give Me your heart — Adolphe Monod

“My son, give me your heart.” — Proverbs 23:26

“Man is a creature who has a heart to give…

The heart, for me, is the seat of the emotions, conscience, and love—all of which belong to that inner region that is the primitive and substantive soil of human nature…

But this heart that is within us and, more than anything else, is us is also a heart that aspires to give itself. Beyond that, it finds itself only in giving itself away. To be loved is its joy, but to love is its life. It is in our hearts that the full truth of the Lord’s word, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35), finds its application. Or rather, for the heart, to give is to receive; to give freely is to receive abundantly; and in order to fully possess itself, it must give itself without reservation. Lacking this natural nourishment, our heart folds in on us—or rather against us. Turning to egotism, it gnaws its way through the bosom that contains it without satisfying itself. Given away it would bear us up, but kept it weighs us down. Given away it would cause us to live, but kept it kills us.
There is no one who doesn’t seek a place of rest for his heart.

God answers the heart engaged in that search with the words of my text, saying, “to me.” This response is even more sensitive and tender in a completely literal translation: “Give, my son, your heart to me.” Alas, that “to me” is neither the only one that the heart has heard, nor the first to which it may have listened.

“To me,” says sin with its covetousness, and many hearts have thrown themselves into that wide open pathway until a belated experience taught them that sin only scratches the heart’s needs in order to irritate them and that the most alluring seduction is followed by the bitterest aftertaste. Isn’t that true?

“To me,” says the world with its pomp and pleasures, and too many other hearts have been captured by that bait until they have recognized that the world, even the innocent world—if it ever was—has nothing to fill the heart’s void except its own void, which adds itself to the other instead of filling it. Isn’t that true?

“To me,” says natural affection in the form of a mother, a spouse, or a child, and how many hearts have given themselves without qualms to an inclination that seemed to have the cry of nature and even the approval of God, until they found that there is no creature in the world who can give rest to another creature? Alas, even if he could give it to him, what kind of rest would that be, reduced to reckon day by day with possible accidents, probable illness, and certain death? Isn’t that true?

Then it is that God comes. Or rather, since he was the first to come but without gaining access, we should say that God mercifully comes back, after all the others. He is content to take that humble place provided that he is welcomed in the end, even as a last resort, and he says to us, “My son, give your heart to me…

There, there is the God, the only God who asks for our heart. He is the personal God. Better yet, we say with Scripture that he is “the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9), the God who wants to maintain a warm, personal relationship with us, because he has a heart that responds to ours and that seeks ours (see e.g. Judges 10:16, 1 Samuel 13:14). He is God made man, whom we can love as truly and as naturally as we love a brother or a friend, and yet, through a marvelous union, he is also the spiritual God who enters into an inner communion with us that we cannot know or conceive of with any created being…

Thus, outside of Jesus Christ (Jesus Christ already come or still awaited, it matters little; the spirit who inspires a Saint Paul is also the one who inspires a Solomon or a David), no religion offers anything that resembles the invitation of my text: “My son, give me your heart.” Give me your observances, says the God of the Pharisees. Give me your personality, says the God of Hegel. Give me your intellect, says the God of Kant. Give me your sword, says the God of Mohammed. Give me your lust, says the God of Homer or Virgil. It remains for the God of Jesus Christ to say, “Give me your heart.”

— Adolphe Monod, An undivided Love: Loving and living for Christ, sermon entitled “give me your heart”

www.tunl.duke.edu/~cwalker/AULchap1.pdf