“You can entrust everything to me and always pour out your heart to me” (Inner Word).
How much it would help people to respond to this invitation of our Heavenly Father! Isn’t that what we are longing for? Aren’t we looking for someone we can trust without reservation, someone who will listen to us and understand us?
We continue with the theme from yesterday: the purification of the heart.
With the willingness to perceive one’s depths before the loving Lord, a double realism arises: one recognises both the dark side in oneself and at the same time encounters the mercy of God. One understands that God does not reject and punish because of the impurity that comes from the heart, but that His love has set out to bring light into the darkness.
It is not a question of integrating the shadow, as is sometimes suggested in depth psychology, and seeing it as part of the personality. This cannot be a way to transform the heart. A correct view of “integration” of the “shadow” is the recognition of the fact that there are abysses in the heart and that these should not be repressed. The shadow, however, does not essentially belong to man, but is the deformation of his very being, the inheritance of the “old Adam” who, turned away from God, fell under the dominion of sin (cf. Rom 5:12). He distorts the image of God, which God in His goodness wants to restore. For this process, the purification of the heart is essential.
