Purifying the Heart
Friday, August 22, 2025
Blessed are the pure of heart; for they shall see God. —Matthew 5:8
Cynthia Bourgeault explains how understanding the ancient meaning of the word passion can help us gain emotional equilibrium:
The tradition from about the 4th century on has been unanimous with what gets in the way of becoming pure of heart. I will quote directly from the Philokalia: “The problem with the passions is that they divide the heart.” The passions are the culprit that sucks the heart out of its capacity to see with equanimity and clarity, with luminosity and radiance, and makes it the slave of your personal drama.
Nowadays, we think of passion as a good thing, as authenticity, and joie de vivre, the energy of our being coming through. Passion is the capacity to relate to life and get some juice out of it. We keep running this map: that if you can only find what you’re passionate about, you’ll become authentic. I’m not going to say that meaning is wrong, but I will say that that meaning is modern. In ancient texts it has a different meaning: “Passio” is the first-person singular passive of the word which means “I suffer. I am acted upon.” What passion always refers to in the ancient texts is this peculiar, compulsive nature of stuck emotion. The passions are really stuck emotions, revolving around themselves to generate drama.
There’s a great teaching from the 4th-century spiritual teacher, Evagrius, the first real spiritual psychologist of the Christian West. He did an interesting analysis of how when you’re in a deep field of gathered stillness something will rise up as a thought and quickly become a thought chain. At first it doesn’t have any energy in it but as soon as it hooks onto a sense of myself, as soon as it becomes an “I-story,” it becomes a passion. It’s usually at this point, if you’re not terribly self-aware, that it comes to the surface in the form of rage, anger, hurt or fear, or all of those.
Once it becomes a passion and it’s stuck to your story, it can do nothing else but churn up more emotion, which then goes down into your physical body and steals your energy of being. Evagrius’ advice is that you have to learn to nip the thought in the bud before it becomes a passion. It’s a kind of wonderful combination of what we might call witnessing presence or practice, developing the capacity to see, combined with kenosis, the willingness to let go of the satisfaction you get from your drama. That is what clears the radar screen.
The core practice for cleansing and restoring the heart to its organ of spiritual seeing, becomes supremely, in Christianity, the path of kenosis, of letting go. The seeing will come, but the real heart of working with emotion is the willingness to let go, to sacrifice your personal drama, letting go at that level, so that you can begin to see with a pure heart.
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John Chaffee 5 on Friday August 22, 2025
1.
“Love that does not know of suffering is not worthy of the name.”
– Clare of Assisi, Italian Saint
Years ago, I was out to lunch with a high school student who had to write a paper on a topic of their choosing. They chose suffering.
Seeing as I was their youth pastor at the time, and had recently finished my Master’s of Divinity, I had the honor of being one of the people interviewed for their paper.
Halfway through our lunch, I said, “I do not believe it is possible to love someone if you are not willing to suffer with or for them.” It flowed out of me at that time, but I completely believe it was the result of my recent reading on the lives of St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi.
To love others is no easy task. Not in the slightest. Especially if it is to the point of being willing to suffer.
2.
“Come, let us give a little time to folly… and even in a melancholy day let us find time for an hour of pleasure.”
– Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Doctor of the Church
Bonaventure is one of my favorite theologians. He was a professor of theology at the University of Paris as a contemporary of St. Thomas Aquinas.
What is so lovely about this quote is how it validates levity and humor. The spiritual life is not supposed to be one of somber faces and boring ways of being. As the French say, “L’amour de Dieu est folie”/”The love of God is folly/foolishness.” The willingness to be a fool, an idiot, the laughingstock of others is proof of a particular type of humility that can only be found by resting in the infinite and intimate love of God for each and all.
3.
“Through a tree we became debtors to God; so through a tree we have our debt cancelled.”
– Irenaeus of Lyons, Early Church Father
Irenaeus was a student of Polycarp, who was a student of the Apostle John, who was a student of Jesus of Nazareth.
I say that to infer that we can trust his theological pedigree.
In the Garden of Eden, humanity became debtors to God. Not in the sense that we stole money, but in that there was an offense that needed to be rectified. In the Garden of Eden, humanity took the forbidden fruit from a tree, and then many years later, the Son of Man was hung like rotten fruit on a twisted tree outside of Jerusalem.
Here is the brilliance of Christianity: Humanity did not offer something to appease God; God sacrificed himself to prove to humanity that God is infinite, outpouring, co-suffering love (Thank you, Brad Jersak).
4.
“Keep in mind God’s precept that states, ‘Judge not, and you will not be judged’ (Lk. 6:37), and in no way meddle in the lives of others.”
– Symeon the New Theologian, 10th Century Monk
I struggle with this one.
I struggle with this because I can be a judgmental son of a gun.
There is one side of my personality that wants to say some people need to have their lives “meddled with” because the way their lives do violence to others. On a macro-scale, we could easily point to the Israel-Gaza conflict or the Russian occupation of Ukraine. On a micro-scale, we could point to abusers, thieves, and the like.
But perhaps all that is my roundabout way of justifying my own unhealthy need to judge others and tell them how to live their lives. Who knows? Rather than point my fingers at others, I should stop rationalizing things and reiterate that I am a judgmental son of a gun, and I do not want to give it up.
“Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” – Romans 7:24
5.
“The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.”
– Augustine of Hippo, Early Church Father
If you are immature, you will read the Bible in an immature way.
If you are mature, you will read the Bible in a mature way.
As someone who majored in Biblical Studies in college, and never slowed that personal study of the Scriptures since, I can say for myself that my understanding of the Scriptures has consistently blossomed. There were some readings of the Scriptures that I needed to let go of, allowing the Scriptures to breathe, grow, and teach me in new ways.
