Grace Notes: Guarding the heart

By SISTER ANNE MARIE WALSH, SOLT
Columnist 
 
The world of today seems to idolize the idea of love at a more or less superficial level, often amounting to nothing more than sentimentality and glorified sin. But in the tradition of the church, the language of the heart is profoundly theological and anthropological at the same time.  

The “heart” speaks to the deepest core of the person, the place where we think, choose, desire, remember and love.  It is the place where the state of our relationship with God is revealed. Sins of the heart, therefore, are more about interior thoughts, desires, intentions and attitudes that turn us away from God, even if we have not acted on those desires, etc., yet.
 
The Catechism defines sin as “an offense against God” that “sets itself against God’s love for us and turns our hearts away from it.” This is the key: sin is not first the breaking of a rule; it is a distortion of love, a refusal of communion with the God who loves us.
From that perspective, “sins of the heart” are the root of every sin. To speak about sins of the heart is to invite people to look beneath behavior and into the inner movements where our real relationship with God is decided day by day.
 
Our modern understanding of the heart tends to associate it with mere feelings.  The Bible, as we indicated, sees it as the “seat of understanding, memory, freedom and love." Israel is told to “lay these words upon your heart.” Mary “ponders” in her heart. The Lord promises to write his law upon our hearts. To “harden” the heart is to resist God in the core of one’s person; to have a “new heart” is to receive a renewed capacity for obedience and love.
 
When Jesus teaches about sin, it is a teaching that speaks to these interior realities.  He points to what lives within us, to the inner movements of heart, soul, spirit, where our relationship with God is constantly being decided. He wants us to look beneath behavior to what moves us because what ends up defiling us comes from within.  

“From within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” (Mk 7:21-23) 
His concern is not first with what appears on the surface, but with what the heart clings to and wills. When he speaks of looking at another “with lust,” He explicitly calls this a committing of adultery “in the heart.”
 
A clear example of a sin of the heart recognized as such is the story of a widow I met, who shared that she was a nurse who had married a good man she loved deeply.  They raised a family together, and she affirmed that he was a very good husband and father, and that she really loved him.  

But she found it hard to forgive herself because, despite this, she became “involved” with another man, the doctor she worked for.  She admitted that her work necessitated spending a lot of time together, and in the course of that, she found herself admiring this doctor more and more, until she began to recognize that her heart was no longer with her husband but with this doctor.  

At this point, she clarified that they had never been physically intimate with each other.  But she felt great guilt because she knew nonetheless, she had been unfaithful to her husband.  Her heart was no longer with him.  She had gone to confession, but she knew she had to call her heart back.  

Her conscience was sharp enough to understand that her problem lay in her heart, drawn away from the great gift of her marriage and family to something emotionally compelling but with the potential to destroy their lives. Contrary to the modern mindset, which insists we follow our heart, it is clear the heart is often not something we should follow without strict discernment and rational judgment.  

Years ago (1965), when the movie Dr. Zhivago first came out, it was touted as a great love story by one of Russia's great novelists, Boris Pasternak.  He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner for literature, probably sparked in part by the fact that his work was banned in his native country.  

The movie became one of the highest-grossing films of all time.  And yet the most honest assessment of the story came from one of our older priests, whose observation about the story was that it was glorified adultery.  Never mind it being a story of the heart. It was glorified adultery.
 
From this perspective, sins of the heart are not “just thoughts” in a harmless, passing sense. They are those interior movements to which we give real consent: the thoughts we nurture, the resentments we feed, the fantasies we deliberately entertain, the attitudes we choose to keep. Each of these already reveals a disposition of the heart toward or against God. And in the end it is the heart that God is interested in.  

Wouldn’t we thrill to hear the words spoken of David, by the Lord applied to us: “Here is a man/woman, after my own heart!”  May Our Lady bring our hearts into hers and obtain for us this grace!

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