In one of his most famous lines, St. Augustine exclaims, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Hans Urs von Balthasar took St. Augustine’s profound insight and reflected upon it from a different perspective—God’s perspective. Addressing Jesus, and speaking for all human beings, Balthasar exclaims, “Your Heart is restless until it rests in me. Your Heart is restless until we rest in you, once time and eternity have become interfused.”
Yes, our hearts are indeed restless until they rest in God. The signs of that restlessness are all around us, as we observe so many people desperately seeking fulfillment in anyone and anything except God. How different life looks (and feels) when we come to Augustine’s realization that our ultimate happiness and peace are found only in God, and when we strive to keep that insight top of mind! This realization can transform our lives, and that transformation is deepened and broadened when we come to the further realization that not only are we restless for God but God is also restless for us! God yearns for us (see Song of Sol. 4:1–15; Hosea 2:14–20, 11:1–9; Luke 13:34–35, 19:41–42). God longs for us. God eagerly wills that each and every one of us might accept his offer of an eternal share in the divine life and love, so that we might be united with him forever. That is why Jesus knocks insistently at the door to our hearts (Rev. 3:20), but as Balthasar points out, we so often immerse ourselves in the stresses (and the distractions) of daily life that we fail to hear that knocking (or may even deliberately try to drown it out):
We forget our heart under the stress of our affairs. We think that life lives of itself. No one listens to his own heart, not even for a second—his heart, that bestows hour after hour on him. We have grown used to the slight tremor in our being, to the eternal beating of the waves that from within us dash on the shore of consciousness. We accept it as we do our destiny, or nature, or the course of things. We have grown used to love. And we no longer hear the tapping finger that knocks day and night at the gate of our soul; we no longer hear this question, this request to enter.
In this passage, Balthasar is once again echoing Augustine, who urged all of us: Redire ad cor! “Return to the heart!”
[God] is most intimately present to the human heart, but the heart has strayed from him. Return to your heart, then, you wrongdoers, and hold fast to him who made you.
Blaise Pascal also emphasized this theme of returning to the heart, defining faith itself as Dieu sensible au cœur—“God perceived by the heart.” But God wants more from us than just our faith defined as such, more than just “perceiving God with our heart.” In Jesus Christ, God has given us his heart, and God desires that we give him our hearts in return, in a loving reciprocation of his burning love for us: Fili, praebe mihi cor tuum. “Son, give me your heart!”
Balthasar has written some beautiful passages in which he depicts the piercing of Jesus’s heart on the cross as the moment in which Jesus most definitively opened up access to the heart of God for all of us:
It is the heart of God himself that is laid open here (for Jesus’ heart cannot be separated from the Father’s heart and the Spirit’s heart). . . . Pierced, the Son’s heart gives access to the Father’s heart, and from the wound flows the Spirit of both for the world.
The opening of the Heart is the handing over of what is most intimate and personal for the use of all. All may enter the open, emptied space.
By allowing his heart to be pierced on the cross, Jesus has made space for all of us who are willing to enter into the very heart of God and to dwell there forever. But part of that process of “entering in” to the divine heart is being willing to allow our own hearts to be conformed to the heart of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18), conformed to the heart that was pierced on the cross. To dwell as deeply as possible within the divine life and love, we must allow our hearts to be pierced. We must empty ourselves out in self-giving love for God and neighbor in imitation of Jesus’s self-emptying love on the cross. In doing so, we enable the divine love to flow through us to all those who are most in need of that love. In allowing our hearts to be “pierced”—in allowing ourselves to sacrifice and suffer for the sake of love—we become more effective conduits of the divine love, enabling that love to flow more freely throughout that mysterious body, the communio sanctorum.
That is why we celebrate the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus every year: to remind us of Jesus’s “restless heart,” to praise and thank God for his burning love for us, and to pray for the grace to align our hearts with the heart of Jesus, so that we might enter as fully as possible into the divine life and love.