Again the Isaiah (58:9-14) and Lucan 5:27-32) readings present invitations to look within your heart. Isaiah puts forth numerous ways to evaluate how to live a life that will bring "happiness in the Lord." The Luke verses give context to Jesus' mission: "calling ... sinners to repentence." Both challenge you to look at preparations for a journey, the journey of Lent.
As Fr. Nouwen (in Spiritual Direction) stresses, any journey of the spiriutal life will have value if it is based upon the traveler's efforts to bring genuine discipline to the heart. The earliest practices used to come to a deeper knowledge of one's self were built upon "introspection and and contemplative prayer." This was a sure way to build a strong relationship with God.
Simply stated: through an almost daily effort to focus upon the Source of our being, who is at the very center of a person's being, is the practice of prayer, especially interior prayer. It is by looking at the map we use for the journey, that a person becomes aware of God's presence within.
Nouwen as well as many spiritual guides believe that the effort to discover God within us eventually will bring the seeker to recognize God present in the world around us. The discipline of the heart is precisely what the Isaiah reading offers for the journey through Lent. Once you make it your work to discipline the movements of your heart you will realize that this kind of discipline will teach that "prayer is not only listening 'to' but 'with' the heart." The important word to consider during these early days of Lent and then later on as you draw closer to Holy Week is listening. Untold treasure will come when you use your heart to pray rather than always relying on devotional prayers. A "listening" style of prayer brings you into the presence of God with all the luggage you bring with you on any journey --- all that makes you who you are, all that make you what you are. Bringing to mind a clear picture of all your "alls" and opening your heart to them you are are making yourself ready to listen to God's voice as he speaks to your heart.
Don't forget this: your heart is more than an organ in your body. It is that "secret place," as Nouwen calls it, where you can pull together an understanding of the person God made you to be. This looking at the map for our journey can be bother frightening and a challenge. Few are we humans who are are not weak. Who enjoys or prides oneself knowing the mistakes, failures or sins in living the gospel that mark our lives? Just consider how you make your confession.
Do you carefully select words to "dress up" what has been sinful because it is embarrassing before God a priest or a friend to say what has happened? How human it is to want to hide from God and certainly others the sins of our past. When we let this modus operandi (way of being or acting) dictate our prayer, our listening to and with our hearts, we are in need of a genuine discipline for our hearts.
This is why anyone seriously wanting to make a spiritual journey that makes life more than ordinary needs the help of another, a spiritual director, a confessor or a true friend. It is this kind of guide who can help make conversation with God not a chore but a daily experiene we long to have as soon as we awake each day.
Another Nouwen "saying":
What is most intimate is also what frightens us most .... The mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus desires to meet us in the seclusion of our own hearts, to make his love known to us there, to free us from our fears and to make our own deepest self known to us. (99 Sayings, page 7)
