The Restless Heart Checks In

I want to tell you about a worry I carried, because I suspect some of you carry it too. A whisper: is all of this new? The SASHETS check-in, the noticing, the attuning of a Heart to Heart, the practice of being with our own hearts, with one another, with Immanuel. Is it just modern therapy wearing Sunday clothes?

So I went looking, and friend, what I found undid the worry completely. None of what we practice is new. When we quiet and notice, when we name what we feel, when we attune to another heart, when we live the Immanuel lifestyle with the God who is with us, we are not trying something new. We are stepping into the ancient, wise tradition of the church fathers. We are returning to what it is like to be us.

Let me show you, beginning with Augustine, a bishop in North Africa sixteen centuries ago and the teacher the church has leaned on more than almost any other since, a father both Catholics and Protestants claim as their own. Rome fell around him, and the philosophers repeated their oldest advice: the wise soul feels nothing. Augustine stopped midway through The City of God, the greatest book of his life, to tell them no. Our emotions, he wrote, are love in different postures. “Love, then, yearning to have what is loved, is desire; and having and enjoying it, is joy; fleeing what is opposed to it, it is fear; and feeling what is opposed to it, when it has befallen it, it is sadness.” Desire is love reaching. Joy is love resting. Fear is love guarding. Grief is love taking the blow. And these motions, he added, are good, if the love is good.

Do you hear what that means? When you check in as sad or scared or tender or glad, you are watching your love move, and each feeling is longing for something particular:

Every line of that chart is love, asking. And where is all the asking finally headed? Augustine answered that too, in the most famous sentence he ever wrote, the opening line of his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” He means that every longing on that chart, traced all the way down, is a longing for God. So if you have ever paced a kitchen at midnight, restless without quite knowing why, that sentence is about you. When we notice what we feel, we are doing what Augustine did. We are returning.

And the noticing itself? The fathers named it long before anyone called it a skill: watchfulness, from Proverbs, guard your heart above all else. Gregory the Great said it in four words I never got over: love itself is knowledge. He meant that loving God is itself a way of knowing him, and we may fairly widen the window he opened: your feelings are understanding, arriving by another door. Your check-in is no wellness trend. It is a fifteen hundred year old discipline.

And if you wonder why, after all this time, you still need these rhythms, Gregory of Nyssa would smile. The soul’s yearning for God never finishes, he taught, and that is the design, not a flaw: the loving heart stretches toward an infinite God forever, always filled, always reaching. “This truly is the vision of God,” he dared to write: “never to be satisfied in the desire to see him.” You are not behind, friend. You are alive, and stretching.

And the being with one another, the attuning at the center of every Heart to Heart? The oldest piece of all. In the centuries just after the apostles, the church’s first spiritual guides went into the Egyptian desert to seek God with their whole hearts. The church calls them the desert fathers and mothers, and their communities kept one practice at the center of life together: a younger member would walk to an elder’s cell and say out loud what had been moving in his heart, and the elder received it. Friend, look at what that is: your check-in, and our Heart to Heart rhythm, centuries early. Quiet, share your heart honestly, be attuned to, listen for God. John Cassian, a monk who lived among them and carried their wisdom to the wider church, recorded why it was a rule of life, not a suggestion: hidden things “hold sway in us just so long as they are hidden in the heart.” We say, what you can name, you can tame. The desert said it first.

So the next time you open the chart, or settle into a Heart to Heart and someone asks what you are feeling, remember: you are joining a line of hearts that runs from a bishop’s candlelit study through desert cells to your screen on an ordinary morning. The room is older than it looks. The question is deeper than it sounds. And the One the whole practice has always been stretching toward is already there, glad, as ever, to be with you.