Our Royal Part

Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, ...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The thirteen-century Middle English tale, Havelock the Dane, recounts a drama of misplaced children who descend from royal families. They find themselves living in evil circumstance, in Denmark and in England, but however lowly and mean their surroundings become, their royal character cannot be hid. In one case, Havelock, the rightful heir to the Danish throne, is spied in a dark room at night breathing in and out a divine flame as he sleeps. We might be sure that no physician then or now might determine the etiology of this flame, for it is of spiritual origin and has no material explanation. It is just there, out of the reach of scientific explanation.

The story is an allegory about ourselves living in the world. We, too, are royal heirs to a Heavenly kingdom, yet we live under evil circumstances. Manuy of us bathe each night in the death rays of television with its obvious agendas. We breathe the toxic air of popular culture. Before long, our royal characteristics and traits are apt to be obscured, even buried. And the royal flame that proceeds from one's mouth? It is not quenched, for that is our royal part, but neither is it noticed. And very often it is mislabeled and misunderstood. Yet, it is there, the bodily organ that is sovereign over all the others, set within us by royal Heaven: it is one's soul. Not only is it apt to be obscured and mislabeled, but more troubling still, we are not permitted to talk about it in the public square nor teach it in the public schools, where our children are formed. Nor will first-year medical students find this organ listed or described in Anatomy class.

Instead, medical students are taught that humans are determined by three components: our genetic inheritance; the environment that has shaped us, especially as children; and, finally, the random growth of cells. For all of that, mindful people will discover that the the decisive moments in human development and formation are when the soul has acted. Being an identical twin — having someone else's DNA, sharing the same parents, growing up in the same household, attending the same public schools, playing with the same friends, watching the same television programs side-by-side — perhaps this question presents itself differently to me than it does to others. I am highly conscious of the role that the soul has played in my life and in my brother's. It has played the master role in like proportion to its royal place within us. It is the master organ.

For thousands of years all men and women looked within themselves and knew this fact. How did we lose this self-awareness? When did we lose it? The Empiricism Revolution that began in the sixteen-century, which then morphed into the Scientific Revolution, started us down the road toward materialism, bringing us to the place where we are today. You see, if you could not measure it with a caliper nor weigh it on a scale, then the thing ceased to exist in the body of human knowledge. Indeed, empiricists would weigh dying men directly before and directly after the soul was said to take its flight from the lifeless corpse in order to "prove" (or disprove) its existence .... by establishing the soul's weight! May I ask a question this morning? Since we claim every day in the Creed that Jesus Christ is fully man and fully God, how much that does the God part of Jesus of Nazareth weigh? For that matter, how much does the Risen Christ weigh since we assert that God is spirit? We say that "Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth contain," and C.S. Lewis remarked that once something larger than the entire universe lay in the tiny confines of a manger; then, how much does the infinite vastness of God weigh? And we claim that something infinite has been set within each of us. How much does it weigh?

The ancients thought about these important questions much more than we do. But, of course, they did not have to face the iron commands of political correctness among their confreres. It was not a forbidden subject in the community led by Saint John and by the Mother of God. In our readings from that community this morning, we are taught that "God abides in us, by the Spirit He has given us." And where exactly does God dwell inside our mortal bodies? The word John uses is καρδι'α (kardia), from which we get our words cardiologist and kardiogram. Yes, according to St. John, God dwells in our hearts.

It is fascinating that scholars of first-century Greek language tell us that the word kardia is rarely found in any writings during this period .... outside of the New Testament. And we do not learn in the Hebrew Scriptures that God dwells inside us. Yes, the ancients believed that humans possessed an organ which was the seat of the emotions (of course they did!), and that was the liver. (In college I dated a girl who studied the Classics, and she told me in a valentine that she loved me from the bottom of her σπλαγχνον (splangchnon), her liver!) But the word kardia? That word was virtually unknown. It is as if the revolution of Christ and then of the Holy Spirit put this word on the map, and it is widely used in the New Testament. And in the those usages it means

The seat of the spiritual life.

The center and source of the whole inner life.

The organ of spiritual enlightenment.

The dwelling place of heavenly powers and being.

You understand that the anatomical precision is not important here. It is not so much a matter of where but of what. What is of towering importance is that within us is a Heavenly organ. It cannot be weighed or measured nor can its pulse be taken (though many living the spiritual life might wish that taking a spiritual pulse were possible!). It is only important that we understand this: it does not have to do with the brain, whose activity can be studied and measured; it does not have to do with human reasoning nor the disciplines of the sciences. As Blaise Pascal put it so succinctly, "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."

