Locked Inside Your Heart Shaped Box

When you make a decision do you tell everyone by letting off some smoke from the chimney? Sounds silly but as many of us know, this is exactly what happened at the Vatican on the 13th of March 2013. And while most of us do not "literally" puff smoke out of a chimney to indicate the result(s) of our decision(s), we can (and often do), however, give off smoke screens with our actions that indicate our heart's intent. That is, when our actions do not coincide with our words - when our hearts are nothing more than an empty heart shaped box, the actions we blow off for the world are covered in the smoke of artificiality.

What then, is locked inside your heart shaped box? Better yet, who? Who you are determines what you do...Being goes before purpose or action. But this is not how much of the world lives. So often, we allow earthly things, items, people, to determine who we are, and thus, what we do. During this week (called Holy Week for the Church) might we contemplate what it is that we fill our hearts with?

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled" (Mat 5.6). To hunger and thirst for righteousness means to reorient the typical human perspective. To hunger and thirst for righteousness means that we must think beyond ourselves - it means that we are to think of the other. And this my friend is simply not what we are accustomed of doing...

Think of today's news, commercials, t.v. shows, marketing schemes...We are constantly told that life is about me. It is perfectly acceptable and even expected to hunger and thirst for self-promotion which ultimately is self-preservation. A message that calls for people to look out for the other is a counter-culture message - the antithesis of today's me-for-me mentality.

Only through and from the Father Son and Holy Spirit is meaning determined, and as theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, through the Absolute, "we find not only the ultimate meaning of reality as such, but also, beyond that, the ideality that provides the meaning, or determines 'what ought to be,' which is the ultimate measure of the truth of reality." In opposition or rather in contradistinction to the autonomous story, the cosmic drama of the Godhead illumines the interaction of the protagonist—Christ—with the creature through the direction of the Holy Spirit. Such interaction plays out through the multiple scenes—intersecting narratives—of the characters upon the stage of creation thereby allowing the realization not only of what our performances are, but what they are to become.

Our current frame of reference of individualism that transforms relationalism into a consumerist transition must give way to an interpersonal view of life and its freedom as revealed through the salvific performance of Christ so as to engage the structures of evil head-on. In place of the evidence that demands the verdict that Jesus is Lord, what is required today is the verdict Jesus is Lord demanding evidence in our lives that He is Lord—as exemplified in the witness of St Francis of Assisi or Dr. John M. Perkins. The values of the Christian faith must be those that reflect the values of God’s heart or else they are nothing but an empty heart shaped box:

    She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak
    I've been locked inside your Heart Shaped box, for weeks
    I've been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap
    I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black


 
    Hey!
    Wait!
    I've got a new complaint
    Forever in debt to your priceless advice
    hey
    wait
    I've got a new complaint
    Forever in debt to your priceless advice

So what is locked inside your heart shaped box?