The Heart of Jesus is a heart of flesh, and not of stone. He loves each of us as if there were none other for Him to love.
St. John Henry Newman
We often see images of Jesus with his heart on fire, bursting from his chest, symbolising his love, compassion and suffering for humanity. The heart is exposed, encircled with thorns and surrounded by a radiant light, a light that burns for each and every one of us. In the Catholic tradition, the month of June is dedicated to the Sacred Heart.
Growing up, I was surrounded with these images of devotion, especially in my grandmother’s home. Whenever I stayed overnight, I slept under a gold-framed picture of Jesus with his heart powerfully aglow. I didn’t really like looking at this picture too closely, not being one who was good with the sight of anything that suggested blood or human wounds or suffering. But, I did understand the enormity of this great heart, a human and divine heart on fire with endless love; a love that included me. I also knew that my prayers were bundled into this giant love, held and heard. Though small and stumbling, they were sacred, too.
The devotion to the Sacred Heart became widespread after visions reported by Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) in the 17th century. Saint Margaret Mary was a French nun and mystic of the Visitation Order and was known for her profound devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. From a young age, she experienced mystical visions, but it was during her time at the convent in Paray-le-Monial that she received a series of extraordinary revelations from Christ between 1673 and 1675. In these visions, Jesus revealed his Sacred Heart to Margaret Mary, asking her to spread devotion to his Sacred Heart as a symbol of divine love and mercy. Today, the iconography of the Sacred Heart is an accepted artistic and symbolic image in Catholic piety and devotional practice.
Our hearts can be sacred, in small and hopeful ways, when we look beyond our own comforts and needs and see how others are managing in the lives they lead. Over the course of our lives, our hearts will change. They will still have the same shape and beat the same way but our actions in the world will be altered because some of our perceptions and responses have changed through time and trial and “lived experience.” This will enable us to be a little more merciful or compassionate, treading gently amongst others of our global family.
We become more heartfelt when our own hearts respond less judgementally, when we make more room in them, building up that hospitality of heart that we see and admire and try to emulate in the example of others.
We are all familiar with the Emmaus story. Post – Resurrection, Jesus joins two disciples on the road and they do not recognise him. They tell of the recent events in Jerusalem and are sad, confused and doubting. Jesus gently rebukes them, telling them they are slow of heart to believe the truth. However, when Jesus breaks bread they recognise him as their beloved teacher. Later, after Jesus has gone, they remark that their hearts were burning when Jesus spoke of the scriptures.
When do our hearts burn?
Sometimes, there are moments of great clarity or awe, moments of revelation when the scales fall from our eyes and we see something in its truth, not in the dress-up of artifice. Our hearts might burn in tearful awakenings, in new recognition, in something spine-tingling because it moves us in a moment of spiritual recognition, just like that moment of communion with Jesus and the two disciples. There may be a quiver or shiver bodily, a shaking or trembling, because we have been somehow undone.
And opened up.
It is that moment of profound change.
I recently saw the French film Jean Valjean : An honest man which tells the first hundred pages of the Les Misérables story and comes to its high point when the former prisoner decides to become a good man after the priest forgives his theft of the silver candlesticks. Jean is cast as a lumbering, brutish hulk and we are taken through his backstory and incarceration in great detail.
I found the scene where Jean takes a sous off a wandering chimney sweep and is immersed in his own thoughts most affecting. You can almost see him deciding his future path as the Spirit comes to change his life. A subtle shift in his demeanour indicates a turning point or conversion as he vows to take a different path. His slow of heart has been changed into a heart on fire because of the grace of redemption. The transformative power of metanoia changes the former prisoner, 24601, forever.
I thought it was a towering performance by Grégory Gadebois, so nuanced was the physical shift mirroring the spiritual one. (How wonderful, too, that great works of literature can be retold or reinterpreted to speak again to another audience.)
We have a choice as to how we live out our faith lives. We can be slow of heart or we can take heart as John reminds us in 16:33 when Jesus says Take heart, I have overcome the world. Our hearts can be fragile or fierce, burnt-out or burning, sore with disappointment or soaring in gladness. Our choice.
The poet, John Donne, wrote,
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
If we imagine our hearts on fire, we can kindle a passion to do good, to reach out, to do a bit more than we have to, to go way beyond the mere month of June, to make new our own sacred hearts for love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
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Anne Morrison says:
Thank-you, Ann, for another beautiful reflection.