The Heart of the Word Incarnate – Dennis J Murphy MSC
THE HEART OF THE WORD INCARNATE
Dennis J Murphy MSC
Imprimi potest Michael Curran MSC Superior General Rome, 10 October 2002
Imprimatur the Most Reverend Dr. Ignatius Pinto Archbishop of Bangalore India, 22 February 2003
@ by Heart of Jesus Society, Bellandur Gate, Bangalore 560 034, India.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
0Pub. No. 391 ISBN 81-7086-300-7
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Introduction
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is not an acceptable term in some circles. In a sense rightly so, because some feel it does not express the richness of this particular approach to Jesus Christ. For example, they find the word ‘devotion’ more an obstacle than a help. For others, of course, the devotion is simply a non-issue under any aspect. It is over and done with.
For a number of reasons, which I will explain later, I have decided to retain the expression ‘devotion to the Sacred Heart’. It is already in place and so has a right of possession. It presents no problem for many who are still helped by naming Jesus Christ ‘Sacred Heart’. And to consider the word ‘devotion’ an embarrassment is to ignore the richness of this word which traditionally has been synonymous with ‘religion taken to heart’.
At the same time, it would be out of proportion to get excited about what title we should use. Personal preferences are in order. The main point is that ‘heart’ is a word which cannot be replaced merely by the use of some synonym; it has linguistic, literary and psychological overtones that are unique to it. There are many such words in all languages; they embody and manifest deeper realities beyond their written and voiced syllables – in some ways they resemble sacraments. Thus, to omit to use the word ‘heart’ would impoverish the understanding and description of our religion. A word used 1,163 times in the Bible is not without. significance. This is not a matter of personal preference but of fact.
‘Heart’ language can give us an entry into a comprehensive understanding of Christian faith and life. It can readily transmute theology into wisdom and prayer. In the pages that follow I will try to show some of the ways in which a whole tradition of spirituality, with firm roots in the Bible, has experienced this to be so.
There is another point. Shifting the balance from the head to the heart, without excluding intellectual speculation, may open the way for Christian faith to relate more readily with the East where the balance is often more towards experience and interiority than towards abstract thought. It may even be a way for that same faith to make a deeper contact with Western culture which for some time has been showing signs of being disenchanted with the rationalism of eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
Sacred Heart devotion has taken, takes and will take different forms. That is to be expected. Some may be disappointed that I have not followed their particular emphasis. I have no desire to undervalue other approaches or to present the following pages as the only understanding of the devotion, for only a pluralism of approaches can do justice to it. I know from experience that there is a welcome variety of emphasis even in the tradition that interests me. Furthermore, I have limited myself to only a few aspects of it.
This book arose from a request to write an article based on a twenty-minute talk I had given. The further I proceeded, the more I realized I was being drawn into areas beyond the limits of my competence and available time. The result is a rather random retrieval of some writings from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I have added to them reflections of my own in an attempt to understand aspects of the devotion in the light of recent developments. Obviously, these reflections have the limits of a personal point of view.
Though much that follows is an invitation to listen to the past, it is not an invitation to visit a museum – interesting perhaps, but irrelevant. Much less is it an invitation to remain there. The past cannot be repeated; it has no monopoly on enlightenment; but neither has the present. However, the past can throw light on the present and in this way help us take new steps more surely.
I have used regularly the writings of Jules Chevalier (1824-1907) 1, the Founder of the religious Congregation to which I belong.
However, this is not technically a study of his teaching. I have placed quotations from him and other authors side by side with my own reflections because they throw light on each other, not because they say exactly the same thing or belong to the same historical, spiritual, or theological context. Although nineteenth century piety has its own unrepeatable way of looking at things, this does not mean that we have nothing to learn from it.
Jules Chevalier was by no means a significant figure in nineteenth century theology. He possessed great vision, plus the determination to translate that vision into deeds, but he was at the same time an ordinary parish priest like so many others of his time. In this way, he can be a voice for the otherwise voiceless and also give unexpected insights into how devotion to the Sacred Heart was widely understood in his time and maybe how it could be given new relevance in our own.
