What is the condition of your ‘heart’ starting 2024? For me, my actual physical heart needed a check. In 2021 during a year long struggle with ‘long covid’, my doctor recommended I do an echocardiogram. This was the first time in my life for that, and as the test went on and the technician looked at the images of my heart, they kept turning up the sound of the ‘glug, glug, glug’ of my heartbeat. It was a bit disconcerting when they also would give a little sigh and mutter ‘oh’! Later I found out that the test had discovered that one of my valves was ‘regurgitating’ and had some ‘moderate’ damage. Whether due to covid, or perhaps this was a pre-existing condition back to childhood, they did not know. It was not serious enough to merit any further surgery, only monitoring.

I did wonder at the time, if I did an echocardiogram of my inner ‘heart’, or ‘soul’, or inner life, what would that look like? What would yours look like?

Again at the start of 2024, a few days ago, my physician had recommended I do another echocardiogram to make sure the valve had not gotten worse. She had seen some edema (swelling) in my legs and wanted to make sure all was good with my heart. So again I lay on the table on my side, and a technician again hooked me up and did the test. This time the ‘glugs’ didn’t get turned up as loud, and there were no ‘sighs’. I haven’t gotten the official results back yet, but hopefully the ‘moderate’ issue has stayed the same for now.

So what is the state of our inner life as we go into 2024? A few months ago I was on my way to South Africa for an intensive of a Masters in Christian Formation that I have staffed the past few years. In a very crowded departure waiting area due to delayed flights, I ended up next in line to a lady. She asked me why I was going to Capetown, assuming it was for tourism as she was. When I mentioned the Masters, she asked what Christian formation was about, and I said there was a focus on our ‘inner life’. She looked at me with a blank stare, and said ‘what do you mean, our inner life’? I tried to explain as simply as I could, with a contrast to our ‘outer life’. But I wonder: how many of us and those around us live as if all that exists is our outer persona, one that interacts with people and circumstances and life everyday? Yet there is always so much going on in our emotions, thoughts, motivations, desires that are ‘below the surface’ of what people see from the outside.

As Thomas Merton, Christian monk and teacher, writes so well: ‘Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.‘ This inner journey starts with a surrender to its reality, not denying how we feel or think or desire or are motivated to respond. It often starts with being more attentive to the simple things all around us, the beauty even of creation. As Merton also writes: ‘One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of an interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendor that is all around us in the creatures of God. We do not see these things because we have withdrawn from them.‘ (pgs. 447, 386, in ‘A Thomas Merton Reader’, edited by Thomas P. McDonnell, 1974).

How attentive are we to the sunrises and sunsets of a day? Or to our own feelings in a situation? What is happening in our ‘heart’ or inner life, will always affect and impact our outer life and world, as much as we may try to mask it. One of the things in our inner life that can most affect us negatively is disappointment. As one sage said, ‘Disappointment is the mother of bitterness’. When we allow disappointments and regrets to grow internally, it can start us on a path to becoming the ‘victim’ in life and allow bitterness and resentment to grow. Doing an echocardiogram of our inner heart is important periodically to make sure that these inner attitudes that can destroy us do not grow from ‘moderate’ or even ‘limited’ to becoming much more serious. And then an inner heart surgery may be required, just as it is if our physical heart has danger signs.

It is not easy to do ‘inner work’. And it can be oh so scary, and at times painful. A rather daunting quote about this inner work, but with much truth in it, comes from Fritz Kunkel, a depth psychologist and Christian believer who sought to integrate faith/religion and psychology. Kunkel writes about facing areas of inner darkness in the ‘cellar’ of our inner lives: ‘The way to overcome darkness is not to fight or inveigh against it, but to introduce the light-not to suppress the negative, but to develop the positive. This we must do by going courageously downstairs into the cellar of our life-into the unconscious, the dark region where the forgotten remnants (experiences) of the past dwell like specters haunting the present. Then, when we turn on the light of that understanding which includes forgiveness, the specters vanish. We find they are not real but only illusions.’ (Kunkel, pg. 210, in Selected Writings, edited by John Sanford 1984).

A commitment to do this kind of inner work, though painful, can be incredibly rewarding. And though this work certainly involves the past, and bringing the light of understanding that includes forgiveness as Kunkel writes, it is also very much about living in today with a peace, hope, and joy that affects the future. As the saying goes that accompanies this post, today is our life and we need to live it. But often doing the work of facing the past is also so important.

So back to the echocardiogram of the heart. If you did one today of your inner heart, what would it show? What can you do in 2024 in inner work, and often with the needed help of others, to address the health of your heart?