Giving from the Heart
Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)
Pope Francis has just produced an encyclical letter, his fourth. It is entitled in Latin Dilexit Nos, in English, “He loves us”. It is a letter on the love of God revealed in the heart of Jesus, his Sacred Heart. It is a beautiful meditation on the love of God for humanity and on the Catholic devotion to the heart of Jesus.
The Pope raises a question at the beginning. Does the symbol of the heart still carry meaning for today? We are all familiar with statues and holy cards illustrating the Sacred Heart. Here in the cathedral as in most of our Catholic church there is a side altar dedicated to the Sacred Heart. It reflects how significant devotion to the Sacred Heart was in Catholic spirituality. Across Tasmania we have many churches dedicated to the Sacred Heart.
But in recent decades emphasis on the devotion has declined. So, the Pope is right to ask the question: Do this devotion still engage with us?
To answer this question, he proceeds to give an excellent reflection on the image of the human heart. He comments, “Yet living as we do in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart”. I believe this to be very true.
How often do we stop and explore the inner recesses of our heart, particularly examining the current state of our heart? In a world driven by activity it is so easy to overlook or dismiss the movements in the heart.
The Pope comments, “if we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter”.
The Sacred Scriptures remind us that God does not look at appearances, but at the heart. It is the state of our heart that matters and not our external performance. We can pause for a moment and wonder: if God was to look at my heart right now, what would He see?
Is my heart principally given to the desire to love? Is my heart at peace? Is the state of my heart one of trust in and surrender to God?
Consider the Gospel given to us today. St Mark describes a very beautiful human moment. Jesus is in the temple precinct. We are told that he sat down opposite the temple treasury. People were making their donations, some with large amounts. Then a poor widow came along and placed two small coins as a donation.
The Lord, witnessing this, said, “This poor widow has put in more that all who have contributed to the treasury”. He reminds us of a very important truth. It is not the amount of money that counts but the heart that inspires what is given.
It is what is in the heart when a gift is made that finally counts.
The story also witnesses to the fact that this poor widow wanted to make a contribution to the temple treasury even though she had so little. She wanted, in the midst of her poverty, to give back to God. From even the little she had she felt that it was right to make a gift.
It touches another important truth. All we have has ultimately come from God. When we give, we are in fact giving from what we have received.
We are the recipients of the generous love of God. Everything we have and are have come from God. Thus, we want to give something back. We want to give back with a generous heart, with a joyful heart.
The image of the Sacred Heart is a constant reminder to us that God has loved us first. In fact, this love is a burning love, and desires our love in return.
Pope Francis quoted from St Margaret Mary who said, “He asked for my heart, which I asked him to take, which he did and then placed myself in his adorable heart, from which he made me see mine like a little atom consumed in the fiery furnace of his own”.
The first thing we can give – and the most important thing we can give – is ourselves – to give our hearts unconditionally to God. The prayer in the heart of every Christian can simply be: “Lord, you have given all to me, I offer myself to you”.
These are the words of St Ignatius of Loyola and they wonderfully capture this complete giving over of ourselves to the Lord. His prayer is:
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.
This offering of ourselves to God means that we are open to God’s will for us. As we say in the Lord’s Prayer – “Your will be done on earth as in heaven”. We can say with the psalmist, “Lord, here I am I come to do your will” (see Ps 40).
We can offer our time and talent to the Lord. We give ourselves to the Lord in love, because we know how greatly we are loved. Like the widow, we give generously from all that we have.
God has given us all, we desire to give back with grateful hearts.
Archbishop Julian Porteous
Sunday, 10 November 2024