It is possible and even advisable to read the chapters that follow separately and in any order. The same is true to some extent even for paragraphs. Browsing is often more attractive for people who read for relaxation or meditation. Moreover, this method of writing may help readers spot more quickly what they do not need to read, either because they are familiar with it already or not interested. It will also, hopefully, enable some to discover more quickly points they want to reflect on more deeply. For those who have not experienced any problem with devotion to the Sacred Heart, the first chapter’s paragraphs on symbol, networks, etc could be left aside. Since the aim has been to make chapters complete in themselves, there is some unavoidable repetition.
For convenience I have shortened some quotations from Jules Chevalier mainly by leaving out repetitions. At times this has lessened the richness of a passage, but the sense has remained unchanged. The translations are all my own.
Dennis J Murphy MSC
1 The main source is the fourth edition of his book Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus Paris: Librairie de Vic et Amat, Quatrithne Edition, 1900. Already in 1883 he had written a book of 824 pages on the relationship between the Sacred Heart and Our Lady under the title Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus dans ses Rapports avec Marie ou Notre Dame du Sacre-Coeur. The section on the Sacred Heart was published separately in 1886 and expanded further in the fourth edition of 1900.
1. It seems not
A method of studying theology in the Middle Ages was to list first the objections that could be raised against the point that the author or teacher wanted to make. The objections were introduced by the Latin tag videtur quod non, ‘it seems not’. There may be some wisdom in using the same approach here.
In 1966, I wrote in an article: “Devotion to the Sacred Heart is just what the Church needs today except for three little things – the words ‘devotion’, ‘sacred’ and ‘heart’.” The article was an attempt to answer that remark, first by seeing what truth there was in it and secondly by suggesting what we could do about it. Though I thought I was bringing out the essentials of the devotion, the article nevertheless hurt and disturbed a number of people. I regret that A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. I am much older and, I hope, wiser. There may, however, be some value in beginning in the same way.
Looking back now as an old man, I would still claim – I hope not too defensively – that the article I wrote was not. as bad or as negative as some made out. It was an attempt to salvage the devotion, not destroy it. I accept that in now correcting the limitations of a younger man I might be substituting the limitations of old age. That is for others to judge.
Some problems
The following points were bothering me and others when I wrote the article mentioned above. Was ‘devotion’ an adequate word to describe what Popes and others had claimed to be a summary of the whole of our religion? Was there a danger that the word ‘sacred’ would confine it to some personal shrine hidden away from the hurly-burly of everyday life? In the nineteenth century, for example, Jules Chevalier and others had discovered its relevance when contemplating the world around them. Finally, did the word ‘heart’ cause misunderstandings? At that time the nature and power of symbols was still widely underestimated even though individual theologians and philosophers had already made significant breakthroughs.
Leaving aside those today who have never had the devotion put on their menu, problems about it seem to exist mainly for those who have done ‘courses’. This does not imply that higher learning necessarily rejects it. One of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner SJ, disproves that. So also does Teilhard de Chardin and key figures in the post-Vatican II reform like the General of the Jesuits, Pedro Arrupe, and the moralist Bernard Haring C.Ss.R. This would suggest that objections about the devotion are often based on misunderstandings or exclusive concentration on what some perceive as abuses.
Karl Rahner and the others mentioned did not cling to the Sacred Heart devotion out of some nostalgic compulsion to return to the past. Nor was it some sideline or eccentricity. It fitted into the project of their life and work. Rahner claimed that it was in his reflections on devotion to the Sacred Heart that he first discovered the importance of symbol, which would become a key point in his theology. Consequently, the understanding of the ‘heart’ of Christ is central to his Christology. For Haring the Heart of Jesus summed up his approach to moral theology, which was to have such a great influence after Vatican Council II.
Already in 1918, Teilhard de Chardin was claiming, “the characteristics which Scripture attributes to the Word incarnate, and which the Church has so magnificently collated in the Litany of the Sacred Heart, are quite formal in asserting that to Christ belongs the function of binding together into a unity the totality of creation. The world, i.e. our substance, is centred upon God in Christo Jesu“! Admittedly, Teilhard de Chardin would also have negative things to say about some forms of the devotion in seventeenth century France. His main problem (unnecessarily so) was with reparation, which at that time did not seem to fit into his optimistic, evolutionary vision of the universe.
