Following the heart.....
What does that mean from a Catholic perspective?
The heart is the temple where God dwells. While the written word, ritual, and traditions can help dispose our heart to receive God, they are not the source of our holiness. The source of holiness is God Himself. God likes to make use of creation to communicate Himself to us; He made everything for the purpose of revealing Himself. Catholics know that it pleases God to make use of water, bread, and wine, to impart His divinity to us. Nevertheless, at root, the principle of our sanctification is God Himself: the gift of Himself to us in our hearts.
The most astonishing truth, worth celebrating every moment of the day and on into eternity, is that God wants to dwell in our hearts. His presence to us could not be more immediate. In such a case, there is no intermediary between Him and us. He is as close to us as our heartbeat.
The experience of God in our hearts comes in many forms. One is the intuition that our life is somehow not our own. We are aware of rights and wrongs. We sense that our life has purpose and that we are meant for something greater than ourselves. We perceive a kind of destiny shaping our life. We sense a greater purpose underlying the things we love, and our relationships.
This intuition is the quiet presence of God in our hearts. He is always there, gently guiding and shaping our choices. We sense that we should turn right or left. We feel drawn to make this or that change. Something makes us feel pain or confusion; this is like an alert from God that we need healing or to make a change.
Although this is a deep mystery, our faith reveals to us that the heart is dead to God in sin from the moment of conception. Our hearts are only healed from sin, one grace at a time. These graces gently nudge us or our caretakers towards the water of baptism, where the seeds of the Holy Trinity are planted in our hearts as a permeant indwelling. These seeds of grace--God's life in us--grow and blossom as we nurture them and grow in virtue. This growth is often painful, as it involves forsaking our sinful habits and reorienting our lives around completely different values. The spiritual battle humbles us, and helps us understand the truth that only God is all good. We can not love ourselves or others in a Godly way unless God capacitates us to do so.
As we persevere in spiritual battle, our heart becomes more and more receptive to God and His holiness. The presence of the Holy Trinity in our hearts grows stronger. It becomes easier to do the good we want to do. With practice, we learn to recognize the voice of God with ever increasing sensitivity. It becomes easier to make choices that please God. We feel more deeply united with God in every aspect of our lives.
Only God knows our destiny. Only He knows how to get us there. Our heart is the privileged place where God speaks to us and reveals our destiny to us, one baby step at a time.
Our ability to discern God's voice starts out very limited, and only grows with grace and time. When we first try, our perception of God's will be imperfect. We are born sinners, after all. However, discernment improves with practice; practice is the only way discernment improves. God summons us to to act on the graces we do have, long before we are fully formed in grace. Ultimately, this is an exercise in trust and surrender. We have to be willing to fail. We must be wiling to venture out into the unknowns God calls us to, completely trusting in Him to care for us.
At first, it will be easier to stay within the guidelines we have inherited from society or our parents, etc. These sources may present us with a formula for life that likely "works," but it may fall short of the unique path God has planned for us. While we should treasure every good thing we inherit from our parents and mentors, there must come a time when we speak to God one-one-one, for ourselves, and not through the prism of inherited structures. Again, to do so, we must be willing to take risks and walk away from what is familiar and comfortable.
This is the Catholic understanding of what it means to "follow the heart."
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