Jesus could not work miracles for people without faith, because such persons are without the Holy Spirit which empowers people to “see” the Father in Jesus. People do not come to Christ unless the Father draws them through the gift of his Spirit of love for the Son he proclaims as his “beloved” at his baptism.

Our love for Jesus Christ evidences our acceptance of the Father’s gift of the Spirit of his love for his Son, “the beloved.” Our love of Jesus Christ and his body the church evidences our finding and reception of the Holy Spirit. This love is all of a piece with our love for all human beings; for how can we say we love God whom we do not see without loving our neighbor whom we see? Bernard  Lonergan’s theology of religious conversion makes it clear that even people who have never heard of Christ or his church can have been transformed by the gift of his Holy Spirit, evidenced by their falling in love with God. Their love for others is evidence of their having fallen in love with God; for how can we say we love God, if we do not love others. The Holy Spirit of God’s love has been found and welcomed by loving persons. Bottom line: the Holy Spirit is where it acts, and as the Holy Spirit of the Triune God’s love, it acts in the minds and hearts of loving persons whose love evidences their having found and received the Holy Spirit.
Because there is no such thing as presuppositionless history, many historiographers concur that objective historians are those who know and disclose their presuppositions. The cognitive-affective life of every human subject operates from presuppositions about their relational existence and its contexts. The challenge is to acquire a critical awareness and knowledge of how they are determining our interpretation of our historical experience. It is in this context that Alan Richardson, in his book History Sacred and Profane, affirms that what kind of person the historian is determines the kind of history he or she writes. (Lonergan was enthusiastic about this book, which implicitly affirmed his conversion theory.)
In this context it is more appropriate to speak of affectional rather than psychological conversion. If Lonergan speaks of the intellectual conversion of the knowing and loving subject, the correlative conversion of the human suject’s cognitive-affective consciousness is affectional.

The human subject as the cognitive and affective integrating center of consciousness needs both cognitive and affective health and maturation. In this respect, I thought your analogy of the empty heart with the empty head was brilliant. There is an inseparable interplay between the cognitive and affective that you imply in you excellent parallel.

True Images as Precondition for Human Development

Inasmuch as our images precondition our decision and action, it important to have true images of ourselves, others, the world, and God for responsible and virtuous decision and action. Kiely agrees with my axiom in Tellers that we cannot do anything without at least some some vague image (idea/phantasm).

Jesus’ parables employ the pedagogy of liberating us from false images of our relational life so that we can achieve authentic fulfillment with true images. His parable of the prodigal son, for example, contrasts the conversion of the one brother with its absence in the other because the former implicitly sees God as a father whom he loves, whereas the latter sees him as a boss for whom he work (personal father-son vs. impersonal master-slave relationship); consequently, the elder son cannot understand God as having a father’s love for a son because he has a master-slave image. Similarly, the elder son does not see the other as brother. He speaks of “that son of yours.” He has three distorted images that make his life miserable: God as an impersonal boss; himself as an impersonal slave/employee; others as alien miscreants. Father-Son-Brother vs. Master-Slave-Wretch. There is the interplay of the cognitive and affective in our images governing our decision and action. The elder son is a good example of how both aspects are at work in a distorted way that makes him the miserable, resentful, and mirthless refuser of God’s festivity.