Spirit Matters: Sacred Heart’s immanence is all-pervasive

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Heart of Christ at the heart of matter…the Golden Glow…gleaming at the heart of matter. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I have written frequently about living a heart-centered spirituality, and by extension, a heart-centered life. They are really one and the same thing, whether we realize it or not.

We might not consider ourselves religious, or even spiritual, but if we live our lives with heart-centered values, we are living out our spirituality from the heart.

It should come as no surprise that the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, celebrated on the last Friday in June this year, is one of my favorite days of the liturgical year.

To live a heart-centric spirituality in light of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is to live with the awareness that the heart of God infuses all creation, on a cosmic and molecular level. It is to believe the Christ consciousness pervades all things, despite current evidence to the contrary.

Over, above, around and below the noise and chaos that is in our faces around the clock, there is the quiet, abiding loving presence of the Holy One that was here long before, and will be here long after the current creators of chaos have perished.

A heart-centric spirituality recognizes this abiding, loving presence of the sacred in all things, animate and inanimate. To not acknowledge this reality is to deny the dynamic and ongoing creation from the beginning.

David Richo’s book, “The Sacred Heart of the World: Restoring Mystical Devotion to our Spiritual Life,” is a beautifully thought-provoking work that allows us to consider how our spiritual hearts and the Heart of Christ are intertwined. Richo’s devotion to the Sacred Heart is not so much about the dry practices of yesteryear, as it is a living, experiential deep dive into the endlessly tender essence of God that refuses to let us go.

I used to lie awake at night as a child, trying to wrap my head around how God could simultaneously be aware of all things and everyone at the same time. Eventually, nature would get the best of me and I would fall asleep. Probably for the best – finite minds have no business boxing in the infinite.

The more we try to prove the existence of God, the more time we waste living the existence of God.

I still don’t know how God could simultaneously be aware of everything and everyone, but through living and growing in a heart-centric spirituality, I have come to witness it. By hearing other people share their spiritual lives, I have come to recognize that God is as present in the lives of the people around me as God is in my life.

Simultaneously.

It is in and from the heart space that we experience the ineffable Beauty that is the essence of existence.

This truth is expressed well in an iconic scene in Dead Poets Society, when Robin Williams as English teacher John Keating, speaks to his students at an all-male prep school in the 1950s:

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

Keating challenges his students to consider how they can channel into the world this inherent Beauty that is always just beyond our intellectual grasp.

Every day we are alive is an invitation for us to do the same.

Because despite the deeply dark times in which we live, that Beauty is alive and well, not just because it exists on its own, but because of people through the ages who have contributed a verse to this powerful play.

From their sacred hearts.

SPIRIT MATTERS is a weekly column by Jerrilyn Zavada Novak that examines experiences common to the human spirit. Contact her at jzblue33@yahoo.com.