye training its gaze on Jesus?