Kallistos Ware Quotes

“As Thomas Merton correctly observes, “Sufism looks at man as a heart. . . . The heart is the faculty by which man knows God”, and so the supreme aim in Sufism is nothing else than “to develop a heart that knows God”. In the words of Rumi, “I have looked into my own heart; it is there that I have seen Him; He was nowhere else.” This leads Martin Lings to observe in his book What is Sufism?, “What indeed is Sufism, subjectively speaking, if not ‘heart-wakefulness’?”. Illustrating this, he quotes al-Hallâj: “I saw my Lord with the Eye of the Heart.” The Hesychast tradition of the Orthodox Church, for its part, speaks repeatedly of “prayer of the heart”, of the “discovery of the place of the heart”, of the “descent from the head to the heart”, and of the “union of the intellect (nous) with the heart”. (p. 5)
– Kallistos Ware, Chapter 1: How Do We Enter the Heart?”
― James S. Cutsinger, Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East

“Heart" in this context is to be understood in the Semitic and biblical sense rather than the modern Western sense, as signifying not just the emotions and affections but the totality of the human person. The heart is the primary organ of our identity, it is our inner-most being, "the very deepest and truest self, not attained except through sacrifice, through death." According to Boris Vysheslavtsev, it is "the center not only of consciousness but of the unconscious, not only of the soul but of the spirit, not only of the spirit but of the body, not only of the comprehensible but of the incomprehensible; in one word, it is the absolute center."

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The aim is not just "prayer of the heart" but "prayer of the intellect in the heart," for our varied forms of understanding, including our reason, are a gift from God and are to be used in his service, not rejected. This "union of the intellect with the heart" signifies the reintegration of our fallen and fragmented nature, our restoration to original wholeness.

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For the heart has a double significance in the spiritual life: it is both the center of the human being and the point of meeting between the human being and God. It is both the place of self-knowledge, where we see ourselves as we truly are, and the place of self-transcendence, where we understand our nature as a temple of the Holy Trinity, where the image comes face to face with the Archetype. In the "inner sanctuary" of our own heart we find the ground of our being and so cross the mysterious frontier between the created and the Uncreated. "There are unfathomable depths within the heart," state the Macarian Homilies.

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usually prayer of the heart comes, if at all, only after a lifetime of ascetic striving. There is a real danger that, in the early stages of the Jesus Prayer, we may too readily assume that we are passing from oral prayer to prayer of the heart. We may be perhaps tempted to imagine that we have already attained wordless prayer of silence, when in fact we are not really praying at all but have merely lapsed into vacant drowsiness or waking sleep.

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Prayer of the heart, when and if it is granted, comes as the free gift of God, which he bestows as he wills. It is not the inevitable effect of some technique. St. Isaac the Syrian underlines the extreme rarity of the gift when he says that "scarcely one in ten thousand" is counted worthy of the gift of pure prayer, and he adds "As for the mystery that lies beyond pure prayer, there is scarcely to be found a single person in each generation who has drawn near to this knowledge of God's grace." One in ten thousand, one in a generation: while sobered by this warning, we should not be unduly discouraged. The path to the inner kingdom lies open before all, and all alike may travel some way along it. In the present age, few experience with any fullness the deeper mysteries of the heart, but very many receive in a more humble and intermittent way true glimpses of what is signified by spiritual prayer.”
― Kallistos Ware