Two Hearts, One Love
To give one's heart to God is to receive God's heart, the heart of love.
The Irish rock band U2 sang a beautiful love song called “Two Hearts Beat as One.” It reminds me of a mystical encounter between a medieval Cistercian nun, Lutgarde of Aywières (1182-1246), where in a vision Jesus asks her what she wants.
“I want your heart,” the nun replied, to which Jesus declared, “I want your heart.”
To which the Belgian sister responded, “Take it, dear Lord. But take it in such a way that Your Heart’s love may be so mingled and united with my own heart that I may possess my heart in You, and may it ever remain there secure in Your protection.”
In his biography of Lutgarde, Thomas Merton notes “Here, expressed in simple, imaginative terms, we have a definition of the mystical marriage that sums up St. Bernard’s teaching on the subject—and, indeed, the doctrine of all the greatest Christian mystical theologians concerning this perfect union of wills.”
But I don’t want to get too distracted in which this “means” — I simply want to savor this beautiful notion that the Source of All Divine Love seeks to exchange hearts with us, so that our hearts beat in the Divine torso, even as the heart of God beats in our own breasts. It’s like a dual heart transplant, but entirely immersed in the exchange of love as well as life.
Your heart, and God’s heart, beat as one heart. And this one heart continues to pump simultaneously within you and within the Divine breast, holding the entire universe in an embrace of compassionate care. We know the old spiritual, “He’s got the whole world in His hands” — Sister Lutgarde dares us to believe that we can carry the whole world in our hearts, for the Divine carries all our love within it as well.
In the first letter of John, we are told that “we love because God first loved us.” I take this to mean that all the love I experience ‚ the love I receive, the love I hold, and the love I give away — ultimately flows from the heart of Divine Love. To be human is be a conduit for the love of God. We get to choose whether or not we will allow that love to flow through us. To say yes to that invitation is to say yes to the dance of love throughout all space and time.