Charity, love, agape
In the past, theologians tended to dissect the word ‘heart’ as they would a concept in logic. The way they wrote and spoke at times seemed to imply that we had to worship and pray to a heart. I made the point in the article that ‘heart’ remained a symbol of love arid could be fruitfully used in quite natural ways. After all, the symbol of love took us to the very centre of our faith. But that gave rise to a further question:
Why bother about ‘heart’ at all if it is only a symbol? Why not speak simply of God’s love? The word seemed to complicate something that was eminently simple.
When St. John said, “God is love”, he used an uncommon Greek word, agape, not because there were no other words in the language, but because the usual words did not express what the New Testament authors wanted. Translators have always had to face this problem. In English, for example, the older translators used ‘charity’; more recent ones prefer ‘love’. Neither is adequate. ‘Charity’ tends to suggest almsgiving and institutional help, ‘love’ various degrees of warm affection. Both, of course, are very important aspects of what the New Testament means by ‘love’, but the words would be misleading if they referred exclusively to human activity. This is not a matter of down-playing human values but of seeing them in a radically new dimension.
The sort of love the New Testament wanted to express does not begin with us or with our activity, however important that may be. The ‘love’ it is concerned with has its origin in God – the One Jesus calls ‘Father’. And to understand this love we do not look primarily into the human heart, much less into a dictionary. We have to see how God’s Word incarnate revealed this love and lived it. Thus, the linguistic problems we have in translating agape become almost side-issues if our reference point is the Heart of the Word incarnate. It sums up in symbol the clear teaching of the New Testament and brings us into the Trinitarian dimension of ‘love’. Agape has its origin in the Father who loves us even when we are in sin (1 John 4:7-10); it is revealed and made present in Christ Jesus (Rom 5:8); and it transforms our hearts through the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5).
The New Testament has much to say about mutual love and service, compassion and forgiveness, but the reference point for this, centres on the Father’s love for us revealed in the death of Christ and made present in us through the Holy Spirit This is basic in any understanding of the religious experience of St Paul. Christ not only gave his life for him but also to him (Gal 2:20, cf. John 17:26), and nothing could separate him or us from the Father’s love present in Christ (Rom 8:31-39). But there are responsibilities on our part. Faith in God’s love for us has to be put into practice through our love of others (Gal 5:6) and has to activate all that we do (Rom: 16:14). Thus, belief in God’s love is not merely a doctrine but a whole way of life which Paul describes in very practical ways (Gal 5:18-23; 1 Cor 13:4-8). This love, which is a fulfilment of the law and the prophets (Rom 13:8-10), can also be called the ‘law of Christ’ (Gal 6:2, I Cor 9:21). The constant reference to the death of Christ as a proof of this love and an expression of its nature is summed up by Paul in Philippians 1:27 – 2:11. This reminds us of the aptness of the pierced heart of Christ as a symbol of what the New Testament means by agape, love.
It is ‘in Christ’ that we experience and understand something of this love that ‘surpasses understanding’ (Eph 3: 17f). Or put in another way, it is Christ in us who brings us to this experience: May the love you have for me be in them and may I be in them (Jn 17:26). This should not be left at the level of an abstract statement. Only the way of ‘devotion’ – of lived prayer – can make it a reality.
What is the nature of the Word?
His nature is the same as the principle from which he comes.
And if he is the splendour of the glory of his Father, his power,
his image, the perfect copy of his nature,
he must also be the splendour, the power,
the perfect copy, the substantial expression
of the Heart of God from which he is born.
He must be eternal love.
And this eternal love,
basic to the very nature of God,
and proper to his Heart,
is formed from the blood of a Virgin.
Christ is wholly God,
his living sacrament,
his complete gift,
the Heart with which to love us.
Jules Chevalier 2
Symbols
When I wrote the article, I knew that symbols were useful; I was not sufficiently aware that they were necessary. Later I came to see more clearly that whereas we can give a substitute for many words, there are others that embody more than a simple reference to an object; they carry within themselves a whole range of experiences both personal and cultural; and they do not have adequate substitutes. Such words are symbols. ‘Heart’ is one of them.
Sacred Heart devotion is not limited to anyone philosophical explanation of symbol; reflection on our own experience is sufficient.
Words like ‘child’, ‘love’, ‘country’, ‘death’, ‘courage’, ‘fear’, ‘tears’, ‘laughter’ cannot be limited to a meaning one finds in a dictionary. Even their sound has a wealth of associations. This is true in varying degrees of most words in a language, but some to an exceptional degree.
