By DONALD DeMARCO
“Have a heart” is a popular idiom: “I am sorry for what I said, please have a heart and forgive me.” It does, however, raise an interesting question: “Is it possible for a person not to possess this vital organ?”
Can a person truly be heartless, if only for a moment? The heart is at the very core of our personality. This statement may appear redundant since the word “core” is derived from the Latin cor, which refers to the heart. At any rate, the heart is an essential and indelible part of us. We cannot rid ourselves entirely of our heart.
What we mean when we implore a person to “have a heart” is to get his heart functioning in the proper way. The heart should be a source of virtue and nothing less. When our heart is not expressing itself virtuously, it may create the impression that a person is “heartless.” The heart is versatile and spacious, capable of many things, some good, some not so good. The heart is multilayered and polyvalent.
The Pseudo-Macarius has expressed the matter admirably: “The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons live there, and there are many lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace — all things are there.”
We would do well to take his message to heart.
Three virtues of the heart, in particular, that should be cheerfully employed during the Christmas Season are warm-heartedness, lightheartedness, and kind-heartedness. Charles Dickens’ immortal classic, A Christmas Carol, is about the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge’s heart from something icy cold to something vibrant and bursting with joy.
Early in the tale, Dickens describes Scrooge as an ice-cold character whose heart is bereft of any warmth: “The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrow, and on his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always within him; he iced his office in the dog days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”
A novelist can make his character utterly unattractive simply by reducing the temperature of his heart.
Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell is a frozen lake in which Satan is eternally trapped. Scrooge was heading in that direction until his heart underwent a radical conversion. A heart of ice is a heart of vice.
We read in Luke 24:32 about the two companions who walked with Jesus on the road to Emmaus. “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked to us on the road, while He opened to us the Scriptures?” The warmth of Jesus’ heart touched them just as the warmth of a fireplace warms those who are close to it.
Warm-heartedness is infectious. It communicates itself to others without effort. The virtue of warm-heartedness, like modesty, is recognized apart from its being expressed in a particular action. If there must be global warming, let it arise from the collectivity of happy hearts.
Through the intercession of the spirits of the past, present, and future, Scrooge’s heart began functioning at full throttle. The virtues of warm-heartedness, lightheartedness, and kind-heartedness were activated simultaneously, which made Scrooge’s whole being go into a spin. “I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath….“I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”
The “bah, humbug” of the cynic had faded into the distant past. He now went about wishing everyone in sight a Merry Christmas laughing all the way. As Dickens states, “His own heart laughed; and that was quite enough for him.” Scrooge had unburdened himself from the weight of monetary concerns which freed him to be light-hearted. G.K. Chesterton famously stated that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
Warm-heartedness and lightheartedness had made it easy for him to be kindhearted. Scrooge purchased the prize turkey, twice the size of Tiny Tim, and dispatched it anonymously to the Cratchit family. His heart was bursting with virtue so much so that he promised to give his longsuffering employee a raise and committed himself to assisting his struggling family. Tiny Tim would receive his life-saving operation.
“Shall not my heart’s warming,” wrote Robert Browning, “not nurse thee into strength?”
The nineteenth-century Nova Scotian humorist, Thomas C. Haliburton once remarked that “God has made sunny spots in the heart; why should we exclude the light from them?”
Proverbs 17; 22 reminds us that “a cheerful heart is good medicine.” The three spirits who visited Ebenezer Scrooge had awakened his “sunny spots” and provided him with strong medicine. And in so doing, brought him back to life. Virtue is the vitality of the heart.
Wishing people a “Merry Christmas” is a very lighthearted thing to do. Gifts are expressions of kindheartedness. Warm-heartedness is the glow that radiates from all who observe the joy that Christmas brings. Christmas is a time when these virtues of the heart should be fully on display. They resonate the joy of the first Christmas and the singing of angels.
Tiny Tim has the last word in Dickens’ classic, “God bless us every one,” affirming Dickens’ own words: “For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a Child Himself.”
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a professor emeritus of St. Jerome’s University and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary. He is a regular columnist for the St. Austin Review. His latest books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com.)
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