Why do we purify the heart? It is the chosen dwelling place of God. It is the “palace of Christ in which he retires” (St. Macarius). It is the very seat of eternity, the gateway between heaven and earth—the Holy of Holies.
If your heart is like a house where clutter (beautiful and good things as well as ugly and evil things) is the rule, then all that’s holy is hidden, covered, and ignored. Tragic . . . for you can know so much more.
The key is not merely to get rid of the clutter, but to become so unattached to it (and that which causes you to love it and keep it around), so that you no longer feel compelled to have it around anyway.
This is the fruit of interior prayer—that watchfulness, awareness, and non-attachment to thought-clutter that comes from continual, unceasing returning to Christ in prayer.
Cleaning the house, purifying the heart, make it more hospitable to the indwelling of Grace. Nonattachment keeps it open and pleasing to the fullness of the Trinity of love.
I’ve stumbled upon a book that parallels my own teaching on prayer. And since my own book is bogged down or delayed, I suggest you pick it up. John Main (deceased) and I’ve read much the same historical material and come to similar conclusions and practices drawn from the wellspring of historic Christian spirituality.
From the Amazon.com review:
This is his classic book on how to practice contemplative prayer, or Christian meditation. Stepping aside from the busyness of our daily lives and being still in the presence of God is the key to discovering our true selves and knowing God as ‘the ground of our being’. This book offers a twelve step programme in learning meditative prayer, but as the author says, it is not so much about mastering a set of techniques, or escaping from life’s challenges and difficulties, or cultivating a self-conscious piety. Its purpose is to teach us how to be at peace with ourselves in order that we might let the presence of Christ flood our whole lives and our relationships.
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Here’s a poem from 2008 envisioning the awakening that is prayer:
Dance With Me
And this is what I saw—
Leviathan leaping,
full length,
in radiant delight,
up from the dark depths of Mystery.
The night sky, clear;
the moon full,
casting its silver light across
the whale-fractured sea.
And then
she crashes, full length.
A million silver shards
dancing their holy glee.
As she
disappears again
into the dark, silent depths,
to soak in Thee.
Why then
pray like some dead fish
in this, God’s sea?
Dance, fly,
play, plunge.
That’s what prayer is meant to be.
Take time to explore your experiences of “coming home”. The home you’ve known may not be a place you wish to return to. But what would it be like to come home to a place where you were known and loved and embraced? Have you ever tasted a moment of homecoming or is such a moment still a dream?
Try to recall a time when you “awakened” to a sense of peace and happiness.
- Perhaps you were a child and you awoke on Christmas morning full of expectation and desire.
- Maybe it was the morning after your wedding day and you awoke to birds singing, sun shining, and you basked in the warmth of your beloved sleeping beside you.
- Could it be the time you “woke up” and realized you get paid to do work you enjoy so much you’d do for nothing?
- Maybe you can recall a moment when the light of Christ came to you and you awakened to a sense that in that moment you found yourself exquisitely, unexplainably happy.
The images of homecoming, invitation, and waking from sleep are central to spiritual awakening. Each image probably has powerful connections to your own life.
So, sit with them for a while. Don’t hurry.
Here’s a little exercise:
You might explore some of your earliest experiences, those you could label as experiences with God.
I remember vividly a “wake-up invitation” that came to me when I was a teenager, probably thirteen or fourteen. I thought I had things figured out and God was one thing I figured was certainly out—I was an atheist. But on a family fly-fishing trip in the San Juan Mountains of western Colorado, I was tromping through the high country chasing rainbow trout with Stan, an old family friend, and an expert fly-fisherman. I respected him greatly and knew he was not a religious man.
It had just rained and, though soaked to the bone, I can still recall the fresh scent of the slippery willows and pine trees we were crashing through. The sky had opened up and boasted a dazzling rainbow set against a bright blue sky.
Stan stopped and said half to himself and half to me: “Sometimes I’ve a sense that I’m involved in something much greater than I am.” And then he headed back down along the trail.
That moment holds a special place in my life; it’s the first invitation to come home to God that I can remember.
What moment or moments can you point to when light broke into your life, even if it was for no longer than a flash of insight? Where were you? What was happening? What did that moment plant in your soul? Did something shut it down or did something open it up further?
“[What we seek] is not distant from us nor is it external to us,” taught St. Anthony of Egypt nearly sixteen hundred years ago.
“Its realization lies within us and the work is easy if only we want it. The Greeks leave home and cross the seas in order to gain an education, but there is no need for us to go away on account of the Kingdom of God nor need we cross the sea in search of virtue. For the Lord has told us, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ All that is needed for goodness is that which is within the human heart”.
The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, ed. Benedicta Ward
The transformation of your life, the recovery of prayer and the discovery of all you seek will require a journey.
This journey is not from one place to another. Rather, it’s a pilgrimage into the deepest places within you where God dwells in fullness. As scandalous as that sounds, it’s a universal truth—all who’ve sought God and found what they were looking for will tell you that.
I once traveled farther than the Magi traveled in search of all this only to find that what I was looking for was right beneath my nose: close as my next breath, near as the beating of my heart.
Such long distance trips to find God are unnecessary and can even distract you from looking to the only place you’re going to find what you’re looking for: your heart.
Prayer is coming home—to God and to ourselves, to heaven and earth and all that fills them.
Prayer is waking up to Life itself. It is opening to grace.
But prayer’s been so terribly reduced in our day. For most, it’s more like rubbing a Genii’s lamp than an encounter with the Beloved, whose aim is the glorious transformation of our lives into the fullness of our humanity, which is also the cradle of Divinity: the God who permeates and pervades all creation, even, or more accurately, especially . . . us.
Much of our lives are spent curved in upon ourselves—closed up within, and closed down to the Divine.
But there comes a time when each human heart receives an invitation to awaken to the Light that radiates from the Center, Source, and Substance of all things—to open what was once closed, to curve outward in a gesture of receptivity, like a chalice awaiting the wine.
Many of us ignore that this summons to come home; we minimize it, deny it, struggle against it.
When we do, we remain restless— vagabonds wandering this earth, searching and searching but never finding . . . until we awaken to the invitation to come home to the Light manifest in Jesus, who is, astonishingly, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, Love who gives life to all, our eternal Home.
Prayer—conscious, intentional, and in the words of St Paul, “unceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5.12)—is the highest expression of our intellectual, moral, and spiritual life.
Prayer, when we are awake to it, is life.
When you consciously and intentionally enter into the prayer that is always going on around and within you, you become spiritually active, free, and more fully aware that you are alive to more than your “self-made me” and its many compulsions, anxieties, and obsessions that keep you curved in upon yourself, fallen into the sin that separates you and contracts you and closes you off from the presence of the Beloved who is always near, and whose prayer is always calling you to the friendship that is prayer.