Words like ‘my country’ can make present and express to us without diminishment a vast, complex reality within the narrow limits of a shape on paper or a vibration in the air. This analogy has special relevance when we consider the Word of God made flesh.
Even if unnecessary, it may be useful to touch on some wider philosophical and theological issues concerning symbols, otherwise Sacred Heart devotion might be reduced to a mere grammatical discussion about the use of nouns and adjectives.
It would be beyond the scope of our reflections here to enter into the studies of numerous philosophers and theologians concerning the nature and importance of symbols; one will suffice. The neo- Kantian German philosopher, Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), made one of the most comprehensive studies of symbol. There is no need to agree with details of his theories, but it is significant that he made ‘symbol’ the central point in his whole philosophy. For him, symbolic representation is the essential function of human consciousness; in fact, he held that a human being is by nature a “symbolizing animal”. Cassirer emphasized as well, the unity of sign and signified in symbols. Conceptually these two aspects could be distinguished, but at the same time they form a single reality, one part of which represents the whole. That is, ‘symbolizes’ the whole. Cassirer applied this not only to consciousness, but to science, culture, language, art, religion.
An example of one theologian will also suffice for our purposes. Symbol plays a central part in the theology of Karl Rahner. In fact, for him, symbolization belongs to the very structure of reality, just as for Cassirer and Ricoeur it belongs to the very structure of consciousness and knowledge. Rahner holds that there are things which can be called real symbols. The human body with its parts, for example, is a real symbol of the soul, the embodied self 3. It makes the soul present and manifest. A touch of the hand can be a means of expressing the gift of oneself to another. Though this touch is distinct from the gift of self, it is not a separate reality from it. Body and soul form one being – the human person.
Following this line of thought, Rahner sees Jesus Christ as the real symbol (self-expression) of the eternal Logos (Word) who in turn is the real symbol (self-expression) of the Father. Since for Rahner the word ‘heart’ refers to the deepest reality of Jesus, the centre from which all else emerges, the ‘heart’ of Jesus becomes the symbol of all that concerns him and his mission. Thus, in Rahner’s understanding of the word, to speak of symbol as only a symbol would be a complete misunderstanding.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the real symbol
of the love of Our Lord for us.
A symbol is an object that gives us knowledge
of another object through an analogy it has with it.
The choice of this symbol should not surprise us;
it had to be this way because it is based on truth.
All peoples and our Sacred Books testify that of all the parts of the body,
the heart contains in itself the reason
why it is the overall symbol of love
and the basis for this relationship.
Jules Chevalier 4
Though symbols are important, they are not ends in themselves. What they are symbols of is the primary thing; they are a means to help us comprehend and express more adequately something else. Jules Chevalier uses capital letters at times as a way of emphasizing this point: for example, “the Sacred Heart of JESUS”. The primary object is always Jesus. And the symbol of the heart is used as a way of helping us to see Jesus more fully, and by seeing him follow him more closely. As a young seminarian Jules was advised by his director to read Bishop Languet’s biography of Margaret Mary. The Bishop’s summing up of the object of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was quite simple: Jesus Christ’s love of his Father; his love of us; our response to this love; and the fact that “We cannot express this reciprocal love better than by the word heart” 5.
Networks, theology and devotion
Though my article had a pastoral intent, it was too abstract – too intellectual in the negative sense of that word. It was based on the assumption that the more precise and clear our concepts are, the closer we are to reality. Experience has taught me that everything exists in a network and can be adequately understood only within that network. And symbols play an important and even indispensable role in tapping into such a network and also in expressing it for us.
It is not sufficient to separate conceptually what appears to be essential from what appears to be dispensable. Arms or legs are not essential, but without them a body is defective and does not function properly. Similarly, Sacred Heart devotion has to be seen and experienced within a whole tradition and not exclusively in a few clear ideas. Only when this is done can worthwhile and lasting advances be made in our own time, or in any time.
