Jun 10 Wed
Can the heart be a path to reach God?
We do not possess a rationality (an intelligence) that must be completed (separately) with sensitivity, but rather our feelings must be intelligent in and of themselves. We must “educate” our feelings.
The real danger is to reduce faith to emotions; this leads many to “become consumers of experiences and insatiable seekers of spiritual gratification.”
As Christians, we need to “rediscover the importance of feelings and to integrate them, without undermining reason, into the Christian life.”
The Church, as a good Mother, teaches us that while emotions and feelings may initially impress a person and lead them to conversion, they can also become an obstacle to spiritual growth.
The early Christians did not have a method, but they did have a means. It was their way of life that stirred those who approached them. Their authentic witness drew people in and moved the hearts of those who interacted with them.
Feelings are good for evangelization to the extent that they are not a method for evangelizing, but the fruit of a real-life witness. Otherwise, we may think that a “believer” is someone who believes something, just anything.
“Some claim that what ultimately matters is not so much what one believes as the fact of believing, and the seriousness and intensity with which one does so… This is not the thinking of the New Testament… Faith lies in its content.”
We receive our first lessons about love and affection during the first five or six years of our lives, and always within the context of our family. It is there that the image a person forms of a God who is Love is largely shaped. Thus, the family, the domestic Church, is the natural setting for discussing affection on the journey of faith.
We have all been called to love passionately (God, others, the world…), but rather than the intensity, loving passionately is to love with the Passion of Christ as our reference point. And the Passion of Christ, the Cross of Christ, is anything but sentiment. It is a true story of Love, which led Him to die for us. It is sacrifice, not intensity, that is the touchstone of authentic love.
Digital media cannot convey such love. Thus, many young people cannot cope with frustration, for example. And we find the proliferation of addictions, the rise in suicide among young people, the emotional emptiness that pornography causes in many young hearts, the irrational logic of euthanasia…
Feelings alone will not gain us a comprehensive understanding of the Faith.
For Benedict XVI, the greatest freedom of the human being consists in the capacity to make definitive decisions. But few definitive decisions can be made on a foundation as unstable as feelings. One need only think, in the case of marriage, of the fear of commitment or the ease of breaking ties that dominates so many young people.
St. Josemaría clarifies: “What is the secret of perseverance? Love. Fall in love, and you will not leave Him.”
And Blessed Álvaro del Portillo declares that it can also be read the other way around: “Do not leave Him, and you will fall in love.”
Quotes from Doctrinal Note ‘Cor ad Cor Loquitur.’ Excerpts from Antonio Schlatter Navarro.