SINCERITY - NOT ENOUGH
+ Cardinal George Pell,
23 May 2004
“Of all evil suggestions, the most terrible is the prompting to follow your own heart”. This sounds strange.
They are not the views of some modern-day fundamentalist, but written by Isidore the Priest, a fifth century Egyptian Christian, and I found them in a recent book by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The wisdom of the desert.
In the third century A.D. during the anti-Christian persecutions of the Roman Empire spiritual men and women fled into the Egyptian desert to pray and to fast, so they could come closer to God. When the Empire gave freedom of religion to Christians in the next century, more and more people joined them and eventually there were thousands in loose local communities. Sometimes these are called “the fathers of the desert”, although there were also women.
They left a considerable literature of sayings, but they were people of prayer, healers, rather than theologians or writers. Many visited them, not so much as religious tourists, but rather as pilgrims, seeking advice, or consolation. Often they wanted to know how to come closer to God. “Give me a word”, they would ask the holy man.
The attack on following the promptings of our heart is one such piece of advice, a thought to chew on, perhaps a meditation topic.
Today we are regularly exhorted to get in touch with our feelings. A “stiff upper lip” is even more unfashionable, as we are encouraged to follow the promptings of our hearts, to feel comfortable with our decisions. A few even claim that we decide what is right or wrong from our emotions.
But Isidore the Priest was onto something of value.
The truth about ourselves can be complicated and unpleasant. We are often quite unable to accept the whole truth. Searching for the promptings of our hearts can be like peeling an onion and failing to find anything much at all at the core.
Often when we go to friends for advice, perhaps even when we pray to help us decide (or discern), we can be seeking justification for our preferences, our feelings. Friendships have been broken by unacceptable advice.
Isidore was not urging self-hatred or psychological scourging, but he was clear that all of us, to different degrees, need to be coaxed into honesty, towards belief that faith in God and prayer can be healing.
To know one’s own heart is the work of a lifetime, because evil is often fascinating and disguised.
Cardinal Henri de Lubac, a great Jesuit theologian last century, wrote that “It is not sincerity, it is truth which frees us . . . To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed”.
Sincerity or truth? Instinct or duty? Freedom or the tyranny of fashion? Each of us chooses.
