From the 1st Reading for Holy Mass in the Vetus Ordo….
Return to Me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning; rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord, your God. – Joel 2
When we “rend” something, we radically “wrench” it from its place and open it. To “rend” is to tear, and wrench even violently. The Hebrew word is kawrah, meaning a range of violent acts, like what wild animals do, what a knife does. This is what God wants us to do with our hearts.
God doesn’t desire anything for us except that which is good. Even in the bad things that He permits to happen in our lives, God can cause good things to result.
But why would “rending” our hearts be good for us?
One good reason for rending our hearts, is that it would please God who in His mercy asks us to.
Going farther and taking us back to the question of “Why?”, when you rend something, you can see inside it, the interior is laid bare to view, it contents are no longer a secret.
During the blessing of the ashes, holy Church prays for those who will accuse themselves of sins, weep for them and hold them up to the view of divine mercy.
When we rend our hearts we can see what to hold up to God.
Remember that God already sees it. As St. Augustine describes in his Confessions, when we go looking inside ourselves, He is already there, He is closer to us than we are to ourselves.
After the ashes are blessed, they are distributed. The choir sings…
“Emendemus in melius… Let us amend for the better in those things in which we have sinned through ignorance: lest suddenly overtaken by the day of death, we seek space for penance, and are not able to find it. Hear O Lord, and have mercy: for we have sinned against thee.”
One of the projects that we undertake during Lent is to bring light into the darkness corners of our minds and hearts, to dispel ignorance about who we truly are, what we have truly been, how, in truth, we have sinned by commission or omission, where we have failed, in what ways we have placed something on the thrones of our lives where God alone must reign.
The Gospel from Matthew 6 also speaks of the heart….
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,.. says Our Savior… For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.
If our hearts are in the wrong place, then we need to wrench our hearts and rend our hearts, look inside and clean them out and then place them on high, offering them to God, raising them to Heaven.
Follow your heart, common adage says.
If your heart is below, that’s where you’ll go.
If your heart is on high, your thoughts, words and deeds will follow.
Sursum corda!
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