A reflection on the daily readings, for Thursday of the First Week in Ordinary Time, by Father Perry.
According to several sources, the heart is said to beat approximately 100,000 times a day and about 35 million times in a year.
During an average lifetime, the heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times.
And, in answer to this trick question: “Is the heart a muscle or an organ?” The answer is that it is actually a “muscular organ.”
Well, what might happen if the heart began to harden like a rock or a piece of steel?
Could it continue to beat or pump the blood? As a muscle or muscular organ, wouldn’t it become somewhat or completely petrified?
And so, warn the scriptures in both Hebrews and Psalm 95: “Harden not your hearts!”
It is a real concern! It is a real possibility!
It is, and should remain so always, a real fear!
And to be sure, one should not blame this on God — as if God causes it or makes it happen.
And if God seems angry, could it not be that it is a logical anger or wrath that, because of our embrace not of God but of sin, that his hardening of their hearts results in this “forsaking of God” — ultimately losing contact and relationship with our God and that life that God always wants “pumping away in our hearts”?
Hebrews pushes the point by admitting that hearts can become hardened by the “deceit of sin,” and we can lose our “partnership with Christ.”
And so the psalm keeps gently, but also pulsating, calling us back: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”
And that, dear friends, is the million dollar question: Do we hear his voice?
God is always speaking words of Love and Promise and Hope and Inviting us to draw close, to remain close, to remain in him and he in us.
God whispers and God thunders and God calls and God delivers!
It is our job to keep our hearts open and listening and receptive and desirous and responsive.
This is a daily thing.
After all, the heart beats approximately 100,000 times a day. Now that is true listening — 100,000 times a day in all things — always!
+ And the Gospel verse reminds us today that Jesus came to do the work of God in the preaching of God’s Kingdom: “Jesus preached the Gospel of the Kingdom and cured every disease among the people.”
And there is hope, it would seem, that Jesus might even be able to cure “hardness or hardening of the heart.”
That is, if we were and are and want to listen — and listen with all of our hearts.
Since the heart does beat on its own without our thinking about it or even giving permission; it just does it.
Perhaps, in a manner of speaking, our listening has to be just as automatic and constant and done, almost without thinking about it.
And yet it would also seem that partnership with Christ is and always should be very intentional, very mindful and desired with all of our minds, all of our hearts, all of our being, so as to keep that spiritual muscular organ strong and supple and open and functioning, and producing a lively and wonderful life within us and for us and through us and always!
Father Perry D. Leiker is the 13th pastor of St. Bernard Catholic Church. Reach him at (323) 255-6142. Email Father Perry at pleiker@stbernard-church.com. Follow Father Perry on Twitter: @MrDeano76.
