Making Room for God: Living Out the Blessing Over the Heart

Born to Recognise | Week 4 –  The Blessing Over the Heart

What is the difference between a busy car park and your heart?

Spend a minute with that question before you dismiss it.

Pick your moment: the week before Christmas, a long bank holiday weekend, the first hot Saturday of summer. A shopping mall car park is a particular kind of purgatory. Every slot fills the moment it empties. Engines idle. Horns sound. Someone signals hopefully at a reversing car, and before the space has fully opened, three other cars have already nosed in from the other direction. There is no vacancy. There is only the churn of wanting.

Your heart is not so different.

The Greatest Lie of the Spiritual Life

The greatest lie of the spiritual life –  quiet, respectable, devastating –  is the belief in the empty slot. We locate a vice, a habit, a thought we’re ashamed of, and we go to war with it. Grit our teeth. White-knuckle through a Tuesday. And sometimes, in a certain kind of grace, we win. The thing we were fighting empties out.

And then we wait, blinking, for holiness to settle in.

It doesn’t work like that. It has never worked like that.

Because the queue outside your heart is long and colourful and loud, and it does not stop moving just because you won a battle. Eradicate one craving and another idles forward. Stop the mindless scrolling and something else is already nosing into the gap –  anxiety, perhaps, or boredom wearing anxiety’s coat, or the low-grade hum of self-congratulation at how well you’ve been doing. The slots do not stay empty. The heart does not know how to be empty. It is not built that way.

This is not a flaw. This is the lev –  the Hebrew heart, which your Bible translators had to add a whole extra word to carry across into Greek. When the Shema says love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, the Greek-speaking world needed a fourth term: mind. Because the Hebrew heart already held what we separate into mind and heart –  the whole interior self, oriented, curious, leaning always toward something. Always already in motion.

You cannot empty it. You were not made to.

When Spiritual Striving Becomes Pride in Disguise

Here is where our well-meaning spiritual striving quietly betrays us –  because so much of what we call preparation for God is, if we’re honest, pride in a better outfit.

We want to meet God with the acceptable version of ourselves. So we hide whole storerooms behind our most composed expression. We multiply our practices –  rosary, lectio, holy hour, novena –  and tick each one off with the quiet satisfaction of a good student, never quite entering any of them, just completing them. Moving from one to the next, exactly like the queue. Honk. Honk. We try to rush grace with our efforts, to earn the encounter through the sheer volume of our devotion. And we miss, entirely, the person who only ever wanted to sit with us in the mess of the house, share a coffee that went cold while we were talking, and laugh.

Emmanuel. God-with-us. Not: God-to-be-shown-only-the-presentable-rooms.

Dwelling With God: Learning to Waste Time

So this week, we are not going to add a practice. We are going to do something more difficult: we are going to learn to waste time with God.

The phrase belongs to the tradition –  Archbishop Fénelon carried it, and the Jesuits after him –  and it is more subversive than it sounds. Wasting time means producing nothing. It means letting the hour end with no artifact, no achievement, no sense of spiritual progress. It means consenting to be with Someone rather than performing for them.

The practice is simple, and it asks you to go backwards –  toward childhood, toward the self that did things for no reason except that they were wonderful. Choose something. Hold it for fifteen to thirty minutes. Begin only by saying: Jesus, I invite you to ______ with me. And then do it. Actually do it –  badly, uselessly, with no product at the end.

You could put on music and simply turn in it. You could doodle without drawing anything in particular, following your hand rather than directing it. You could open a colouring book and give everything impossible colours, and maybe ask Jesus which shade of blue the ocean should be on a day when things are going wrong. You could invent a language with your own grammar and speak it with no one. You could collect a few small beautiful things –  a stone, a seed, a torn corner of something that caught your eye –  and arrange them under glass, just because the arrangement pleases you, and imagine someone finding it long after you’re gone, not knowing what it meant, only knowing it was made with care.

None of this will feel holy. That is precisely the point.

Christ Dwelling in Your Heart by Faith

The blessing says: Receive the sign of the cross over your heart, that Christ may dwell there by faith. Not: that Christ may visit the prepared chamber. Not: that Christ may approve the renovation. Dwell. As in: move in. As in: bring his things. As in: this is his house now –  the whole house, the rooms you keep locked included.

You make room for God not by performing a perfect emptiness –  you can’t, the queue won’t allow it –  but by simply turning toward him in the middle of your ordinary life and saying: here. Come in here. I’m not ready. Come in anyway.