A Divided Heart: Homily for Tuesday, May 21, 2024

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As much as I want to focus my heart on God, I know I have a divided heart.

A Divided Heart

Sometimes it happens when you hear a word from Scripture that it feels specially addressed to you. And this first reading from the book of James is one such reading for me. Here’s what I mean. I really do believe in my heart of hearts I want to serve God with all my being, all my strength, all my soul. But I have a divided heart.

There are times, quite frankly, when I want not what is good for me, but what I want. There are times when I look around and I envy someone’s talents or gifts rather than recognizing the blessings that God has bestowed on me. I say I want to do the will of God, but sadly in my life too often I want to do my own will. I say I want to surrender to God, but often I allow myself to be convinced that I don’t really need to do that or whatever I want to do is magically what God wants me to do.

James is talking about our world. And so much of our world is this internal conflict between doing what God wants and doing what we want. If you think of the violent conflicts in the world, for example, he mentions war. If we think of those, oftentimes it is not so much about a cause that is just, but wanting what we don’t have. When we look at what James talks about in other parts of his letter, that people don’t have enough to eat and it’s not enough simply to wish them well, but to feed them, to give them a place to live.

When we look at that, I think it doesn’t happen as much as it might because deep down inside we don’t really want to do it. James really captures this sense in our life of this spiritual struggle between keeping our eyes focused on the next life, which means following God wherever he leads, and desiring the things in this life that are not going to lead to our salvation.

We see a similar kind of thing in today’s gospel. Jesus has talked to them about the fact that he’s going to suffer and to die, but then be raised from the dead. They are preoccupied with trying to convince each other that they themselves are the most important. How often do we find ourselves perhaps feeling hurt when we’re not recognized in ways that we think we should be, in ways where we think that we should be great, in ways that we say, “Look at all these wonderful things I’ve done, and nobody really is giving me lots of praise and adulation.”

The spiritual life, as I said this weekend, is really about surrendering to God’s will, placing ourselves in the presence of God, and seeking to ask him to help us to see clearly what it is he wants us to do. Today, as we hear these readings, let us ask the Lord to continue to purify our hearts, so that in all things we may desire only what God wills for us.

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