22 Sunday B True purity

Four minute homilies

True purity

Today Jesus in the Gospel talks about the importance of having a clean heart. This is the right condition to approach God and to have a good and happy life. It also helps us to have healthy and fulfilling relationships. Our heart is the centre of our desires, dreams and actions. You can measure the worth of a person through his or her heart. From a pure heart, plenty of good things can develop. On the contrary, all sort of evil things come from a heart which is not in the right place.

“Blessed are the pure of heart, they shall see God.” Today we ask God to purify our hearts to be able to see him, to contemplate things through his eyes. Christians should try to look at things from God’s perspective. A simple, transparent, childlike heart helps us to do so. This is why we love children. Holy Scripture says that their angels are constantly seeing the face of God. And Chesterton comments that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

A clean heart helps us to love ourselves and others with true love. People who are always upset, deep down they are not happy with themselves, because their hearts are made of stone; they are banging themselves constantly against a hard rock. A clean heart is soft, and enjoys the happiness of a pure love. Everybody wants to be loved by such a heart, by a selfless love. Our love of God helps us to love others as we love ourselves. Our society doesn’t understand that when we take God out of the picture, we become savages, animals, or like Hobbes says, a wolf against another wolf.

How do we keep our hearts clean? It is a good question. Looking at the things that come in and come out. It is easier to control what we absorb from outside, because our heart is crazy and we cannot predict what is coming out. But if we manage to make sure that our input is sound, most likely we will be able purify our heart and maintain our heart’s purity. It is not easy in our over sexualised society to do so, because we are constantly bombarded all the time with images, sounds and messages that want to distract us from God. But the more obstacles, the more help from God. We need to make sure we keep these things at bay, specially social media and entertainment.

Two more things. First silence. Pascal says that all the problems of the world would be solved if we manage to sit down for one hour in silence. A famous atheist blogger discovered God, when he spent one month off the net. We need to find spaces of solitude and recollection, practical ways to keep screens under control, like not having a tv in our bedroom, or leaving our phone or tablet in the lounge when we go to bed. The other thing is to make sure we cleanse our heart regularly, examining our conscience, not making excuses about our limitations, making acts of contrition when we sin, and going to confession more often. When our heart is dirty, we cannot see our way forward and we sit down on the floor feeling sorry for ourselves. When we accuse ourselves of having sinned in front of a priest, God gives us the grace to fight against our addictions.

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