Know your heart

Here is a beautiful story and prayer from Dr. Remen. Hopefully it can lift our spirits!

Recently during a physicians' seminar on listening, we all took out our stethoscopes and spent several minutes listening to our own hearts. We are all middle-aged people and for the first little while everyone anxiously diagnosed themselves, fearful of hearing a split S1... or a third heart sound. But as time went on, we moved past all that and heard something steadfast in the midst of our lives that had been there always, even before we were fully human. Our lives and all other lives depended on it. It was a profound and ineffable encounter with the mysterious. Most of us were deeply moved. We had auscultated and diagnosed hearts for years, but none of us had ever experienced this before. In that moment we had glimpsed something beyond our habitual way of seeing and hearing and knew that what we work with every day is life itself...Afterward there was a silence. Then one of the cardiologists present began to speak about his work and to wonder aloud how one could be so close to something holy and not know it. It reminded him, he said, of a prayer that he had heard some time back. Somewhat embarrassed, he began to recite it aloud:


Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightening, illuminates the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, "How filled with awe in this place and we did not know it."
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's blessings, p.70