Listen to Your Heart

A nurse, teaching our class of military medics how the human heart sounds, said something like this, “You’ve heard your heartbeat inside your ear, as you’re falling asleep, lying on your side.” Until that point I’m not certain I had heard my heartbeat in that fashion. Since then, that bit of information has caused mean awful lot of tossing and turning.

A student once asked, in writing, that I evaluate his required ‘ten page, double-spaced, typewritten paper,’ which he’d penned in three paragraphs on the single sheet he’d turned in that I, “Grade this with your (my) heart, not your (my) head. I penned in return, “My heart is moved. My head is unconvinced. F!”

Both the nurse and the student were on to something. There can be an amazing hypnotic effect on the mind’s voice when we focus on the steady lub-dub rhythm of our heart’s present, future leaning movement. There can be insightful perceptions, beyond the mere mental, when we focus on the heart’s lilting melody; hearing hymnody to the tempo beating, “Now, now, now, still now, now, now…”

Tuning into the heart’s voice requires stilling, not disconnecting, the mind. Becoming attuned to our heart’s poetic knowing requires both stilling and practice. We practice ways to grow quiet. We rehearse ways to absorb and to relish new awareness of our self, as self – a knowing self, a known self, a loving self, a loved self.

When ipods and cell phones, MySpace and YouTube give way to more subtle, interior intrusions real knowing can well up. From such knowing true prayer can arise:
• 5"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you;…(Jeremiah 1)

• 9Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother's breast. 10On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God. (Psalm 22)

• 13For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. 14I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. 15My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 16Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. (Psalm 139).

Of such prayer conversion (turning away from X and turning toward Y) beckons: Be still, and know that I am God! (Psalm 46)

When we know that God is God we also know that we are not God. There is relief in knowing that we are cared for. There is resilience in trusting that we are lifted up and carried over – in slumber, in labor, in fretting, and in freedom. Now, now, and now, still now.