“But this is the covenant which
I will
make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I
will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will
be
their God, and they shall be my people.”(Jer 31:33)
Our heart is truly the center of
our life.
It shows whether a man is in a good or bad condition and stimulates
other
powers to activity and when their work is finished the heart absorbs
the
result of these actions in order to reinforce or weaken such a feeling
which characterizes the constant disposition of man. It seems
that
the guidance of the heart should be entrusted to the heart. After
all it was the case of many or in a smaller degree by others and
perhaps
it was this way in the beginning. However, passions entered and
they
introduced a chaos. When the passions are present, our heart does
not indicate, our perception is not the way it should be, desires are
distorted
and instigate the activity of other powers to a disorder. This
then
the program: keep your heart under a control and subject all other
feelings,
desires and inclinations to a severe criticism. When the heart is
purified from disordered passions it can act according to its desire”.
(Theophan the Recluse, Russian spiritual writer, +1894).
“Knowledge does not make our soul
happy,
but it is made happy by feeling and experiencing things
internally.”
(St. Ignatius of Loyola)
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translated
from the Czech by Br. Vit Fiala OFM.
We will be making
the other
chapters available one at a time in the comming weeks.
Chapter
I: The Mystery of Good and Evil
Chapter
II: The Snake in the Paradise of the Heart
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
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“The pure of heart is the one
who rejects
earthly things and seeks that which is divine, and unceasingly praises
the Lord, the true God, and will see him with pure heart and
mind.”
(St. Francis of Assisi)
“So I declare and testify in the
Lord
that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of
their
minds; darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God
because
of their ignorance, because of their hardness of heart, they have
become
callous and have and have handed themselves over to licentiousness for
the practice of every kind of impurity to excess.” (Ef 3:17-19)
Likely, our external sense will perceive
the
air during breathing in a lesser degree then the intimate presence of
the
Spirit of God in our heart; His breeze will constantly remind us of its
presence within us and his presence shall increasingly dwell within us…
(Martyrius Sahdona, Syria 7 century).
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