Journey's Weekly Homilies

Ash Wednesday, Cycle C 
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Homily by Tom Kinzie 

Joel 2:12-18
II Cor. 5:20-6:2                       
Matt. 6:1-6, 16-18

Lent is a time for taking stock.  During this season we are encouraged to ask if the life we are living is the life inside of us that wants to live.  Have we given up or is there still a dream inside of us begging to come true? 

One of the desert fathers, Abba Pambo, said, “If you have a heart you can be saved.”  This is my new favorite saying from the desert.  It is generous and affirming.  When I first read it I felt an immediate sense of relief.  I have a heart at least, I thought to myself.  Lent is a time we can notice our hearts and evaluate our heart health. We are meant to understand the word heart symbolically.  Heart is one of those words that have been so romanticized in our culture that we primarily understand it as the site of our emotions -- Valentines Day and the heart.  In biblical culture the word heart symbolizes the center not just of emotions, but of the entire person.  If one wanted to know the measure of a person it was the state of the heart that mattered.  The Talmud said simply: prayer is the service of the heart.  We pray from the deepest and most central part of who we are. 

Some of the words and phrases about the heart still carry this larger biblical meaning: a kind heart, an open heart, but also the more ambiguous or negative diagnosis, such as broken heart, heart sick, cold hearted, a heavy heart, heartless.  All of these words express the idea that when the health of a heart is measured something important is being said about the quality of our lives.  

When the desert Abba Pambo said, “If you have a heart you can be saved,” he meant it in that larger biblical sense.  He meant, it seems to me, that if we can be in touch with the center place in our lives, if we can be open to that place and all that is there, we have a chance to be saved.  When we journey to that place where our lives find meaning and purpose, there where integrity and hope are found; we can become whole.  For it is there we will encounter God.  It is there in that deep center of our being we discover just how much we need healing and just how it might occur.  It is there in the midst of our own healing that the whole world opens up to us both as a source of love and compassion and a worthy recipient of our love and compassion.  Jesus clearly understood this heart place.  It is the place where motivation is crucial.  It is the secret place and it is from this place that genuine spirituality emerges:

But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.  We will be rewarded not in any material way, but in the secret way of the heart. 

One of those diagnostic phrases about the heart seems especially important for this time of year.  If you have ever experienced a broken heart, and who among has not at some point in our lives, you know that it is a grief so intimate, so deeply inside of us that its anguish seems to spread out to every cell of our being.  Someone who has grown impatient with our “broken heartedness” might say ‘snap out of it.’  It is meaningless advice.  For this pain goes wherever we go.  We can’t set it on a table and be done with it.  It follows us like a hungry dog.  You go to bed and it is there.  You wake up and it is there.  It seems to crawl inside your skin just to let you know it is there.  It is there. 

A broken heart reminds us, and it does so with a fierceness that it both strange and insistent, that we have a heart.  It even seems to say we are all heart.  We may go for days, years even, forgetting to be in touch with our heart place, that place at the center of our lives. Revealingly, we often use this phrase, 'at the heart' of who we are.  When this heart starts aching it hurts like nothing else can.  But then a strange thing happens.  It is a thing that can happen only uniquely to each person, in its own time and place.  One day we wake up and we realize that this heart sickness was a blessing.  We not only came out of it alive, we came out of it more alive.  Julain of Norwich expressed the idea that sin (that time of separation from God, the ultimate broken heartedness) as good because the healing that comes from it moves us to a deeper place, ever closer to the healing mercy of God. 

I don’t want to trivialize this is in any way.  And I know that some folk hurt so deeply that they can never get to this place.  Often, and most of the time, where body and spirit are not brutalized past the remembrance of anything human, when the heart is broken this brokenness, through the grace of God, can lead to a heart that is more compassionate, more sensitive, more open, less full of regret, less judgmental, and finally, able to share in the brokenness of others.  It can even happen that people who have experienced a broken heart and its healing will begin to take pity on themselves and do away with the dogged judgments with which we so readily beat ourselves. 

Let me say that this broken heart is part and parcel of what it means to be human.  This is why the church in Lent proclaims these words from the Psalms: “Create in me a clean heart.”  Or, we could say, create in me a whole heart, a holy heart, a human heart, a healed heart. 

The image of the broken heart does not mean that having a broken heart is the only thing.  Having a broken heart is not the end game, but it is for most of us part of the journey – and often.  There is nothing in this that should promote feeling bad for the sake of feeling bad, because feeling bad religiously can end up feeling so good.  We are not to fixate on shortcomings or pain.  We’ve had enough of that in our tradition.  Instead, the heart is the place, the conversion place where we can continue on a journey to a deeper joy.  At some level, anything that gets in the way of joy gets in the way of our being with God.  A broken heart is the path that leads from the pain that so often hides God to a healing that reveals God.  This presence of God is the gift of knowing that God loves us and cares for us, and wants nothing more than to be with us. 

Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart,
With fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
And rend your hearts and not your garments.
                                                                                    (Joel 2:12) 

In other words, everything that is within us we can bring to God, even a broken heart.  We might say in this season of Lent, especially a broken heart.