Villa La Paz Newsletter March 2021
heart: 1a) the hollow muscular organ in a vertebrate animal that receives blood from the veins and pumps it through the arteries
5a) the human heart considered as the center or source of emotions, personality, attributes, etc.
d) any of various human feelings, love, devotion, sympathy, etc.
Webster’s New World Dictionary
Third College Edition
In the biblical understanding, our heart is the center of our being. It is not a muscle, but a symbol for the very center of our being. Now the beautiful thing about the heart is that the heart is the place where we are most ourselves. It is the very core of our being, the spiritual center of our being. Solitude and silence, for instance, are ways to get to the heart, because the heart is the place where God speaks to us, where we hear the voice that calls us beloved. This is precisely the most intimate place. One of the most amazing things is that if you enter deeper and deeper into that place, you not only meet God, but you meet the whole world there.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Heaven is within all of us, and all of us can be in heaven if we enter our hearts, encounter and experience God and then become God’s ambassadors of love and peace.
Gerard Thomas Straub
The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the power to reflect, in human meekness, and in human responsibility.
Vaclav Havel
Former president of Czechoslovakia and
first president of the Czech Republic
God was taking a stroll along the seashore as was His custom when the little boy who occasionally accompanies Him came alongside. They walked a stretch together and the little boy asked Him, “My mother told me that we reason and think with the brain but love with the heart. What did she mean?” God answered, “The brain in the seat of reason and thinking but the heart is where I dwell and, since I am love, humans love with their heart.” “What do you mean, ‘where I dwell?’” asked the child. God answered, “I dwell in everyone, in their heart. I make my home in their heart because I love them and want to be with them.” The child, puzzled, asked God, “But what if someone is bad and does not want you to dwell in them?” God rejoined, “It makes no difference to me. I love them anyway and will dwell in them no matter how bad they are.” More puzzled, the child asked, “Does it not hurt you when someone does not want you to dwell in them and rejects you?” “No,” said God, “because my love is unconditional. It does not depend on how good or bad a person is, what the person looks like, how intelligent they are or whether they love me or not. I will continue to love them and dwell in them no matter what. “ Still puzzled, the boy asked, “Why would you continue to dwell in a bad person who has rejected you and does not love you?” God answered, “So that the person will return to me and my love. I will never rest until I have that person again in my bosom.”
We were created by God to enter into the eternal dance of love of the Blessed Trinity, the complete self-giving and interpenetration of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Their indwelling in our hearts is a precursor of our final destiny since Our Lord said so many times to His disciples, “The kingdom of God is among you.” The indwelling of the Trinity in our hearts assures us that indeed we bear God’s kingdom to one another. Our blindness, inability, and perhaps, unwillingness to comprehend and accept these truths, that we each bear the Divine Spark within us, that we are each tabernacles of the Triune God, are the sources of war, poverty, ethnic strife, religious conflict and all the other negative aspects of human existence. Only the realizations that we are all created in the image and likeness of God and are all equal in the eyes of God will enable us to overcome the artificial divisions that separate us.
In Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.
Thomas Merton
Nowhere is the Divine Indwelling, the Divine Spark, more evident than in children. They are gifted to us with a clean slate, not knowing violence, hatred, indifference. Their love is unconditional. If we nurture the Divine Spark, fan it into a flame with love, compassion, and understanding, the world would change forever. That has to be our goal.
We thank you for enabling us to care for our children. We love you and wish you God’s peace.
