Prayer, Part 5: The Heart is Our Teacher (Psalm 16:7-8)

Prayer, Part 5: The Heart is Our Teacher

First UMC of Pocatello

February 9, 2025

Psalm 16:7-8

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In a little book called The Way of the Heart, Catholic author Henri Nouwen writes about prayer and quotes these words of a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox bishop named Theophan the Recluse: “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.”

Let’s hear that one more time: “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.”

The first part of Theophan’s statement, the part about the mind coming down into the heart, is instructive; it tells us something about how prayer works. Prayer is at its best when the powers of our minds – the powers to question, reason, associate, and imagine – are united with our emotions and our body’s sensations. The heart is always speaking. We pray when we learn to listen to our heart, becoming aware of its affections, disappointments, and hopes.

The second part of Theophan’s teaching is a promise. When we open the door of our heart and allow our mind to carry its candle of awareness there, God will meet us. God is both the Creator of everything, the Great Mystery always outstripping our understanding, and a personal presence in us. We are made in God’s image, which means we are born with a bone-deep craving for perfect love, for God. Our hearts teach us to pay attention to that holy hunger.

Psalm 16 affirms the goodness of our bodies, and shows us how important they are to a life of prayer.

I bless the Lord who gives me counsel,

in the night also my heart instructs me.

I keep the Lord always before me;

because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.

Here in verses 7 and 8, we have our first two body words: “my heart” and “my right hand.”

The Hebrew word translated here as heart is literally the word for the kidneys. Ancient Hebrews believed that the heart and the kidneys were closely related. The two organs are often referenced side by side in scripture. For example, in one English translation, Psalm 7:9 says, “The one who examines the thoughts and emotions is a righteous God” – but in the original Hebrew, those “thoughts and emotions” are the “heart and the kidneys.” These organs were considered the places in the body that house a person’s emotions, affections, and deepest thoughts – the very purposes of their soul. It’s common in scripture to hear of God searching, examining, and naming what is in these parts of the body. In Psalm 16, they speak directly to the one praying, offering their wisdom: in the night also my heart instructs me.

Hebrew poetry uses a literary device called parallelism. Parallelism means that one line will – you guessed it – parallel the next. The most common kind of parallelism is when two lines of poetry say pretty much the same thing but in slightly different ways. It’s not always that the second statement builds on the first statement, though that does happen. More often, the second line and the first line expand one another, giving the reader a fuller picture. It’s like describing the same mountain from two different angles.

A good example of parallelism is the first verse of Psalm 51:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;

according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

‘Unfailing love’ parallels ‘great compassion.’ The plea for mercy parallels the plea for one’s transgressions to be blotted out.

Here’s what’s wonderful about Psalm 16:7: “I bless the Lord who gives me counsel” is in a parallel structure with “in the night also my heart instructs me.” The psalmist is not driving a hard wedge between the counseling Lord and the teaching heart. They are not the same thing, but they’re not separate either. When we quiet ourselves enough to really hear what our hearts are telling us; when we seek our body’s wisdom, we’ll hear God’s voice, too. The heart knows when it has strayed from God’s purposes and it’s truest desires.

For some of us, this might be a new and revolutionary way of relating to your body. Maybe you’ve been taught that your body is, at best, unimportant to your life with God, or, at worst, a cesspool of sin.  Maybe you’re simply out of touch with your body most of the time, living in your head. We can tell ourselves all sorts of stories up there, some helpful, many far from helpful. We can grind our reason against an immovable problem. We can rationalize anything and everything. We can do all these mental functions while being unaware of what our hearts really want or what our bodies already intuitively know.

Our bodies might contradict our mental stories; they might ask us to do something risky – to feel, and then to act on that feeling. I wonder what it would mean for you to descend into your heart, your chest, your gut as you ask, “What do I want? How am I being called to love? What’s the next right thing that God would have me do?”

How would your heart – speaking in harmony with God’s voice – guide you?

Of course our bodies get sick and suffer injury. They store up trauma and they age. But these challenges are also opportunities to learn to listen and honor the body’s wisdom. They do not mean that our bodies are evil. Our bodies, along with our minds and souls, are created in the image of God. The image of God is Jesus Christ, and he the embodied, enfleshed, incarnate One.

