JULY 27, 2003, 17^TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME—CHAPTER 

As a part of his mission Jesus was assigned the burden of revealing the true dispositions of the human hearts of those to whom he was sent. The prophecy of Simeon delivered at the time of our Lord’s presentation in the temple, declared this to be a result of his presence among his people.

Such a revelation proved to be more than most could endure. We know what it cost our Lord in terms of rejection, suffering and death. Jesus endured precisely the same kind of fate, only with much greater consequences in every way, that Jeremiah had known in the course of his own prophetic witness. Knowledge of the human heart, then, has proved to be a difficult and even dangerous acquisition. Self-knowledge is experienced more as a threat than as an opportunity for liberation by many, to judge from the example of these two persons sent by God, one a holy prophet the other the Son of God himself. Jeremiah attempted to turn the attention of the people from the externals of temple worship to the inner dispositions of the heart. He sought to point out that exterior acts without proper adherence to the divine purpose of interior obedience to the word of God were not acceptable to the Lord, the Glory of Israel. Because the people lacked insight into the meaning of their disobedient behavior, Jeremiah urged them to turn to God who assured them saying: “I will give you shepherds after my own heart and these shall feed you on knowledge and discretion.” The kind of knowledge that is understanding of God’s will and the discretion that discriminates the ways of justice and holiness from the seductions of error.   

Jesus gave fuller and more urgent expression to the primacy of interior dispositions and so of the necessity of that self-knowledge and discretion which recognizes one’s sinfulness and accepts responsibility for purifying the heart. Far from pleasing God, the observances of religion performed without sincere inner intent were unacceptable to his heavenly Father. The kind of formation our Lord sought to give was a worship “in Spirit and in truth.” This truth was embodied in his person, his teaching, his example. Some were charmed and persuaded by this teaching; the majority, however, found it altogether too much and rejected it and him with his doctrine. Man cannot endure too much truth, T.S. Eliott was to say many centuries later, with abundance of evidence to sustain his argument. Certainly, the truth that Jesus taught about the human heart, alienated from God and so at cross purposes with itself, met with a violent resistance that did not hesitate to kill the messenger. What has been acclaimed as the Good News by generations of believers, was at that time, and is still today, rejected as a threat or simply ignored by large numbers of persons.  

To receive the Gospel message the hearer must begin with an acknowledgment that he is a sinner and needs the mercy and grace of God. This admission is a beginning of self- knowledge in light of the saving truth of revelation. This is the minimum measure of self- knowledge and the first stage in a life long endeavor to appropriate the spiritual light that purifies the heart and unites us with God. We never arrive at a stage in this life when we can presume we have acquired sufficient understanding of our self in light of our destiny as sons of God. Even writing to a saintly Pope, Eugene III, St. Bernard considered  it not superfluous to admonished him to attend to this necessity. “Begin by considering yourself, lest you seek other things in vain for having neglected yourself.”(De consideratione II.3.6) St. Bonaventure cites this passage at the beginning of his Soliloquy. He adds in his own words similar advice: “O soul, hold to the counsel of the saints: direct the beam of contemplation first upon the land of the East, that is, upon your own condition. Consider with care how generously you were formed in your nature by your Maker.” (Introduction I.1.22 “The Works of St. Bonaventure” , III p. 42)  

There is no difficulty in finding other eminent doctors of the Church and saints who    profer the same teaching and underline its essential contribution to the work of purification and of contemplation. The kind of self-knowledge to be acquired is various. St. Ambrose, also cited by Bonaventure, emphasizes the positive role of this kind of understanding: “Know how great you are; consider attentively what comes into your mind through reflection, and what goes out of it through speech.” (Hexaemeron VI. 8.50). This is a noteworthy orientation that was to become an essential feature of Catholic spirituality. Pope Leo the Great gave it prominence in a phrase that invites all the people of God to look within to discern in their soul the natural foundation of their hope: “O Christian, recognize your dignity!” When Pope Gregory the great commented on the Canticle he underscored this doctrine and insisted that such knowledge of the interior man is the chief science to master for those who would progress in their life with God.

Bernard of Clairvaux built his spiritual edifice on this foundation. He also had a keen awareness, however, of the loss of the original likeness to God through sin. Knowledge of self as he conceived it, was nothing if not aware of the human predicament resulting from the consequent alienation and unlikeness. We are called to nobility and greatness by the endowments of nature, freedom and choice, yet we are wounded and weakened by failure to obey our Maker. These are the two aspects of our condition that reveal themselves to us when we enter upon the way of return to the original likeness. He states his convictions on this matter in a strongly worded sermon to his monks in chapter that treats of the paths that lead to the way of confession which in turn terminates in Paradise. He makes his case in the following terms.

Enter by the narrow gate, since the road that leads to perdition is wide and spacious, and many take it; rather, it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7: 13, 14) 

For the contemplative life this understanding of the interior man in all its breadth and depth is particularly pertinent. Of course, there are innumerable kinds of knowledge involved in human experience that enter into the formation of the human personality. For a majority of people emotionally charged experiences are dominant at first and need to be confronted. After a more or less prolonged period following upon the way of conversion other kinds of problems make their appearance such as lack of social skills or defective ability to reason, or to analyze the causes of inner conflicts with a view to eliminating them. The approaches to gaining this knowledge are various as well. St. Bernard was keenly aware of this fact and pointed it out to his monks. “Many and diverse are the paths that one can take to find this way, difficult it is to hold to them, too complicated to count them” (De div. 40.3). So diverse, as Bernard discovered as he gained more familiarity with the inner ways of the heart, that he never managed to formulate a single doctrine on this question. While his various treatments of the image and likeness in man are complementary rather than contradictory yet he has more than one schema for presenting this doctrine and so more than one way of approaching knowledge of self (cf. Casey, 138). 

However, these paths are rendered more negotiable by the light thrown on them by meditation and study of the Scriptures and the Fathers. After having traveled a considerable distance along these by-ways, more distant horizons appear as the voyager catches glimpses of the divinity shining through the person of the Son made flesh. Only in the reflection of the divine glory can man become aware of the hidden mystery of his own person. Since human dignity derives from being created according to the image of God, the lineaments of his own nature appear only to the extent that a man discerns the original prototype. The clearer our perception of the glorified Son of God the more distinct will be our consciousness of what we are destined to be. Thus contemplative prayer is accompanied by an increment of self-knowledge at a deeper level, by way of revealing something of the Creator in whose image man is created.  

Any one who undertakes to enter his heart has to be willing to confront there passion, disordered dispositions and tendencies that stir feelings of anxiety, guilt, shame, fear along with aberrant ideas and disturbing images, all of which serve as obstacles to purifying the heart. However, as our holy Fathers have shown in their own lives, God is greater than the heart, and he calls us to holiness and even union with him in his son, Our Lord Jesus. He calls us because he loves us. The Lord Jesus answered Jeremiah’s question: Who can pierce the heart’s secrets? God who is love; who became man that human warmth might open the heart of man and reveal its secret in the clear knowledge of its Maker. As this realization of his merciful love grows in us we shall find within our own soul the strength and confidence we need to follow through the paths of the heart that lead to that knowledge of self that reveals to us the way that bring us to eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.