A Pure Heart Only Desires One Thing

The lecturer I admired most was an existentialist who spent his time trying to convert us to his chosen philosophy. Everything he said seemed to make sense but none of the books he recommended did. They were always too difficult for me, even the more popular works. I struggled for weeks trying to understand Kierkegaard‘s popular masterpiece Purity of Heart. I thought that at least that would be easy enough to understand, but it was not. Nevertheless, it was not all a waste of time, for its full title, ‘Purity of Heart’ Is to ‘Will One Thing’, has remained with me over the years and helped me to understand things that I may never have understood without it. It has helped me, for instance, to understand what Jesus meant when he said that there’s only “one thing necessary.”

When you really think about it that is all that really matters, to will one thing before everything else. For that, you need a pure heart, a heart that is not fragmented by a thousand and one desires competing with each other and destroying the peace of mind that we all long for. Whenever I have been in danger of becoming confused by the complexity of the spiritual life I just remember Kierkegaard and he puts me back on the straight and narrow again.

A pure heart is utterly simple because it simply wants one thing. I don’t know what that one thing was for Kierkegaard, but for Jesus, it is to love God with your whole heart and your whole mind and your whole being. Nothing else matters. If you get this right then everything else follows as a matter of course. As St John pointed out, if your love of God is genuine it automatically enables you to love your neighbour, which is the second of the two commandments that sum up all the others. Taken together the two of them constitute what came to be known in the Early Church as the “Great Mandatum of the Lord,” possible only to those who had the genuine purity of heart that enabled them to will but one thing in all things.

When Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God,” he meant that when you begin to love God above all else you can begin to see him in everything and everyone and encounter him in everything you do and in everyone you meet. In order to do this more perfectly the Desert Fathers used to spend time each morning examining the forthcoming day to see how their single-minded love of God could enable them to transform it. They would try to anticipate all they had to do and the people they would expect to meet, so that throughout that day they could continue to offer themselves to God by the gentle and peaceful way in which they did everything and treated everyone. Success was never gauged by how well they succeeded in doing this but by how well they tried and tried again and again on successive days no matter how often they failed. St. Francis of Assisi used to say that if you can’t love your neighbours then at least don’t harm them.

Let’s face it, for most of us that’s about the most we can do while we wait on God to give us the grace to do what is quite impossible without it. What the Desert Fathers learned and what St. Francis practised so perfectly was that mere waiting on God is worthless unless that time is filled by doing all we can do to receive the grace to love our neighbour as ourselves. That’s why the Desert Fathers spent their time before the day began preparing for it by trying to anticipate all they had to do and everyone they had to meet.

Then they asked God’s help to enable them to do everything as Jesus himself would have done it. They found from experience that this was the best way to extend the purity of heart with which they tried to make their morning offering at the beginning of the day, throughout every moment of that day. This is how they endeavoured to observe at all times the “Great Mandatum,” what Jesus called the “one thing necessary” without which nothing has any ultimate meaning or purpose.

My father used to use the  “Prayer of the Heart,” taken from the Psalms and written down by John Cassian. “You must continually recite it in your heart, whatever work you are doing, or office you are holding, or journey you are undertaking; in adversity that you may be delivered, and in prosperity that you may be preserved. You should be so moulded by the constant use of it that when sleep comes you are still considering it so that you become accustomed to repeating it even in your sleep. When you wake let it be the first thing to come into your mind, let it anticipate all your waking thoughts. When you rise from your bed let it send you down on your knees, and thence send you forth to your work and business and let it follow you about all day”.

What better way to prepare for the day ahead than by setting ourselves goals or targets to attain by the end of it. However, once we’ve offered the day to God and mentally previewed it with the aim of transforming it, it’s a good idea to make a few resolutions to do what we are likely to forget or find convenient to forget. It might be just to do hum-drum tasks that we keep putting off, like changing the sheets on the bed, putting air into the car tires, or defrosting the freezer, or something that’s more important. There’s always that friend or relative who’s sick or in need whom we should phone, or write to, or even drop in on for a few minutes. Or perhaps we should make a resolution to apologize to one of the family, a friend or someone at work for the way we behaved the previous day.

It’s very difficult to stand up for someone who’s been abused by authority at work, or elsewhere, or to speak the truth when no one wants to hear it, or to make a stand for what we know is right, but these are some of the more important things that could occupy our minds as part of morning prayer. Then we can ask for the strength to put the resolutions that we know we ought to make into practice. I can even promise you peace of mind if you fail, so long as you make a genuine attempt to do what is right and sincerely ask God’s pardon if you fail.

Thanks to Kierkegaard I was able to see one of the simplest truths of the spiritual life that I may not have seen so clearly without him, and to see too from the practice of the Desert Fathers how that truth can transform each passing day.