A large, good heart

The icons of Bose - Listening - Byzantine style - egg tempera on wood, 32x40 cm
...Only when the Lord has made your heart new can it be open and ready to listen...

God calls you to the silent solitude in which the two of you can converse in prayer. God wants to speak to your heart.

The Bible speaks of the heart as the center of the human person, the deepest and most authentic part of us, and as the seat of our faculty of understanding. And so, the principal organ used in lectio divina is the heart, because it is the nucleus in which each human persan exists as a unique, unrepeatable mystery. Yet you have read of an uncircumcised heart (Dt 30:6; Rom 2:29), a heart of stone (Ez 11:19), a divided heart (Ps 119:13 and Jer 32:29), and a blind heart (Lam 3:65). All these expressions indicate a heart that is far from God, that has not been touched by faith. A believer's heart can become weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the concerns of this life (Lk 21:34). It can become sick, hardened and so blocked up that it can no longer recognize or understand the Lord's words and actions (Mk 6:52 and 8:17). It can become unstable, inconstant, and tend to
lose or forget the Word (2 Pt 3:16; Lk 8:13). A heart can begin to draw its nourishment from what is merely human, from the latest ideologies or even from its own pride, which is the worst sin. So when you are getting ready to spend time listening to God, take your heart in your hands and raise it up toward God, so that God may make it a heart of flesh: whole, steady and cleansed. Only when your heart becomes like that of a little child can it receive God's gifts (Mk 10:15).