Perhaps more important, the soul has nothing to do with our feelings or our emotions. Our emotions do have an organic place in our brains, the amygdala, or limbic system, which is the seat of our feelings, of our animal urges, of sexual desires, and of our most instinctual level of being: "I want! I desire!" Our limbic system is a particularly earthbound part of us. In that sense the seat of our emotions is the furthest opposite you can get from the kardia, which we have come to call the soul. Indeed, the seat of our emotions and desires is highly compatible with what Saint John would call "the world" while our heart, our soul, our cardia is a Heavenly territory.

The soul is very different from our emotions. In fact, in functional terms, it stands between the brain's frontal lobe, the seat of human reason, and the limbic system, the brain's seat of animal desire. I think that is why we have such a hard time understanding spiritual life and why people stumble as they "freelance" (as it were) in the spiritual life, calling themselves "spiritual people" or "people of conscience." This latter term enjoys a certain level of cultural acceptance, even dignity.

One morning a Roman Catholic diocese where I once served woke up to read a full-page ad taken out in the local daily newspaper. It was signed by Roman Catholic laity who conceived of themselves as the leaders of the community — medical doctors, lawyers, judges, university faculty, and elected officials. The clarion call in this "open letter" was "a woman's right to choose," as they styled it. Its signatories said they stood on conscience. In fact, somewhere in the letter they said that they invoked their rights under Vatican II to oppose the Church on the grounds of conscience (rights, I hasten to add as a former Catholic university professor and a priest that are totally imaginary.) Nonetheless, I saw a valuable resource for my students, so I photocopied the open letter and then composed a brief digest of all Vatican II documents that used the word conscience. (I later reprinted this in a book I had written as part of my duties to train the permanent deacons of that diocese.)

The Pastoral Constitution of Vatican II, Guadium et spes, declares that

"In the depths of conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose ... but ... holds him to obedience" (16).

And in the conscience,

"Man ... shares in the light of the divine mind" (15).

As Pius XII put it, in the conscience we are "alone with God, Whose voice echoes in [the soul's] depths." The conscience, it turns out, is a Heavenly and eternal room inside of us where we can go though we ourselves are culture-bound and time-bound. As St. John assured us in our reading this morning, God is greater than our hearts. In this place, we hear God's voice. We go to meet God, to submit to His mind and will. The spirit of this is credo ut intelligo: "I believe through my faith in order that I might understand through my mind." Faith precededs understanding. The conscience is a law which humans have not imposed. Far from it! It is a law which holds humans to obedience. The conscience has nothing to do with our feelings, nor does it grant us a right to dissent from God, but the complete opposite!

How different this is from the willful and proud "conscience" invoked in the open letter. Conscience, in fact, is a place where we must put away our private agendas, tame our personal desires, turn our back on the iron commands of political correctness and culture. In this eternal room inside us, we are to listen for the very different and counter-cultural voice of God.

From here we can better understand our reading from Saint John's First Letter. The Holy Spirit by design dwells in our spiritual organ, which Saint John designates as our kardia. If we have poisoned our hearts, then the Holy Spirit cannot dwell there. The Holy Spirit will not dwell in a wilfull heart. How many times have we read in the Old Testament that God is affronted by the stone-heartedness of people! And by that fact we stand condemned, condemned by our own hearts! Our hearts condemn us because, through our willfulness — our untamed desires or our scheming minds or some concoction of both — we are cut off from God. Alternatively, if our spiritual organ has ruled our desires and our thoughts in to order to obey His commandments and to please Him, St. John writes, then we shall receive from God all that we pray for.

All of this may be repugnant to some people. For they have come to believe that emotions and perceived needs are the central question of their lives. In fact, this "religion of emotions" has become widespread. They will ask, "Isn't Heaven where my every emotional need will be met?" This question, though, worships a different god — the god of therapeutic wellness, self-help books, awareness groups, and culture. But it turns out that we do not impose the law of conscience and of soul ourselves. For our soul is not really ours. It is Heaven's.

In the First Great Commandment and in the Second, we are enjoined to enter into an overwhelming act and relationship of love: with all of our strength, all of our mind, all of our soul, and all of our heart. This is not an invitation to visit our liver with its constantly changing feelings. It is a command to go to the place within us, where God dwells, and to submit all our powers to our divine relationship with Him. And here we shall receive all that we ask or shall ever need.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.