About the Heart by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

The following letter was received by Brother David, in response to his invitation to readers to correspond with him in the 1970s through Integral Yoga magazine.

Dear Brother David,

I’d like to bring up a question that has been on my mind for some time. It has to do with what we call the heart. The heart is a great symbol in spiritual life and in Christianity especially. But the fact is that I don’t know what the heart is. When people talk about the heart they seem to do so in a number of ways. In a general sense, it seems to refer to the feelings; at other times, to love and devotion. It also refers to courage and faithfulness (as when a fighter is said to have heart). And sometimes it refers to one’s basic attitude toward life (as when we say, he had a change of heart).

Probably there are other meanings, and probably they are all interrelated. But with some of them, I feel left out. I tend to think of the heart in terms of courage, and faith in terms of faithfulness. I don’t find in myself those emotions and feelings, especially love and devotion, which seem so intimately associated both with the heart and religion. So the question comes down to this: What is the heart? And do I need to develop that, or should I leave it alone, and follow my own path (centered more on intellect and will)? And if I should need that, how in practice do I develop the heart?

Brother David responds:

There are questions which ought to be answered with a strong voice, but the question you have asked me today should be answered in a whisper. If we speak at all about the heart, we must speak softly and sparingly. And yet, this is not a topic we could simply leave alone. Concern for the heart means concern for the sacred secret of our innermost being. Your question zeros in on the crucial task of our spiritual life, on our “need to develop the heart,” as you call it. “With utmost concern take care of your heart,” says the Bible (Proverbs 4:23), and this is simply the biblical expression for what we call spiritual practice.

Since most of us in the West have roots in the biblical tradition, intellectual honesty demands that we try to understand at least its key concepts, and “heart” is certainly one of them. We have a right, moreover, to search for the authentic meaning of these key concepts. As we set out on this search we make two surprising discoveries: For one thing, spiritual practice really exists in biblical tradition (there is more to it than Sunday school, Hebrew camp, or catechism classes would have ever made us suspect); and while the biblical approach is distinctly different, the practical goal is far more similar to that of other paths than doctrinal differences might have let us to believe. Both discoveries hinge in a special way on the key word “heart.”

Your question, “What is the heart?” provides a fine starting point. Surely the heart isn’t merely a symbol for our emotional life. Using a colloquial expression, we might say of an overemotional fellow that he has “the heart of a whale, but the brain of a mosquito.” Well, that’s not the way the Bible uses the term. In biblical language, “heart” means our whole being, not one or another part of it; rather the center, the source, the taproot of our being. With St. Augustine we could say, “Give me a lover, and s/he will know what I mean!” When you say to someone, “I will give you my heart,” you do not mean part of yourself, not even the best part. You mean your whole being.

We cannot even say that the bodily heart becomes here a symbol for a purely spiritual concept. “Heart” stands for an insight which is conceived before we ever begin to think conceptually. It stands for the fact that I can gather myself together and give myself away in that give-and-take which we call life. And, since I not only have a body but am some-body, this ingathering and outpouring finds expression in my pulsating heart. Located at the center of my body, at the intersection of its horizontal and its vertical axes, halfway between sex organs and brain, my heart constantly takes in and sends out the blood which keeps my body alive. As long as the heart is alive, it constantly sends forth and takes in.

Out-pouring and ingathering, journey and home, are inseparably united in its dynamic reality. We can learn to understand some of the mystery of the heart – our own mystery – by looking at the image of home and journey. Only with reference to a home is our journey truly a journey: otherwise we would merely be drifting. “Home is where we start from,” says T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets . Yet, quoting from the same poem,

“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

“We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

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