Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Gospel this morning, we hear Jesus say, “The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.”

Now what the “heart” is in scripture is a complicated sort of thing. What it isn’t, though, is a particular physical organ of the body! Of all the eight-hundred or so references to the heart in scripture, not one of them refers to the heart as a corporeal organ. Usually, the heart is something like “the emotive center of the person,” or “the intellective center of the person,” or “the inner reality of a person’s character.” And all of those aspects of the heart as a spiritual organ, in their overlapping-ness, synthesize to produce yet another understanding of the heart as the center of the human will, the seat of desire: because our desires flow from our affective life, our intellective or imaginative life, and are reflective, in so many ways, of our character.

Later on in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus will say, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34). Which reveals something really fascinatingly paradoxical about hearts: while they have so much to do with our inner life and character, they reside outside of us…which is how we can speak of our hearts wandering, or of being fixed where true joys are to be found. What a wondrous strange thing: that our interior spiritual lives are lived outside of us and are actually not very interior or at all, not particularly "inside" by any stretch, but exteriorly located or pitched, our interiority belonging to, resting in, not some inner mental or imaginative landscape, but to the world(s) outside and beyond us! Our spiritual lives aren't idealized private, interior things that occasionally have exterior/material consequences in our actions; our life in the world is our spiritual life. (This is one of the reasons why, Beloved, that our prayer is our life and vice versa.)

Our hearts abide in and with what we desire, are held by or given to whatever it is we most long for, and the shape of our lives, the fruit we bear in the world, results from our heart’s rootedness in our longing, in our treasure—in fact, our heart begins to resemble whatever it is in which it’s rooted. Do we desire wealth? Our heart will grow cold and hard and sharp as the gold and precious jewels we desire. Do we desire fame? Our heart will become as ephemeral and insubstantial as a flickering illusion, a ghost, paper-thin. Do we desire power? Our heart will become a hammer or a sword or a stone. Do we desire only our own good? Our hearts will become brittle and hollow, desperate, empty, and alone. Our hearts belong to what we desire, and what we desire conditions our hearts, shapes our lives, and brings us to bear--in thought, word, and deed, in the whole of our lives--the fruit of whatever soil in which our hearts are planted.

What, then, if we were to give our hearts to Jesus?

Yes! What if our deepest longing, the longing that defines our lives, would be for Jesus? Then, Beloved, what a mystery would unfold! We would discover our hearts becoming like Jesus’ heart, and in the course of that becoming, we would see that as we’ve given our heart to Jesus, Jesus has given his own heart to us…that Jesus longs for us, desires us. And as our heart becomes more and more like God’s own love-flaming heart, we would find ourselves living the Love we desire and that desires us, our inner and outer lives harmonized in one spiritual life, bearing fruits of grace, and revealing the endless life and love of Jesus Christ.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+