Tag Archives: devotion

Your Sacred Heart within me beating

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Sacred Heart of Jesus, by Smith Catholic Art

Sacred Heart of Jesus, by Smith Catholic Art (prints available).

I have other things to do today [insert other usual disclaimers which I then go on to ignore], but my dear friend Laura of Catholic Cravings and my new friend Ryan of the Back of the World are inaugurating their splendid new effort, O Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, and tomorrow, by my reckoning, being the First Friday of September, I wanted to be a part of their first First Friday Linkup, in which we all blog about the same thing, our Lord’s most Sacred Heart. Since Laura lives on the other side of the world (I’m not sure which side is the rear end?), and we are going by her clock, it will be First Friday by the time I finish writing this post.

First Friday Linkup (OMostSacredHeart.com)

The suggested topic for this month is “How did [I] first learn about the Sacred Heart?” In order to be brief, for the sake of their readers as well as my other-things-to-do, I will do my best to constrain myself to that. This will be a little of a rambling journey, I’m afraid, and as a further word of warning, I almost always have more to say than I mean to, or than anybody wants to read!

Growing up in evangelical circles, having little knowledge of the Catholic Church but having occasional, cultural brushes with it, I had heard of this “Sacred Heart” thing. Churches were named after it, and I had encountered the artwork of Jesus revealing His heart, especially in an area with a growing Hispanic population — but I never had any idea what any of that meant. And then one day — perhaps as one of the last important signposts to my Catholic journey, when I still had no idea I was on a Catholic journey, no intention at all of becoming Catholic — it gripped me.

audrey-assad-this-house-you're-building

It was the very first week of grad school, in my new apartment in a new place. I was feeling the stirrings of a new call to faith, and was wrapped up in searching for churches to visit, to finally find where I belonged. I did visit the Catholic Church during that time, but had found it offputting and dismissed it; I’ll tell that story before too long. Browsing around on the website of a Christian book and music seller, a new artist jumped out at me: Audrey Assad. I’m not even positive that I knew she was Catholic before I bought her CD. She was nerdy-cute, and a singer-songwriter, and I had a new friend named Audrey (who is Catholic), and that was probably enough to reel me in.

And in the very first track on the CD, it took me aback:

And for Love of You, I’m a sky on fire
And because of You, I come alive
And it’s Your Sacred Heart within me beating
Your voice within me singing out,
For Love of You,
O for Love of You.

I froze in what I was doing. I literally heard it in capital letters: Your Sacred Heart within me beating. That’s something Catholic, I thought. And I felt my own heart beating; my hand on my chest; the blood rushing to my head. Is Your Sacred Heart beating within me, Jesus?

I had never thought of the Heart of Jesus that way before. Sure, of course, Jesus had come to live in my heart. But was His Heart beating within me? — His love for all the world? Did I have the Heart of Jesus?

(If I hadn’t already known it, I quickly confirmed in the liner notes of the CD: the lyric printed as Your Sacred Heart. Audrey Assad is a Catholic convert, raised in a Protestant household and coming to the Church at age 19. And please, my brothers and sisters, pray with Audrey — who is of Syrian descent — and with Pope Francis, and with the whole Church, for peace in Syria and in the Middle East.)

O'Donnell, Heart of the Redeemer

It would still be another six months before I would be drawn back to the Catholic Church, nudged by the local Audrey. But that moment would always stay with me. On one of my thrifting adventures within the next year or so, I ran across a wonderful book on the theological and scriptural and mystical foundations of devotion to the Sacred Heart: Heart of the Redeemer by Timothy T. O’Donnell, through Ignatius Press — so I had no doubt that it would be good. Contrary to what some have asserted, devotion to the Heart of Jesus has a firm and deep grounding in Scripture itself, which, upon learning and studying it, captured my whole mind and heart, and brought me to fall in love with Jesus all over again, with His Heart — which, I pray, may ever beat within me.

I have so much more to share about my Lord and His Sacred Heart! Thank you, Laura and Ryan, for the opportunity!

The Sacred Heart of Jesus

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Sacred Heart

Pompeo Batoni. Il Sacro Cuore (The Sacred Heart) (1740).

I feel like I’ve been on the offensive a lot lately. I apologize for that. I’ve made three posts in the past two weeks against sola scriptura — and I have to confess, it’s been partly out of annoyance at the closed-mindedness the doctrine engenders. Forgive me for that. My deeper aim, in this blog and even in those posts, is to extend to my Protestant brethren the fullness and beauty that the Apostolic Tradition of the Church has to offer.

(For what it’s worth, that last sola scriptura post had been on the back burner half-formed since I posted the first two, so I decided I needed to finish it. I also have another rather critical post I began writing last year sometime, before I even entered the Church, about church membership, that I put down because I decided it wasn’t the tone I wanted my blog to take. I may look at it again sometime to see if there’s anything to salvage.)

