God = Love

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God is love, heart, love one another, Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, sacred heart of Jesus, symbol, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Today is the feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. We all know that hearts appear everywhere when Valentine’s Day comes around. Images of real hearts, however, are more complex and sometimes not so pretty, depending on the presence of blood and the vessels that appear in the picture. We see blood as “messy” or “gory” and we forget sometimes how essential blood is to our life and how we can only live if our heart continues to beat.

On this feast we celebrate the heart as a symbol of what the heart does, of course, not how it is constructed. Presently, in some spiritual circles, there is a description of the heart as “the organ of spiritual perception,” essential to our growth in love. Although the writer of the First Letter of John did not use that denotation, he did understand deeply the significance of the definition. Here is some of the evidence from today’s lectionary:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God…In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his Son into the world so that we might have life through him…Beloved, if God so loved us, we must also love one another…God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in them. (1 JN 4: 7-16)

Take a moment of quiet and listen for your heartbeat. If you can’t hear or feel it, find the pressure point in your neck and just sense the love that is keeping you alive. Thank God for the life that is love, for the Love that is God. Remain in that knowledge, that grace, with each beat of your heart.

Shopping

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consider, grace, options, Peace, rainbow, spring, symbol, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I’ve begun to think that everything can be a symbol from which I can learn if I am paying attention. Call me crazy but I’m convinced that there are lessons to be learned each day and life is more easily engaged in a positive manner if we pay attention. Let me explain.

Yesterday I finally accepted the fact that I needed to get a new phone. (Mine has been on a charger now for days with no sign of life.) Being one of the least technologically savvy persons I know, I resisted a trip to the Verizon store but finally gave in to the inevitability and went. Having been alerted to the fact that there is an alternative to the large store near the university where all the employees are like 15-year-old barracudas who meet you at the door and talk faster than anyone I have ever met, I was grateful for the information that led me to that small, quiet alternative where there were only two employees, one a middle-aged man and one a 22-year-old woman. She became my guardian angel within the first five minutes. The bad news was that my phone was irrevocably dead and because I had resisted adding “cloud space” for the last many months, she would not be able to transfer such things as contacts and photos. The good news was that I would be able to purchase a new phone for about 60% of the price that I was expecting.

I did not buy the phone. I needed time to consider the options. Grace got in my car with me for the trip home, however, because in that half-hour drive two things happened. First, in realizing that I would need to let go of much that was contained in the phone’s memory, I would be starting over. A new season would be born for me which suddenly seemed like a good thing – like when the first shoots of spring plants begin to appear. Of course it will demand some work to build a new set of contacts but those will be recent rather than long-ago entries that are no longer operative. And if my photos are gone, I still have the memories they contained. The recognition was swift and filled me with peace.

As I neared my exit from the highway the most vivid and spacious rainbow suddenly appeared, stretching from ground to sky in a blaze of seven colors that took my breath away. Because I had left the sun in the city and was driving into a dark gray backdrop of sky, conditions were perfect for such a show: no rain, just glorious color. It stayed with me for over five minutes of gratitude and glory.

Today I will buy and begin life with my new phone and call it Grace.

Where Is Your Heart?

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Cynthia Bourgeault, divine, heart, heart chakra, love, music, perception, Psalm 95, sacred heart of Jesus, softening, song, symbol, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, the Source of all Life, The Wisdom Way of Knowing

I remember a song from my mother’s repertoire whose refrain sang: “You’re close to me here, but where is your heart?” The physical heart is what keeps us alive and we know where that lives and how important it is to take care of it. In the last few days I’ve heard of a number of people having heart attacks or heart surgery – all quite serious events. Obviously, however, the question from my mother’s song is about something else.

The heart is universally accepted as the symbol of love. Catholic spirituality speaks of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, energy workers see the heart chakra as the center of the body from which love radiates, spiritual teachers the world over use the heart to refer to the Divine. We are urged to “open your heart and your pocketbook” in times of national disasters and many of us pray each day, asking God to open our hearts to the needs of our neighbors near and far.

Today, the psalmist calls us to take the responsibility for that opening in psalm 95, singing: If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts! Cynthia Bourgeault, in her book The Wisdom Way of Knowing, calls the heart an organ of perception, the center from where we learn to move toward union with the Source of all Life. The process of that daily dance toward the center is not linear, not easy, but the reward of hearing that music, singing that song, softening our hearts is nothing less than everything.