Our hearts are complicated and fascinating, and we’d all be gentler with ourselves and find our lives more interesting if we listened more regularly to their beat. That’s also the secret of our relationship with Christ. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we must put a stethoscope to Christ’s heart and listen to its complex and fascinating rhythms. How do we do this? The Gospel of John gives us a mystical image of this. In John’s account of the Last Supper, he has a disciple, whom he describes as “the one whom Jesus loved,” reclining on the breast of Jesus. Obviously, this connotes a deep intimacy, but it’s also meant to convey something else. If you lean your ear on someone’s chest, you can hear that person’s heartbeat, which eventually begins to reverberate gently throughout your body. This is the image of perfect discipleship for John: We are “the one whom Jesus loves,” and we need to have our heads on Jesus’ breast to hear his heartbeat and, from there, look out at the world. Being attuned to Christ’s heartbeat and reclining in solace and intimacy on his breast will give us both the vision and the sustenance we need to live as we should. As we know, “the one whom Jesus loved” (historically referred to as John) refers to everyone. For John, this constitutes the very heart of discipleship and dwarfs everything else (charism, church office, even prophecy) regarding what’s essential. Intimacy with Jesus is more important than any charism or leadership role. And that’s our call, to have the kind of intimacy with Christ that has us reclining on his breast, hearing his heartbeat, and looking out at the world from that perspective. But how do we do that practically? We do this by imaging our heads on Christ’s breast, feeling that intimacy, hearing his heartbeat, and being filled with the comfort of that; we do this in visioning by listening to Christ’s heartbeat and looking out at the world to see what it means to love purely, beyond ideology, beyond being liberal or conservative, beyond different schools of thought, and our opinions and those of others. We do this by taking in his sustenance that allows us to find the strength to keep our hearts soft when everything beckons us to be hard, our tongues gentle when everything is gossip and slander, and ourselves aware of others’ gifts when all around there is jealousy. Our sensitivity must be a stethoscope that hears the beat of Christ’s complex and fascinating heart.