Pureness of Heart

 


Pureness of heart permits us to encounter God in others (Matthew 5,8). Lacking pureness of heart, abuse is ensured: focusing solely on ourselves is easily mistaken for God’s will and the temptation to use others to satisfy personal needs or interests. 

Neither can we limit it to things sexual, which sometimes is interpreted as an excuse to detach from others in an attempt not to get hurt. 

We are tempted to speak rather than to listen; to teach rather than to learn; to do rather than to be, but this does not suffice when speaking of discipleship highlighted by prayer focused on the cross. 

Contemplating the Crucifix, we learn not to rush: to embrace Shabbat’s stillness, now encountered on Golgotha, as a path to better insights and more profound exploits, which identify with the empty tomb. 

Revitalised by this stillness, contemplating His body upon the cross, we are invited to live committed love because our wounds have been healed (1Peter 2, 24): to be “still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46,10). 

This stillness initiates prayer because we learn to listen to our hearts enkindled by experienced love: a response to God’s search for ‘me’, which invites us to be interrupted in our doings by exposing our hearts to His Word.

This exposure reminds us, following Saint Theodore the Studite, that in the cross there is no mingling of good and evil, as in the tree in Eden: it is wholly beautiful to behold and good to taste. The fruit of this tree is not death but life, not darkness but light, but we understand this not by words, but by living this insight when considering pureness of heart.

Martin


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