There is an old Christian symbol that isn’t used very much anymore, but I think is very important to keep front and center: 

A heart – aflame – and in the heart, an eye – open. 

            One way to understand prayer is “The attention of the heart.” That’s a turn of phrase from a masterful teacher of Christian prayer from long ago, named Simeon: “The Attention of the Heart.” Simeon taught that in prayer we allow our mind to ease and enter the heart as we open ourselves in our desire for God. 

A heart – aflame – and in the heart, an eye – open.

            The expressions of prayer we have from scripture and the other sacred texts of our faith –our psalms, our odes – these all are such deeply passionate expressions of hearts aflame for God, words of blazing awareness of God’s love and God’s justice and God’s awesome transcendence. 

            Did you feel this in our readings for today, just how visceral these expressions are?

            In Psalm 42, the poet’s yearning for God is like a thirst. But not just any thirst, an animal thirst, the thirst of a wild animal panting in the desert for clear, quenching streams. 

            It wasn’t for nothing that Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who hunger and thirst for justice, who hunger and thirst for right and just and holy and good relations between others and with God.”

            This is not just an abstract wish, but a hunger and a thirst, a visceral yearning in the guts. 

Or, as we heard from the Odes of Solomon, which is an early Christian book of sung prayers, the hope the poet feels from God is not an abstract disembodied wish floating through the atmosphere to heaven. No. It’s like mother’s milk to a baby. That immediate, warm, bodily nourishment, love, safety. It’s as rich and delicious as honey.

And when this poet sings prayers to God, it’s:

“As a fountain gushing forth its waters, 

So also, my heart pours forth the splendor of You 

And my lips send out Your praises. 

Then my tongue becomes sweet in Your anthems, 

And my limbs become fat in Your odes. 

Also, my face beams with Your exultation, 

And my spirit rejoices in Your love, 

And my entire self shines.” (Odes of Solomon, from Ode 40)

These prayers are not ethereal abstractions drifting far above the earthly realm. They aren’t vague wishes or good thoughts. 

No. 

They are the cries, they are the groans, they are the glories of human beings feeling the fullness of human life before God. 

We are, after all, embodied beings – we are embodied souls and ensouled bodies. 

I’m reminded of he words of Ireneaus: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Or the words of theologian Jurgan Möltman, 

“The glorification of God lies in the expressive joy of existence.”

But this immediately makes us aware of the ways we and others are not fully live, the ways we and others are not relishing the joy of existence 

Expressing that is also the faithful task of prayer, which we hear in Psalm 42. So I have to add that our reliance on God lies not only in the expressive joy of existence but also in the expressive agony of existence.

When we allow our minds to enter our hearts, to open the eyes of our hearts in prayer, we may well discover the hurts that are on our hearts, as well as the joy, the anger as well as the sweetness, the fear as well as the hope, the hate as well as the love, the ways we are constricted and restricted, as well as the ways we are free and full. When we allow our minds to enter our hearts out of our desire for God, we also grow in our heart awareness of all everyone else with whom we are interwoven. We become more open to rejoice with those who celebrate and weep with those who mourn. 

Everything that is our hears is vital to bring out to God in prayer. 

Jesus is recorded as teaching, in the Gospel of Thomas, that “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not have will destroy you.” (Gospel of Thomas, saying 70)

I think there is no healthy way to do this without honoring the role of our bodies in creative expression. 

For too long in our civilization the spiritual has been separated from the physical, heaven and earth have been split and wedged apart, the mind has been abstracted from the heart, the soul and the body have been divided and set against each other as if they were natural enemies. 

This has caused a kind of insanity. It’s justified violence against bodies. And it’s justified violence against souls. It’s caused a crazy kind of dislocation from the natural world in which we live and move and have our being … but it has also caused a disconnection from the eternal spirit in which we live and move and have our being. When we separate body and soul in such a severe way, we don’t end up with either. 

I think many of us yearn for a reunion. If we let ourselves feel into our deepest needs, our deepest desires for God and God’s mercy, I think many of us yearn for a reunion between body and soul, a reunion between mind and heart, a reunion between heaven and earth.

We can find that reunion in Christ. 

In Christ we find the embodiment of the divine in such completeness that the human and the heavenly cannot be separated from the other. In Christ is a total reunion between body and soul, heaven and earth.

The cross represents this reunion: the marriage between the vertical and the horizontal, the heavenly and earthly. But the cross also represents the violence that comes when humans separate the heavenly and earthly, when we sacrifice bodies to appease the disembodied powers of wealth and status and control … the pain of this, as we know, Christ bore in body and soul. 

But through Christ, we know that the pain of our separation from God, from each other from, ourselves does not have the last word. The ultimate truth of the ultimate union of God and creation ultimately triumphs. Through Christ we may be reunited with our Creator and with one another, body and soul, heart and mind, on earth as it is in heaven. 

As Jesus said, the realm of heaven is within us and among and stretched out before us, if only we have eyes to see. 

The truth is that we do all have eyes to see, thank God, if only we would open them. 

These eyes are the eyes of our hearts. 

So, let our hearts burn. And let our eyes open. 

And let us rejoice in body and in soul 

In the generosity and grace of our Creator

Thanks be to God.