How do you catch your heart?

Catch your heart. Catch your truth. (The writer by the Hudson Yards in NYC, summer 2021)

As a small child, like most young children, I always played on my seat or on the aisles during Holy Mass. And in my playful childhood, I only remember one homily given by a priest which has stuck with me even to this day.

I was with my mother Jocelyn at the Cathedral Church in Cebu City, my birthplace. The officiating priest (bless his soul) was Msgr. Maglasang, quite a well-known Church leader who was from Tuburan, a northern town where my father Anastacio was born. 

He spoke gently during his sermon, so beautifully, that I listened to him, instead of playing on the pew. What I clearly recalled was the confusion I had in my mind when he said which was something to this effect: So I am telling you to try to catch our heart. Learn to be able to catch your heart. 

That message stuck in my mind all throughout my growing years. What does he mean by catching my heart? It is inside my chest. Why will I catch it? 

How do you catch your heart, Msgr. Maglasang? I have asked the good Monsignor inside my mind as far as I could remember. Although I had that in my mind, I never bothered to ask my mother right at that moment as well, nor until we reached home. 

I grew up rationalizing that Msgr. Maglasang was just waxing poetic. 

So many years later, I landed into my course on Spiritual Formation in the spring of 2021 for my doctoral studies, in the era of the coronavirus. I skimmed through my four reference books. Henri Nouwen’s Spiritual Formation (Following the Movement of the Spirit) has given me such enlightenment on how to catch your heart!

Spiritual formation is the way of the heart, viola!  There’s the answer to my silent question while growing up.  

Me at three with my parents (Anastacio Montebon, RIP Dad, and Mom Joy Rubi Montebon now living in Stockton) on a Sunday at the beach in Talisay, Cebu.

To catch my heart means to be true to yourself. One has to journey from the mind to the heart as the process of spiritual formation. My mind has to courageously discard denials, confront fears, and accept mistakes. Only then can I touch my bare self. Only then can freedom be achieved.

As a journalist, truthfulness is my commitment. I bear myself to truth, meaning dealing with the reality outside but shielding my inner world from its brutality. I am being more cerebral than emotional. I dig the truth as a matter of mission and try not associate the precision of facts with my own feelings and opinion. My psyche is such that truth is the primary rule, regardless of what I believe or how I feel.

I think that it is perhaps because of this mindset that I have never really understood Msgr. Maglasang’s message of trying to catch your heart. 

I have been fixed into my cerebral world, leaving my heart untouched, protecting it from drama, I should say. It has often just been my mind that’s while writing to beat my deadline. Such cerebral discipline makes me go deep into my language - looking at meanings, angles, and perspectives in a way that it is always challenging per story that I tackle. But more often than not, my journalism work has always been a cerebral journey to produce a story to beat a deadline. 

I remember the inspiration given by Dolly Parton in her Heart Strings movie on Netflix. A singer - composer must write and sing from the heart, she encouraged. I found that beautiful but realized only later that doing things from the heart is spiritual. 

Writing from the heart is always easier said than done, and that is the challenge. Each one of us have to deal with ourselves in a unique and difficult way. But once you get hold of your truth, you get hold of your heart, the words and music just flows out, majestically. 

People who read and hear music or a narrative that is written by the heart would simply just love to journey with the writer or composer. They ride on the music of the song or the beautiful flow of the written narrative. 

Thank you, Msgr. Maglasang and Dolly Parton. Thank you, God for the people around me, as you spoke through them. 

Writing from the heart is my own way of a spiritual journey. I finally have caught my heart. I am writing based on reality and from within, especially now from within. In my heart, God has whispered - and I hear it - when you are able to touch it as you do things that you love doing, which is writing in my case, you embrace truth, feel joy, and become humble and grateful. #