What Fills the Jack Hammered Hole in the Heart?

©2010 Randall A. Beeler

nd the word of the Lord came to me, saying: 2 Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a provoking house: who have eyes to see, and see not: and ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a provoking house. 3 You, therefore, O son of man … 5 Dig you a way through the wall before their eyes: and you shall go forth through it. 6 In their sight you shall be carried out upon men's shoulders, you shall be carried out in the dark: you shall cover your face, and shall not see the ground: for I have set you for a sign of things to come (Ezek 12, DRE)

This morning as I knelt at Mass, I heard a jackhammer thudding in a nearby street, and I thought about my heart.


Have you ever hoisted a jackhammer? Heavy buggers, they are. If you even can hoist one (I barely can), when the pressure is turned on, you might as well be hugging a tornado. They have to be so darn heavy and thunderous, because they have to chip away at fortress walls of stone.

I realized this morning that the hole God asks Ezekiel to jackhammer is no mere symbol but a sacramental parable of Christ on the Cross, pounding through the fortress walls around my heart.



In Ezekiel's case, his holey city wall is an escape from my self-imposed stubborness, my hardness of heart. For Israel, and for I who sin, the only escape is exile.



Yet, the Word of the Lord promises a return. He returns to the leveled city of my heart and bores through my hearts … not that I might escape my self-imposed alienation, but that He might make a garden, a Carmel, of my barren cardiac landscape.

But my heart is hard, and I cannot from within jackhammer a whole through it. Besides, what am I going to do with a hole in my heart? If I can't make the breach, how am I supposed to stop it up?



At the end of Mass, when the jackhammer had quieted and Father John had returned the Monstrance to the altar, I knelt and saw Who fills the hole in my heart: His flesh. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, He fills the hole and makes me whole.



Christ is exiled with us, and in so doing, ends our exile:

saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth was gone: and the sea is now no more. 2 And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men: and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people: and God himself with them shall be their God. (Rev 21, DRE)