By CHARLES R. AVILA – The Gardener of The Gardener’s Tales. Christmas 2024
Among certain Catholic circles, there is great devotion to the Heart of Jesus. Saint Arnold, for one, was a great Sacred Heart devotee. “May the Heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all,” was his constant prayer.
It is noted that this kind of talk (“heart”) tends to be regarded as so much non-scientific piety of the easily breakable plaster type. And why single out “heart” rather than “brain” or “hands” or whatever other bodily part for a regular devotion?
So, I thought it good to check out what the scientists say and look again at the latest Encyclical Letter of the present Pope, Francis.
When you look at the studies of scientists (led by Greg Braden), you’ll recognize that the heart is more than just a pump—an amazing one, for sure, that keeps blood moving throughout our lifetime. I said “amazing”: It beats an average of 101,000 times a day and circulates approximately 2,000 gallons of blood through 60,000 miles of arteries, capillaries, veins, and other blood vessels, day in and day out, nonstop, until it stops or is forced to. And how is it forced to?
A few years ago, my heart had been under attack, the lab and clinical diagnosticians said. Under stress and duress, our heart emits or coughs up a volume of protein that these moderns now call “Troponin.” The normal reference range for troponin is 0.0 to 12.0 only. That is all my body should have shown when I went to the docs and the lab that night a couple of years back, as with terrible chest pain I could hardly breathe. What the lab showed was way higher than that normal range. My heart initially showed an elevated 14,150.0 and later a much higher 23,150 against the normal range of 0.0 to 12.0 volume of Troponin!
There was no question that a serious attack had occurred and why, though my pain tolerance was very high, the chest pain I felt then gave me no choice but to rush to Emergency. The doctors wasted no time cleaning up the tubes to my heart and removing blockages that prevented good blood circulation. They had a name for the procedure – a triple stent angioplasty. Had I not allowed them to do what they did, the risk to me would have been heart failure – a forcible stop to the beating heart.
As I continued studying how our heart functions, these modern scientists revealed something more amazing than I first surmised. They showed me that the heart is an integral source of memories, intuition, deep wisdom, and a biological organ that gives life—yes, the scientists said all these.
They now say that the two that are one are the Heart and the Brain. The heart has intelligence. They have found that about 40,000 specialized neurons, or sensory neurites, form a communication network within the heart.
So, scientists now talk of a “heart brain” as a single unity or intricate network of nerves, neurotransmitters, proteins, and support cells similar to those found in the brain proper. The heart brain is also known as heart intelligence. Blaise Pascal famously remarked that the heart has reasons the mind cannot understand.
With the modern recognition of the heart brain, humans have also found a mechanism of intentional self-healing and an awakening of super-learning abilities. These scientists say that the challenge for us now is to create heart-brain harmony and use this understanding to tap the power of our greatest potential.
Our ancestors – even going way back to the beginning of AMH or anatomically modern humans 200,000 years ago – survived all kinds of threats to existence. How? Why? The studies show that the explanation may be quite simple: our forebears had conscious access to an advanced neural network that gave them the godlike powers of intuition, self-healing, super-consciousness, and much more.
Today the key to accessing such advanced features of our experience, which we have long forgotten, begins with our mastery of the simple organ that has been the focus of our ancestors’ teachings for millennia: the human heart.
How about our religio-moral leaders? What do they say in this regard?
In a new encyclical letter titled “Dilexit nos” (“He loved us”), Pope Francis regards the heart as representing the “profound unifying center” for each person and society. From ancient times, says Pope Francis,” there has been an appreciation of the fact that human beings are not simply a sum of different skills, but a unity of body and soul with a coordinating center that provides a backdrop of meaning and direction to all that a person experiences.”
At the same time, however, Francis is quite aware that the depreciation of the deep core of our humanity – the heart – has a much longer history. Many thinkers and philosophers did not take Blaise Pascal seriously. They felt safer constructing their systems of thought in the more readily controllable domain of intelligence and will – in the world of clear and distinct ideas. This failure to make room for the heart resulted in a stunting of the notion of a personal center, in which love, in the end, is the one reality that can unify all the others.
If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, said Francis, “we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter.”
His predecessor, Benedict XVI, had earlier said that “every person needs a ‘center’ for his or her own life, a source of truth and goodness to draw upon in the events, situations, and struggles of daily existence. All of us, when we pause in silence, need to feel not only the beating of our own heart but deeper still, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible with faith’s senses and yet much more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world” (Angelus, June 1, 2008).
This would be “everyday Christmas,” – the heart of Jesus living in the hearts of all.
But first, let’s hear Francis at the beginning of his letter: “The symbol of the heart has often been used to express the love of Jesus Christ. Some have questioned whether this symbol is still meaningful today. Yet living as we do in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart.”
In contemporary society, said Pope Francis: “People … often find themselves confused and torn apart, almost bereft of an inner principle that can create unity and harmony in their lives and actions. [We] exaggerate our rational-technological dimension or, on the contrary, that of our instincts”. No room is left for the heart.
Then he says quite succinctly: “All our actions need to be put under the ‘political rule’ of the heart.” The mind and the will should be put at the service of the greater good by sensing and savoring truths, rather than seeking to master them as the sciences tend to do. The will desires the greater good that the heart recognizes, while the imagination and emotions are themselves guided by the beating of the heart.
According to Francis, It could be said that “I am my heart, for my heart is what sets me apart, shapes my spiritual identity, and puts me in communion with other people. The algorithms operating in the digital world show that our thoughts and will are much more ‘uniform’ than we had previously thought. They are therefore easily predictable and thus capable of being manipulated. That is not the case with the heart.”
The word “heart” evokes the inmost core of our person, and thus it enables us to understand ourselves in our integrity and not merely under one isolated aspect. This unique power of the heart said Francis, also helps us to understand why, when we grasp reality with our heart, we know it better and more fully. This inevitably leads us to the love of which the heart is capable, for “the inmost core of reality is love”.
Pope Francis then brings in Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman who took as his motto the phrase “Cor ad cor loquitur” (Heart speaks to Heart) since, beyond all our thoughts and ideas, the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart. This realization led Cardinal Newman, the distinguished intellectual, to recognize that his deepest encounter with himself and with the Lord came not from his reading or reflection, but from his prayerful dialogue, heart to heart, with Christ, alive and present. In the Eucharist Newman encountered the living heart of Jesus, capable of setting us free, giving meaning to each moment of our lives, and bestowing true peace.
Above all, Pope Francis mentions Mama Mary, who saw things with the heart. She was able to dialogue with the things she experienced by pondering them in her heart, treasuring their memory and viewing them in a greater perspective. The best expression of how the heart thinks is found in the two passages in Saint Luke’s Gospel that speak to us of how Mary “treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart” (cf. Lk 2:19 and 51).
Said Pope Francis the scholar: “The Greek verb symbállein, ‘ponder’, evokes the image of putting two things together (‘symbols’) in one’s mind and reflecting on them, in a dialogue with oneself. In Luke 2:51, the verb used is dietérei, which has the sense of “keep”. What Mary “kept” was not only her memory of what she had seen and heard but also those aspects of it that she did not yet understand; these nonetheless remained present and alive in her memory, waiting to be ‘put together’ in her heart.” So, finally, according to Pope Francis, in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture what can only be kept deep in the human heart. But that heart will always be restless until it rests in Christ’s Sacred Heart. FINIS