Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.— Psalm 90:12
I find myself pondering the meaning of the phrase, “wisdom of heart.” When I was younger, I often tended to make decisions based on head knowledge and concurrently, did not always trust what I felt in my heart. Back then, I didn’t know the words of Proverbs 2:10, “For wisdom will enter your heart, knowledge will please your soul.” I wondered what the expression would have meant to the ancient psalmist as well as more recent theologians.
Ancient Egyptian and Hebrew thinking intertwine on this matter. Egyptians believed that the heart was the source of human wisdom, as well as the source of emotions, memory, the soul and the personality itself. It was through the heart that God spoke, giving ancient Egyptians knowledge of God and God’s will. The ancient Hebrews also saw the heart as the seat of emotion and as the seat of thought. The Hebrew word for heart, lev, means “authority within.”
St. Ignatius of Loyola gave voice to a method of discernment when making decisions that relies heavily on listening to what your heart is saying. As David L. Fleming, SJ, writes in, What Is Ignatian Spirituality?: “We make our decisions within the context of this relationship of love. It is a relationship of the heart. Our heart will tell us which decisions will bring us closer to Jesus and which will take us away from him”. . . “Confirmation comes not from the reasoning intellect but through a discernment of the meaning of the different movements of the emotions and feelings. This is Ignatius’s greatest gift to us about decision making. It may be called the gift of the reasoning heart.” www.ignatianspirituality.com
As Pope Saint John Paul II most eloquently states, It is Jesus “who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
Charity and justice are already written on our hearts, we just have to be wise enough to discern them. The next time you have to decide on an action, practice wisdom of heart and join our work at socialconcern@hnojnc.org
Barbara Molinari Quinby, MPS, Director
Office of Human Life, Dignity, and Justice Ministries
Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral Raleigh, NC