I Am My Heart
Simone Riva - A student transcribes the essay to give to the teacher. A gesture of sharing. What if it were the beginning of a dialog with the heart of Christ?
When I enter the classroom, it is all about writing. "What are you doing?" I asked her. "I'm transcribing the paper, then I'll have her read it." By the end of the lesson, I was no longer thinking about that answer, but she came to the desk, moved her phone closer to mine, and shared the text of her essay. In the evening, before going to bed, I read it quietly. Everything about silence and its role in life. But I was struck by this gesture of wanting to share the essay.
In number 12, Pope Francis writes: "It is necessary to affirm that we have a heart, that our heart coexists with other hearts that help it to be a 'you'. Since we cannot develop this theme extensively, we will use a character from a novel, Dostoyevsky's Stavroghin (The Demons, 1873). Romano Guardini shows him as the very embodiment of evil, because his main characteristic is that he has no heart: "Stavròghin has no heart; therefore his spirit is cold and empty, and his body is intoxicated with laziness and 'bestial' sensuality. That is why he cannot meet anyone intimately, and no one really meets him. For only the heart creates intimacy, true closeness between two beings.
Only the heart can welcome and give a home. Intimacy is the act, the sphere of the heart. But Stavròghin is distant. [...] Infinitely distant even from oneself, because one can be intimate with oneself only with the heart, not with the mind. To be within oneself with the spirit is not in the power of man. If the heart does not live, man remains a stranger to himself" (Romano Guardini, The Religious World of Dostoevsky, Brescia 1980, 236).
The Pope's decision to write an encyclical that focuses on the heart of Christ, and therefore on the heart of man, is striking. We seem to have become accustomed to sentimentalizing the place where each person "makes his synthesis" (Dilexit nos. 9). Instead, in order to truly meet the other and not remain strangers to ourselves, we must come to terms with the truest and most intimate part of ourselves.
As the Pope writes again and again: "Instead of seeking superficial satisfactions and playing a part before others, it is best to let questions arise that are important: who I really am, what I am looking for, what meaning I want my life, my choices or my actions to have, why and for what purpose I am here in this world, how I will evaluate my existence when it comes to an end, what meaning I want everything I live to have, who I want to be before others, who I am before God. These questions lead me to my heart" (Dilexit nos. 8).
This girl took seriously the desire to be met not by vows, not by behavior, but by what vibrates in her heart, by the urgency of silence, which is, among other things, the first ally of our interior life. Perhaps that is why a text like this was needed so that the gesture of this girl could become part of what the Church teaches.
Could it be an opportunity to discover a "Magisterium of the Heart" that truly leaves no one out and calls us back to that never-ending dialog with the Heart of Christ? It all depends on the question with which we question reality, including the encyclical.
The author did not review the translation.
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