When I wrote my article, I was ignorant of the theological tradition behind the devotion, especially in the nineteenth century. That was my greatest mistake. Admittedly, devotion to the Sacred Heart is not primarily a doctrine but a very simple way of experiencing and approaching God and certainly not limited to theologians, nevertheless it can only be understood properly in its proper context. Henri Ramiere SJ (1821-1884) popularized devotion to the Sacred Heart through the Apostleship of Prayer and the Messager du Sacre Coeur-a Jesuit publication that would be copied in many countries. His approach was by no means merely pietistic, but comprehensively theological with emphasis on the Incarnation, the Trinity, the Church as the Body of Christ, the Eucharist and also on the devotion’s social implications. He wrote in 1862: “Devotion to the Sacred Heart properly understood is not a particular devotional practice. It is the whole of religion, but religion seen under its most enlightening and consoling aspect” 6. In other words, Sacred Heart devotion was not merely a matter of pious practices nor of purely speculative theology; it was ‘wisdom’ in the biblical sense of that word. In a letter to Ramiere that same year, Jules Chevalier fully agreed with him.
The Heart of the divine Master
is the centre on which converges
everything in the Old and New Testament;
the pivot around which everything in Catholicism turns.
That is how I understand devotion to the Sacred Heart:
it embraces everything, it is the answer to everything.
Jules Chevalier 7
This comprehensive view of Sacred Heart devotion was not a passing enthusiasm for Jules Chevalier. Much later in life he made the same point based on years of personal experience and study. Towards the end of his long book on the Sacred Heart he showed that what he had written was not simply a description of some acts of piety but a whole vision of Christian faith and morality.
In itself devotion to the Sacred Heart
is a whole world of theology.
Its range is enormous.
We have already been able to convince you of that.
It embraces everything:
dogma and moral; the past, the present and the future.
When one practises it, its influence penetrates irresistibly.
That is why this devotion is essentially social,
restoring all things.
Jules Chevalier 8
Learning from the past
‘Creative fidelity’ is unfortunately misused at times as a sleight-of-hand that masks either a fear of genuine creativity or a fear of genuine fidelity. That was certainly not the way it was understood by the philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, who seems to have coined the phrase. I understand it here as an equally respectful listening to the past and listening to the present. Without this sense of continuity (fidelity) and challenge (creativity) we cease to really live in history. We become either museum pieces or passing fads. I am convinced that the same applies to Sacred Heart devotion.
Many things changed after Vatican Council II. Not always wisely. However, some things needed to change and even be forgotten in order that they could be rediscovered in their pristine beauty and in this way open new possibilities for our own time. In the process, theologians recognized that they had created a ‘piety void’. Usually this was applied to the ‘simple faithful’, but others recognized that it was relevant to theology itself.
If our ideas about God (theology) do not lead us into worship (devotion), we have not really grasped who and what God is. In other words, theology that is not open to devotion is suspect; and devotion that is not open to theology is also suspect. Admittedly, the warm word devotion is still suspect among many and ‘spirituality’ preferred. We will return to this later.
To understand Sacred Heart devotion in its network we need to return to the past, not to be imprisoned there but to be better equipped to answer our needs today. Otherwise, we may spend time foolishly, and not without arrogance, reinventing the wheel. It is too often forgotten that Vatican II did not come about merely by listening to the world of its time. For some decades previously, the theologians who most influenced the Council had returned respectfully to the great men and women of the past in order to learn from them. Arguably, this respectful return to the past is lacking in a lot of theology and spirituality today. We are, in consequence, the poorer in facing the needs of our own time in a way that will free us from fads and produce more lasting effects.
In the presentation that follows, I intend to go back frequently to a nineteenth century French parish priest, Jules Chevalier (1824-1907), to see what we can learn from him. Though interested in theology, he was not a theologian. This is an advantage because it keeps us closer to earth and to the people he cared for in his parish for over fifty years. Neither was he original, which is also an advantage. He borrowed much from other books on devotion to the Sacred Heart. He also got ideas from confreres who helped in a variety of ways. Consequently, when we listen to him, we are in contact with a wider current of nineteenth century ideas.
1 Quoted by Christopher Mooney SJ, Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ. London. Collins 1966, p. 76. Italics mine
2 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 146f. The biblical references are to Heb 1 :3; I Cor 1:24; 2-6; 1 John 4:8; Jn 1:14). The last sentence is acknowledged to the from Mgr. Gay whom he calls “one of the most profound theologians of our century”.
