A Thought On Sunday

What is unsolved in Your Heart

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius c.p.

Sunday, May 9  2010

The word “home” has warm feelings about it, hasn’t it?  I’m sure this is true in every language. 

Home is where you feel “at home,” where you feel wanted, welcomed, at ease, relaxed, where you have a history.  Home is company, sharing, reminiscing – you don’t have to prove anything, you belong!

But I had the experience ten years ago of going into my own home, the place I was born, where I grew up, the place of many memories, but it was horrible!  Why?  Because it hadn’t been lived in for some time.  There was no one there.  It was cold and empty, it had that “unlived in” feeling about it – it was just a house, an empty house; it wasn’t a home any more!

So, when Jesus says we must make his word our home and when St. Paul says, “Let the message of Christ in all its richness find a home in you, it means that to be a disciple of Jesus, his word must be lived in; we must be at home with his word, it must be life, strength, nourishment and encouragement to us. 

It must be more than “head knowledge.”  We can have degrees in theology, as you know, and still not know the living God, and still not believe.  We have to get this word of God from our heads to our hearts, to our hands and our feet and live it!

I love quoting Prior Roger’s words when welcoming pilgrims to Taize: “No one can possibly grasp all that is in the gospel but if during your time here, you’ve understood just one word, almost nothing, then put that word into your life at once and intensely.  That one word will lead to other words.  Put into life, live the little you have understood.” 

I find this consoling and reassuring because there is so much in the Gospels (and in the Scriptures), so many words that I don’t understand.  However, that doesn’t matter so long as we try to live what we do understand. 

Maybe we’re not ready yet for those other words!  The student in us wants to know everything now, but real knowing and understanding is a slow patient process and growth.  In our prayers we always knew there was more than one kind of intelligence when we prayed to the Spirit “to instruct our hearts.”

The poet, Rilke, sums it all up for us in these wise words:

Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart …
Try to love the questions themselves,
Do not seek answers that cannot be given
Because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything,
Live the questions now
And then you will, gradually, without noticing it,
Live along, some distant day,
Into the answers.