So, what does it actually mean to listen to the heart? How do we do it?

There’s no single answer to this, but the psalmist says that his heart teaches him in the night. For our Jewish siblings, the new 24-hour day begins at sunset. There was evening, and there was morning… There was evening, and there was morning. In the Bible, the days run from evening to evening, which is why Jewish folks begin their Sabbath observance on Friday night with the lighting of candles and singing.

Darkness, the time when most of us are winding down and letting go, is the time when God initiates fresh work. Maybe at the end of the day we’re tired and spent; maybe we’ve finally reached some delicious solitude. Either way, there is something about our vulnerability in the evening that allows us to lower our defenses and listen to what the heart has to say. Perhaps for just this reason, the Psalms speak often of evening prayer. Here are some examples:

·         Psalm 1:2 – “…their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.”

·         Psalm 17:3 –  “If you try my heart, if you visit me by night, / if you test me, you fill find no wickedness in me…”

·         Psalm 42:8 – “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, / a prayer to the God of my life.”

·         Psalm 77:6 – “I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit.”

·         Psalm 91:1-2 – “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, / to sing praises to your name, O Most High; / to declare your steadfast love in the morning, / and your faithfulness every night.”

Over the past month, I’ve invited you to try some different prayer practices, like praying “Help me” over and over throughout your day, and paying attention to good stories, and praying with metaphors, and saying a simple threshold prayer at moments of transition during your day. I now want to teach you the prayer of Examen.

The daily Examen was designed by St Ignatius of Loyola to take no more than 15 minutes at the end of the day. It has five movements that can take about 2-3 minutes each. The first movement is simply to acknowledge God’s presence with you and become centered and inwardly aware. Deep breaths help us connect to our bodies, maybe followed by saying a favorite psalm or poem or the Lord’s prayer.

The second movement is about gratitude, naming a few gifts from the day. That should be easy for us, since we’re already keeping our 5x5 gratitude journals.

The third and fourth movements involve reviewing the day, first noticing moments of spiritual consolation and then moments of desolation. Consolation is about freedom and love, openness to God and others. Desolation is about being unfree, reactive; distant from God or others.

Positive feelings don’t always correspond to consolation, and negative feelings don’t always correspond to desolation. If we spend time one day with someone who is grieving, we might feel our own sadness and come away from that encounter depleted. But at the end of the day, our hearts will tell us that we were right where we needed to be, alongside our friend.

Ignatius was concerned that we don’t applaud or judge ourselves for these moments; we’re just meant to notice them. The point isn’t to get fixated on one thing and relive the drama of it over and over. We review the day in a detached way, and ask the heart to show us when we were speaking and acting from inside or outside our grounding in God. If a moment from the day stands out as particularly important, we can take a minute to talk to God about it.

After reflecting on consolation and desolation, the final part of the Examen is looking ahead to the next day. One writer describes it this way:

[We] ask God to show us the potential challenges and opportunities of tomorrow. We try to anticipate which moments might go one way or the other for us: toward God’s plan or away from it. We ask for insight into what graces we might need to live this next day well: patience, wisdom, fortitude, self-knowledge, peace, optimism. We ask God for that grace, and we trust that he wants us to succeed in our day even more than we do.

     And that’s the Examen. Centering, thanking, and reviewing today’s consolations and desolations, and tomorrow’s needs. By praying the Examen once a day, we learn to listen to our hearts. Over time we notice patterns that can really unlock growth for us. Patterns of consolation and desolation show us where we are tripping up over and over again or where God’s joy reliably meets us. We can then act based on those patterns, avoiding the things that bring us down and moving toward the things help us love.

That’s partly what the psalmist means when she says, I keep the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be moved. In the ancient world, to be at someone’s right hand was to occupy the place of honor, the place of strength and trust. We come to know God as a strong and trustworthy friend by listening to our own hearts in the night.

     I’ve again made up some cards for you to take home, if you’d like. This time they have instructions for the Examen on them. I still have threshold prayers from last week, too, if you didn’t get one or want to take a few more. Let’s use the Examen to practice keeping the Lord before us by listening for the harmony between our heart’s voice and God’s voice.

“To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.”

God is waiting for us.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Amen.