Today is the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, and June is the Month of the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart is a devotion to the wounded physical heart of Jesus as a representation of His all-surpassing divine and human love for all humanity. This devotion — really the idea of devotions to things other than God Himself — is a new, rather strange concept to my evangelical brain. Isn’t devotion to or worship of an object idolatry? Well, no. Idolatry is worship of something as a god that isn’t God. Veneration of the saints is not idolatry because it’s not worship. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is not idolatry because the Blessed Sacrament really is Jesus. Likewise devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is not idolatry because it is an aspect of Jesus: it’s the love of Christ for all humanity, the love of God for all the world; and God is love (1 John 4:16).

Devotion to the Sacred Heart has a long tradition, with roots in Scripture and in the Church Fathers. I have an excellent book (picked up on one my thrifting quests) about the history and theology of the Sacred Heart, Heart of the Redeemer by Timothy T. O’Donnell, S.T.D. The earliest Christians associated the water flowing from the side of Christ at his Crucifixion with the “rivers of living water” flowing “from his heart” (John 7:37-38). . . .

[And a sidenote: I’m thrilled that the ESV and some other newer Bible translations, even Protestant ones, have translated this verse as “out of his heart.” Traditionally, that Greek word, κοιλία (koilia — in the phrase, ἐκ τῆς κοιλίας), has been rendered “belly” or “bosom”: according to the LSJ, it is a common Greek noun that refers to a cavity of the body, especially the belly or abdomen, but also any body cavity, ventricle, chamber, such as in heart, lungs, liver, brain: figuratively, the innermost center of being and consciousness of a person. It is the same word used for Mary’s womb in Luke 1:42. The Hebrew word used in Proverbs 4:23, the essence of which John 7:38 seems to follow, is לב (lêb), and most certainly refers to the heart (translated καρδία [kardia] in the Septuagint). In short, I think it’s pretty fantastic that the ESV translators, in translating a verse that refers to Old Testament prophecy, considered the Hebrew context of the words in their translation decisions from Greek. Jesus more than likely would have been speaking Aramaic, and may have quoted the passage in Aramaic rather than Hebrew; though especially the Evangelists Matthew and John would have been familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures. Both the Evangelists and our modern translators had to consider all these things in translating to and from Greek.]

St. Bernard

St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

. . . And the Church Fathers saw this wound, this flow of blood and water from the side of Christ, from His heart, as a symbol that the Heart of Jesus is the source and fountain of the living water that gives us grace, salvation, and the Sacraments (O’Donnell 49). Jesus’s wounds, his suffering for our sake, became a visible symbol of His love for us. Over the centuries of tradition, increasing devotion to the Heart of Jesus developed. There are so many wonderful passages I could quote (this book is really amazing), but here are some of my favorites. From St. Bernard (1090–1153):

The secret of His Heart is laid bare in the wounds of his body. One can easily read in them the mystery of God’s infinite goodness and merciful tenderness which came down to us like a dawning from on wounds. How could you indeed, Lord, show us more clearly than by your wounds that You are indeed ‘full of goodness and mercy abounding in love.’

From David of Augsburg (d. 1272) (O’Donnell 101):

From the burning Heart of Jesus flows his blood, hot with love. Jesus showed us from the Cross his faithful heart, glowing with love, since the death of our souls touched him more nearly than the death of his body. Ah, dearest Lord Jesus Christ, what great love and faithfulness wilt thou show when thou displayest thy riches and openest thy Heart to thy beloved friends!

The devotions grow longer, more elaborate, more flowery, until in the late seventeenth century, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French nun and mystic, experienced a series of visions of the suffering Christ, in which He revealed his Sacred Heart to her, and set her own heart aflame with the fire of His. It is from her revelations and her writings that our modern conception of the Sacred Heart has proceeded. Devotion to the Sacred Heart spread throughout France, and gradually beyond its borders. Pope Pius IX first extended the Feast of the Sacred Heart to the entire Church in 1856. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII consecrated the entire human race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, following the visions of Blessed Mary of the Divine Heart, in whose visions Christ Himself requested the consecration.

So in short: The Sacred Heart is, to put it simply, an ancient, God-inspired Christian meme. So much in tradition works this way: a writer has a revelation, and then another writer picks it up and elaborates upon it, until over time, a whole tradition of devotion and literature develops around it. No matter how you might feel about the personal revelations of these nuns, it is the symbol of the Sacred Heart that is important: the symbol of Christ’s divine and human love for the whole world, that has been a longstanding Christian tradition and object of devotion. To dedicate oneself to the Sacred Heart is to dedicate oneself to live in and for the love of Christ.