Open Hearts
/I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, 18so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, 19and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. - Ephesians 1:17-19
This is St. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, and as I’ve written before, I like to think he’s praying it for us in Keene, too. And what a lovely prayer it is! It’s a prayer for wisdom and new understandings as we come to know God in Christ more deeply every day. It’s a prayer of hope that we’ll come into the glorious inheritance of the saints. It’s a request that we know the power of God in our lives and in this world.
And the part I like best is the part that prays that the “eyes of our hearts” will be enlightened. It reminds me of St. Benedict’s rule, in which Benedict advises his monks to listen with the “ears of your hearts.” There is something about seeing and hearing with the heart that feels deeper than normal seeing and hearing with eyes and ears only. It’s a bodily, incarnated kind of seeing and hearing, a deep, intuitive kind of seeing and hearing. It feels like seeing and hearing with your deepest soul.
When we see or hear something beyond our expectations, we often say things like “I can’t believe my eyes!” or “I can’t believe what I’m hearing!” That just shows how much we are habituated to the average day to day and how unprepared we are to experience the power of God around us. When you ‘can’t believe’ something, it might be an invitation to open hearts to allow those deeper eyes and ears to receive the deeper messages we are being given.
I pray that this Christmas season we move forward into the coming calendar year with hearts open wide to see and to hear what is always right in front of us, but often hidden from our normal sight and hearing. I pray with Paul that at St. James we may be given a spirit of wisdom and revelation as we come to know God in Christ, so that, with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we may know what is the hope to which we have been called, which is no doubt a much deeper call than we’re expecting - a call that brings the riches of the glorious inheritance among the saints to us and to all people, and that reveals what the power of God can do in us and among us.
