FROM THE FULLNESS OF THE HEART THE MOUTH SPEAKS

People often think the coldest places on planet earth are the north and south poles. Analogically, the heart of person could be the coldest place, for it is deep in the heart of a person, evil seeds are harboured and germinated, from which words and actions are the fruits.

A good heart is a like a good tree – it can produce only good fruits, and bad words and actions come from a bad heart. Words and deeds are like the ‘spokesperson’ of the heart, “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil, for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Lk 6:42)

Becoming a good person with a good heart just doesn’t happen. Goodness is a virtue that has be practiced again and again by the person until it becomes his/her nature. Today’s first reading uses the image of a good person like a sieve suffering the rubbing and the shaking in order to reveal the husk; the potter molded in the furnace. So, tribulation is the test of the just. The fruit shows the care that a tree has had. The character of a good and just person similarly will have to go through the test.

A good person would not see the faults in others, but see the imperfection of his own, lest he is like a blind man leading other blind men and all will fall into the pit. The purgatory of self is a process of purification or transformation where the unredeemed self will be purged or cleansed from what is not of God in himself, and having gone through it, the self is redeemed by being submerged and merged into the real SELF which is God.

Once a person can reach the goodness of God who shows his compassionate love equally to both the good and the evil, who makes rain and the sun to shine on both the grateful and ungrateful, his discriminating self then will be purified and transformed in the SELF of God, and become one with Him, who is all in all.

Quang Phan svd.