Reflections | THE HEART

Watch as Msgr. Don explains how the heart can keep both your physical and spiritual worlds in tune with one another.

Good morning. The spiritual life is a celebration of union between divinity and humanity. So in every human being there is this gift, this unique thing that you are. Then God is promised in order for that to grow and develop and become what is going to be and what God intended it to be. He wants to be inside of you helping you do that.

Now, imagination is a very important thing. And I remember going to a workshop one time when we were talking about the idea of how do you feel about this organ? It's in the center of your chest. What do you think about it? It is a pump that makes my blood go around. I take medicine so the pressure stays right and all that kind of stuff.

Well, there's been tremendous medical research done on the heart that shows that the heart has a quality that most people would never imagine it has. It's made up of the same kind of cells as the brain. So all of a sudden, medicine tells us, science tells us that the heart can think it can make decisions, it can influence actions that are going on inside of you.

Well, that was fascinating to me. But then also to find out that in science, the heart puts out an electromagnetic field that goes out about six or seven feet and comes back around. And so that there is an actual energy that can be measured in a photograph that is not flowing out of your head, but out of your heart.

So I thought, wow, and there is something about this organ that is very different. Then you look up the word heart in a concordance, which is a list of how many times a word appears in scripture. Pick up the word love and there's 400 references to the word love. Then they look up heart and there's 800 references to heart, one to mine by the way, but all I'm saying is that there's something so wonderfully exciting about understanding something about the spiritual world that is so in tune with the physical world that when God said, “I'll write my law on your heart”, you don't need to look anywhere else to find out what's right. You'll know it in your heart. 

Well, how can the heart know it's a pump? No, the heart is a brain and the brain of the heart can override the brain in the head. It's when there's a logical answer to something and you say, “Okay, that makes logical sense”, and then somebody will come along and say, “But I don't know, I've got the same information, but I'm feeling something.” Then they will often point to their chest. “I feel that there's something else going on here.” My intuition is, don't do it or do it, whatever the direction it's supposed to go. 

Think about that. All of those things reveal this most powerful and important understanding of God's relationship with us. He dwells in us and it's fascinating to me that knowing human minds in the way we work, for him to say that in a sort of ethereal you know, non literal way is hard for us. But if he says, “No, I live in your heart. I am right there in your chest.” And that thing that resonates you out to the world, and that makes sense. It makes so much more sense to me than if he's in your brain. If he's been your brain, then he's an idea. If he was in your heart, he's a force, he's an energy, and he's grace.

And I want to live with that because it's so different than living out in this. Our mind, our will, they're essential. But when it comes to the essence of who we are, it's our heart that makes the difference.

Have a great day.

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Kyle CrossComment