Dear Westwood Family,

I’m headed on a vacation to Spain next week, hoping to experience another total solar eclipse. And, of course, to enjoy the rich cultures of Spain. In preparation, I’ve been reading Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. (I am grateful to my friend, Rev. Laurel Mathewson, whose new translation into English is both beautiful and accessible. She was here at Westwood shortly after its release back in 2024.)

Teresa, a 16th century Spanish Christian mystic, described the journey of faith using the metaphor of a castle, with seven successive dwelling places that lead a believer closer in toward the final interior dwelling place: union with God. She surely presumed the people reading her words would be people devoted to God and to prayer–like the sisters in her Carmelite order. It’s humbling, then, to make my way through these many layers and levels of faith. I appreciate her detailed descriptions, which remind me that just because I (like her sisters!) take God seriously doesn’t mean my experience of closeness to God will be easy or quick. It is, as she describes, a long journey toward union with God. My experiences and sense of connection to God have more to do with the graciousness of God than my exceptional skill or merit in prayer.

As of my writing today, I’ve made it to her description of the fourth dwelling. I confess I’ve gotten a bit stuck there, pondering her description of the grace of God, which comes to humble hearts as a gracious gift, like an everflowing stream. She borrows a phrase from the Latin translation of Psalm 119:32 to describe this amazing gift that arrives: “cum dilatasti cor meum.” That is, “when God enlarged my heart.”

At this point, I feel compelled to note that the Psalm was originally written in Hebrew, not Latin, and that the ancient Hebrew culture imagined the heart to be the location of wisdom and understanding, more so than love. (This really makes our beloved UMC slogan sound redundant when we say: “Open hearts, Open minds, Open doors.”) To get to the heart of the matter (see what I did there?), “heart” in Hebrew encompasses mind, will, and emotion; it’s the location of the whole self.

In English translations of Psalm 119:32, we’re forced to make a choice, since just using the Hebrew word (“lev”) would make it even harder to comprehend. Faithful translators take different approaches, as they seek to accurately and faithfully capture the meaning. While I appreciate the gifts of other ways of writing this phrase, today I’m holding appreciation for the choices made by Robert Alter in his elegant and literary translation of the Hebrew Bible: “for You make my heart capacious.” (He adds a footnote, of course, to clarify that this includes minds, too: “The poet clearly refers here to the biblical notion of the heart as the seat of understanding.”)

A capacious heart has generous space to hold more. This seems to me to convey something critical about enlarged metaphorical hearts: God widens the capacity of our hearts, minds, and souls so that they can hold more. Teresa imagines this enlarged capacity using water as a stand-in for God’s presence and grace. By grace, God pours into our hearts, bubbling up like a natural spring. That water causes our hearts to grow larger, which means they’re able to carry more water. With our whole selves, we are able to hold more of God’s grace, for ourselves and for others.

Of course, as I’m seeking to understand the implications of Teresa’s mystical writing, I’m also thinking about the town of Ávila, where a wildfire rages nearby this beautiful walled city with ancient origins. I’m thinking of the parched land, as another heat wave comes with its desiccating warmth, extending the likelihood that fires can become extraordinarily destructive. I know Teresa’s description of water was used metaphorically, but I cannot escape the literalism of this vivid moment In our expanding climate crisis. I pray for containment for these fires, for relief from this heat wave, and for mitigation of the damage of extreme weather events in all places.

I’m also thinking of my recent visit to the Grand Canyon; with our Sierra Service Project team, we stopped for a brief visit at the Desert View Watchtower area of the South Rim. I find it dizzying to try to comprehend the scale of that canyon–it’s more than 10 miles across to the North Rim at points visible from our stop, and even so, the depth and dimensions of the canyon make it so that you can easily see to the bottom only in small sections. Over 5-6 millions of years, water carved this beautiful, intricate canyon, dramatically enlarging its capacity to hold water. And to stop my heart with awe.

I suspect that the ability to hold all these things at once is connected to the insight Teresa offers to us across the centuries: that it’s by the grace of God that we are given the capacity to know about and more deeply understand ourselves, others, and our planetary systems. Grace also allows us to love and care about all these things. And, divine grace enables us to choose to live differently in the world–to use our will to seek a world that honors, protects, and sustains the communities and ecologies we belong to.

So, today, I join my prayer to that of Teresa: dilatasti cor meum. You have enlarged my heart. Make it larger still.

grace and peace,

Pastor Molly