Our Hearts Enter Out

I am not sure about you, but in the last few weeks of going to Church, I have become aware of the overall pattern in my own worship during the liturgy. More specifically, I have noticed that, within myself, the public and communal dimension of the liturgy very quickly moves to the interiority of my own individual heart.

It is not as if I merely “go through the motions” and just unconsciously engage in the gestures, the standing, the sitting, the kneeling and the responding. However, what I have become aware of is that the world prefigured by the physical structure of the Church and enacted by the liturgical movements, I am treating as an entry way to delve into my own interior world, with all its concerns, worries, and inconsistencies.

In short, I have been treating the public as a prelude to the private, the exterior as an entryway into the interior.

And when I do that, I come out of the process feeling frustrated or at best, unchanged and unmoved.

Having only just become aware that this was what was happening within me, the next question then was what to do about it. It was only when I read one of the Advent reflections of Fr John O’Connor’s Food for Faith that I started to get some clarity.

By way of background, I had in my classes in Political Philosophy covered certain themes in Plato’s Republic, in which Plato makes a correlation between the public institutions of the city and the interiority of one’s soul. These two things, Plato indicated, are more connected than we realise. This is because the city is meant to be an outworking of the soul, and the proper ordering of one was meant to lead to a proper ordering of another. Put another way, the narrow confines of the soul were meant to fold outwards into the institutions and promenades of the city.

I bring this up because Fr John’s post brought up a passage from Romano Guardini’s work Sacred Signs, which follows Plato’s patterning of the soul and polis, only this time, the polis is not the earthly city, but the heavenly one represented by the Church.

Speaking of the correlation between the Church and heaven, Guardini says:

A church is a similitude [ie similar to or reminder] of the heavenly dwelling place of God. Mountains indeed are higher, the wide blue sky outside stretches immeasurably further. But whereas outside space is unconfined and formless, the portion of space set aside for the church has been formed, fashioned, designed at every point with God in view. The long pillared aisles, the width and solidity of the walls, the high arched and vaulted roof, bring home to us that this is God’s house and the seat of his hidden presence. It is the doors that admit us to this mysterious place. Lay aside, they say, all that cramps and narrows, all that sinks the mind. Open your heart, lift up your eyes. Let your soul be free, for this is God’s temple.

In speaking of the correlation between the Church and one’s own soul:

It is likewise the representation of you, yourself. For you, your soul and your body, are the living temple of God. Open up that temple, make it spacious, give it height.

Thus, whilst there is a dimension of going to church that involves bringing one’s own heart, worship was not meant to move inwards and end in the small world of my heart. Rather, in keeping with Plato and Guardini, the heart is meant to be expanded by the Church, to have its horizon’s extended beyond one’s own for, contrary to my own inclinations, it is in those expanded horizons that where our true self is located.

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