Echoing the Pope and Scripture
Pope Francis released his 4th encyclical titled “Dilexit Nos” (He Loved Us) on October 24, 2024. Reflecting on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Holy Father emphasized the importance of the heart. He immediately decried what he called “an age of superficiality” which leaves humanity “as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives.” For this reason, the pope requests, “...all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart.”
The first reading and the gospel reference the Shema (a Jewish confession of faith) to reinforce the origin of the relationship between God and Israel. Moses urges the people to observe the commandments with the invitation, "Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today."
Equally, Jesus reminds the Scribe in the gospel, “love the Lord with all your heart…” This passage gives a clue to Jesus’ teaching about treasures in heaven, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21). The heart is the domain of love and the symbol of life. The heart pumps blood to the lungs to maintain oxygen circulation for the sustenance of life. So, our hearts either love or stop loving, showing we are alive or dead and heartless.
Our heart's rhythm: Begin with simple biology
Once more, in the encyclical, Dilexit Nos, the Holy Father maintains, “If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter” (no. 11). In terms of human relationships when love disappoints, we hear expressions such as, “My heart is broken. He/she broke my heart.” A person whose heart is broken experiences the devaluation of love. The individual desires that original connection since we all are made for love.
The word “oxy” comes from a combining form meaning “sharp,” “acute,” “keen,” “pointed,” “acid.” It is used to form compound words such as oxygen, etc. Oxytocin is the love hormone that stimulates energy in human beings. This love hormone performs deeper functions beyond creating romantic emotions/feelings. Therefore, oxytocin is responsible for building trust, gazing, empathy, creating and sustaining positive relationship memories, and fidelity, activating and supporting positive communication, and processing bonding cues.
Can a heart connect with another heart?
A few months ago, I drove back from church. I was parking in the garage when a car pulled in and stopped right behind my car. I came out and a strange young man also came out from his car. He looked desperate and confused. As I walked closer to him, I felt his anxiety and questioned what it was all about. He said, “I want to speak with a priest,” and broke down in tears. This young man had been married for about a year. His wife went into the military and was posted to a different state. He began to feel the gap and then started feeling his wife as becoming less invested in their relationship. He feared that the wife was talking to another guy in the military camp. He was afraid that he would lose her. He said to me, “Father, I am dying. My heart is exploding. She stole my heart but I’m not sure she knows it.”
Why would a young man leave his house early that morning to seek a priest if not for the desires of his heart? Why would he be that vulnerable to a stranger if not for something deeper than mere physical connection? But he told me they stopped doing things that deepened their love, things that stimulated their hearts together such as prayers, scripture readings, and wonderful, holy talks. He told me they started talking about mere emotions at some point and began to hold discussions that for him, lost their original contents. Pope Francis explains, “It must be said, then, that we have a heart, a heart that coexists with other hearts that help to make it a “Thou”. For only the heart creates intimacy, true closeness between two persons. Only the heart is able to welcome and offer hospitality. Intimacy is the proper activity and the domain of the heart” (Dilexit Nos, no. 12). This explains why Jesus said we must love our neighbors as ourselves.
The danger of heartlessness
The problem of today’s world is that we have failed to understand the true longing of our hearts. Pope Francis highlights these problems, “the fragmentation caused by individualism… A society dominated by narcissism and self-centeredness will increasingly become “heartless”. This will lead in turn to the “loss of desire”, since as other persons disappear from the horizon, we find ourselves trapped within walls of our own making, no longer capable of healthy relationships” (no. 17).
How about our age of robots and artificial intelligence? Pope Francis remarks, “In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home… a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms… all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our hearts” (no. 17).
The human heart of Christ and our devotion
Our relationship with Christ begins with Jesus’ incarnation, taking flesh and blood like us. Jesus is born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, nurtured like any baby in the arms of his mother. As a caring foster father, Joseph guided Jesus as he grew up. Jesus related with those around him. The Pope points out that the gospels identify Jesus as bringing his heart to care for those around him; "In his humanity, Jesus learned this from Mary, his mother. Our Lady carefully pondered the things she had experienced; she “treasured them… in her heart” (Lk 2:19, 51) and, with Saint Joseph, she taught Jesus from his earliest years to be attentive in this same way” (Dilexit Nos, no. 42).
By inviting the Scribe to love God with all his heart in the gospel today, Jesus invites us to the meaning of devotion. Only Jesus can activate our hearts to truly love God and our fellow human beings the way God wants. It does not matter if your heart has been broken by any human being. Jesus searches out our hearts and reunites us with God’s love. In the Eucharist, we receive the most holy and nutritional food for our hearts. We consume his Blood which pumps life and oxygen into our souls. We become alive to loving and being loved as God has created us. The search for true love is a search for who we are and who we are made to be, images of love and likeness of the heart of God in us.
The Pope says, “The deepest part of us, created for love, will fulfill God’s plan only if we learn to love. And the heart is the symbol of that love.” When Jesus says, we must love the Lord with all our hearts, he is inviting us to the source of our love, the meaning of every human desire, just as the Psalm says, "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God" (Ps. 42:1). The caveat is, “Our devotion must ascend to the infinite love of the Person of the Son of God, yet we need to keep in mind that his divine love is inseparable from his human love. The image of his heart of flesh helps us to do precisely this” (no. 60). Make this a part of your daily prayer, “Jesus, meek and humble of heart… Make my heart like unto yours.”
READINGS: 1ST- Dt. 6:2-6; 2nd- Heb. 7:23-28; Gospel- Mk. 12:28b-34
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