Tuesday. Kalli Dalrymple | Collegian
“You’re going to hear us give a talk, but you’re also going to hear something individually and very unique because the Holy Spirit is going to speak to each one of you.”
This is how Sister Miriam James Heidland began the evening as dozens of students, faculty, and Hillsdale residents piled into the formal lounge to hear both her and Rev. John Burns speak on “Freedom and Purpose: Jesus Christ and the Fulfillment of All Desire” on Tuesday, Jan. 26.
David Strobach, vice president of Catholic Society, invited Heidland and Burns to campus to inspire students to go deeper in their faith. Burns mentored Strobach last summer.
“I knew Burns’ presence and his message could help shape so many souls, so I was dying to get him here,” Strobach said. “He often co-speaks with Sister Miriam James Heidland, so I thought a joint-event would be improbable, but beyond impactful if it could work out.”
Heidland opened the talk with an invitation to let God “come a little closer,” testifying to her own change of heart.
A former Division I athlete, Heidland shared the story of her radical conversion to the Catholic faith and how she joined the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity after graduating from University of Nevada-Reno. Burns entered seminary to become a diocesan priest after graduating from the University of Notre Dame.
Burns began with a testimony about his spiritual wandering after high school. He took a backpacking trip through Australia and New Zealand rather than take a job in Chicago, and said it wasn’t until the end of the trip he realized how restless his heart was.
“There’s this question that we all need to sit with a little bit in the Gospel of John, that Jesus asks his apostles, and it’s ‘What are you looking for?’” Burns said. “I share my story just to testify to the fact that I had all the things I thought I wanted, but in fact none of them were enough.”
This fundamental problem of seeking satisfaction in something beside God, Burns said, reminds us that we are truly made for heaven, not earth. Though cliche, this idea is necessary to understand the purpose of our life, he said. Heidland agreed.
“Christ continually shatters our paradigms of who we think God is,” Heidland said. “We have these ideas of who we think God is and we have these ideas of who we think we are. And Jesus Christ comes continually and he shatters our tiny little worlds.”
Every human being desires to be seen, Heidland said, but only God truly sees our hearts. The Greek word for “seeing,” she said, is not just a passing glance, but means “to intensely behold” something.
“There is a power to the human heart when we are seen,” Heidland said.
This revelation is important, she said, because modern man has “condemned himself to success.” Without God, man has no place to take his failures.
“We have been condemning ourselves to this idea that ‘I must succeed’ or that ‘I must be a certain way’ or that ‘I can’t have any failure so that I can’t allow the Lord to come into the deep places of my heart because I have to be perfect,’ but this idea is condemning and exhausting,” Heidland said.
Rather than hide from our hearts, Burns said the season of college is the perfect moment to go deeper.
“You have this privileged season here where you get to step out of the flow, and into a place where you can go deeply,” Burns said. “Deeply in the mind, but also deeply in the heart, and you can check your vision and check what you’re looking at and what you’re searching for.”
Burns said he hopes we recognize how interested Christ is in knowing our hearts and that God looks upon us simply to make us well.
Heidland ended the talk in a final meditation of the heart, encouraging attendees to dig into the parts of their heart which they withhold from God and to freely offer them back to him.
“The reason why we love a good story is because we’re part of a good story,” Heidland said. “We are part of the best story ever, and it’s called salvation history. Welcome to the front row of it. It’s called your life.”
