In view of the inner state of their contemporaries, many decline to conclude that it is possible to produce a human being who ceases to be intrinsically open to God and, on the contrary, completely loses the need for contact with the Creator. Are the people of the so-called new age cold atheists? Not at all. Reality must be discerned proportionately, not superficially. Atheism was not, is not and never will be the natural state of the human soul. It is an artificial reservoir of moral engineering in whose thick suspension they try to drown successive generations. Only the state of faith - the primordial certainty of the human spirit as to the nearness of God and His existence - is natural to humans. Why, then, does doubt seem to prevail today?
Again, one must carefully distinguish between dullness of heart and loss of faith. Not so long ago, me more than fifty years ago, somewhere up to the threshold of postmodernity, every person in Western culture was born into a civilization full of signs of the Creator. Everywhere you could hear the ringing of church bells, nuns and clergy strolled the streets, from time to time you saw processions, lines at confessionals, and even a child knew from a young age that Advent or Lent had begun in the Church. The culture itself, full of spiritual signs, naturally put people's inner senses in the presence of God. Someone may have been still at the beginning of his Christian formation, but through civilization he was already in communion with the Creator. Meanwhile, in the laboratory of modernity it was possible to change mercilessly. We should have no illusions: after all, many social, psychological or ethical experiments are directly concerned with effectively erasing the traces of God. Consequently, man today has not so much lost his faith-precisely this virtue he will renounce as the ultimate virtue, because it is the only thing that sustains in him the meaning of existence-as the supernatural capacity to have contact with God. The human person, living in a culture of distraction, very quickly gets rid of the capacity to pray. Spiritual space -liturgy, adoration or recollection- is never boring, but a soul deprived of the sharpness of the interior senses carries within itself a sterile sterility.
The great John of the Cross was not only a mystic, but also a good anthropologist, educated in the noble school of Salamanca. He knew, therefore, the human construction and based on it the whole path of the soul towards union with Christ. God wisely created the human being and wanted man to communicate reasonably with reality. For this reason he endowed him with senses, as if they were readers who gather information about the world. Man thus explores reality through sight, hearing, imagination or touch. But material reality, insinuates John of the Cross, is not the only world that really exists. God is Spirit and, in order to enter into communication with his environment, every human person is similarly endowed with spiritual senses. Just as he possesses the physical hearing or sight and touch with which he admires music or contemplates the mountains or the sea, so he possesses the spiritual hearing or sight with which he ascends to the summit of God's life.
And here lies the crux of the problem. As long as civilization respected the signs of the Creator's existence, people's spiritual senses honed and functioned. When entire cultures were trapped in the mirages of atheism, the spiritual senses of many were dulled. Man still has faith in God and pretends to renounce it as the last thing in life. Only it is difficult for him to orient himself towards God, to communicate with Him, to find Him, to talk to Him. Can anything be done about it? The spiritual senses are located in the human heart. Yes, the heart in the biblical sense is not a gimmick of sentimental preaching. It is not an object of psychological description, but the center of the personality. The heart is thus the wise administrator of the spiritual senses. If it is able to be formed, ordered and centered, the spiritual senses will quickly recover and strengthen: they will perceive God's presence, hear his teaching and feel his loving touch. But the opposite can also happen. A heart immersed in chaos - and this is what is happening today throughout Western civilization - will daze the senses and separate them an unaccustomed distance on the way to God. From this perspective, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus will help. The human heart must be molded to the form of the Heart of Christ - harmoniously, in concentration, in order, as far as possible from chaos, from confusion, from too many stimuli. When this is no longer guaranteed by the state of civilization, it must be consciously chosen by inner autonomy.
The hygiene of the human heart-the seat of the interior senses-should thus once again occupy an important place on the pastoral agenda. In recent times, there has often been an attempt in the Church to dazzle people with an excessive attraction to impulses, movements, lights and sounds, transferred directly from the world to the altar. Pastoral care was to be multicolored like a spectacle, dancing, noisy, humanly attractive. Thus, spiritual formation often lost its mystery and - to use the language of Pope Leo XIV - ended up as a spectacle. In this way, the chaos of people's inner senses becomes even more disordered and pastoral care loses its effectiveness. People receive too many aggressive stimuli every day in the midst of the world, so that in contact with the Lord - in the temple - they need more aesthetics, order, harmony or silence. The cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus will help them to live and then to pray concentrated, that is, to put together the inner senses in the human heart.
Polish priest, missionary in Uruguay, professor at the Theological Faculty of Montevideo and national secretary of the Pontifical Missionary Works of Poland.
