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Our hearts should be icons of God's love

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By Mary Regina Morrell

"Only with the heart can one see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye." Antoine de Sainte-Exupery

Several years ago, a very dear friend suggested that I attempt to write an icon. Being from a Syrian (not to forget Irish!) family, where worship was filled with icons of astonishing beauty, I laughed.

I create with words, not paint. I could barely imagine the results of any such effort, though I did spend a few years trying my hand at sketching and oil painting when I was younger. Not to be daunted, he reminded me that icons are inspired, and left it at that.

True to God's inimitable style, here I am, sitting at my desk with a pencil sketch of the icon I hope, someday, to finish.

The sketch is of Mary Magdalene, standing in front of the open tomb, her right arm raised above her waist. In her open hand she holds a human heart.

During the course of my life, the image of heart has come to have great significance, within both a personal and spiritual dimension, and I am encouraged to know that I am not alone in embracing the heart as the road to God. One of my favorite writers, Thomas Merton, wrote often of the need to have a "heart that knows God." He was well aware, as are our Jewish brothers and sisters, that "the heart is the faculty by which man knows God" (Thomas Merton in Alaska).

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The Hebrew Scriptures are full of references to the heart and, Jeremiah, in particular, was clear when he relayed the words of God: "I will give them a heart to understand that I am Yahweh, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, when they return to me with all their heart." (24:7)

God is waiting for His people to cry, as the psalmist does, "Create in me a clean heart." This is deeply significant because in the Hebrew tradition the heart is not simply the spring of emotion but the seat of the intellect, the will and our ability to love. So when Scripture references the "heart" the writers meant something much more profound than "heart" as we understand it in our culture.

For the Jewish people, to have God create a clean heart would mean for God to transform their entire way of thinking and strengthen the clarity of their understanding, they would be asking God to reign-in their willfulness so that God's will would rule their lives, and they would be praying for a heart that loves as God loves.

A prayer for a clean heart, then, is a prayer of complete surrender -- because we must surrender, not only our heart to God, but our mind and will as well.

In my humble icon, the heart that Mary holds up in a gesture of surrender is one that has been transformed by the love of Christ and that she willingly returns to God in love.

But that heart is not hers, or mine, alone, but ours, the collective heart for which Christ lived, suffered and died.

Such love deserves no less than our hearts - whole, unencumbered and freely given.

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Mary Morrell is the author of Angels in High Top Sneakers, from Loyola Press, and is a syndicated columnist appearing in several Catholic newspapers.