3 Rahner himself uses the word ‘soul’ in soundly theological and philosophical sense. To write off this usage as so-called ‘Greek dualism’ is both simplistic and unwarranted. The stand taken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in its Letter on Certain Questions concerning eschatology (17 May 1979) remains balanced and common sensed: “The Church affirms that the spiritual element survives and subsists after death, an element endowed with consciousness and will, so that the ‘human self subsists. To designate these elements, the Church uses the word ‘soul’, the accepted term in the usage of Scripture and Tradition. Although not unaware that this term has various meanings in the Bible, the Church thinks that there is no valid reason for rejecting it; moreover, she considers that the use of some word as a vehicle is absolutely indispensable in order to support the faith of Christians. “
4 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 152.
5 Bishop Languet, La vie de la Venerable Mere Margurite Marie, p. xlvi.
6 L’esperance de I’Eglise, Paris, 1862, p. 624.
7 Letter 9 March 1862. MSC General Archives, Rome.
8 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 280
2. The human heart
To understand fully the human heart, we need to look into the Heart of Jesus. In Jesus’ way of being human, we see what God wants the human heart to be, because it is God’s plan that we be moulded into the image of his Son (Rom 8:29). But we can also say that to understand the Heart of Jesus, we need to look into the human heart on every level. In its depths the human heart is open to all reality and ultimately to the ground of all reality that we call God. And the Heart of God and the human heart meet in the Heart of Christ.
The Heart of God descends in haste to his creation
with the weight of an infinite love,
and the heart of creation rises towards God
drawn by an attraction that dominates all others in it.
It is in Jesus that these two hearts meet,
and they unite so profoundly that the
two Hearts become one.
Jules Chevalier 1
Jules Chevalier sees this meeting of hearts already achieved through the incarnation. Through it, Jesus is not merely a link in a chain between God and creation; he fuses both together. While this has already taken place, it’s effect will be fully revealed only in the final fulfilment of God’s purpose for the whole of creation.
A day will come, when we will know our own heart
by knowing the Heart of Jesus;
we will be able to say with the Apostle:
Everything belongs to us;
we belong to Jesus,
and Jesus belongs to God.
Then the universe in its entirety will appear as it really is,
as a word uttered in time
to express the secrets of eternity.
Jules Chevalier 2
The meaning of ‘heart’
It is not unusual for a part or organ of the human body to be used to express the whole person – grammatically this use of a part for the whole is called a synecdoche. The ‘heart’, for example, is used extensively in this way in the Bible and in many languages. In the Bible, words like ‘arm’, ‘eyes’, ‘face’ are used at times as a graphic way of speaking of the person. The same language is used of God. When a part is used in this way, the meaning goes beyond the mere physiological part; but there always remains a basis in reality for the usage because the person is understood in the light of the part mentioned. For example, ‘arm’ denotes strength and control, ‘face’ attention and mood. Thus the ‘the arm of the Lord’ does not denote the ‘arm’ as distinct from the Lord, but the Lord himself as one who is strong and in control. Consequently when ‘heart’ or some other internal organ is” used in this way (e.g. ‘liver’, ‘entrails’, ‘kidneys’) it can present the whole person but under the aspect of ‘interiority’, including the depths of a person – the self.
‘Almighty Lord’ is not a synonym for ‘the arm of the Lord’, nor is ‘self a synonym for ‘heart’. Symbolic language is open-ended and something important is lost if one does not keep in mind the part with the whole it represents. ‘Arm’, ‘heart’, ‘face’, for example, have a wealth of meaning when used as a synecdoches – that is, symbolically. More importantly, the symbol of the human heart does not limit us to generalizations about God’s love and mercy but reminds us that he has really loved us with a human heart. Moreover, we are reminded that God has assumed not only the appearance of a human being but has entered into the depths of what it means to be human.
Pope John Paul II referred to this usage of ‘heart’ in his Encyclical Redemptor hominis (4 March1979) in which he outlined the policy for his Pontificate: “Vatican Council II: in its penetrating analysis of the ‘contemporary world’ reached the most important point of the visible world, that is, the human person. To do this, it descended, as did Christ, to the depths of the human conscience, reaching right to the interior mystery of the human person, which in the language of the Bible and even outside the Bible is expressed by the word ‘heart’. Christ, Redeemer of the world, is he who has penetrated, in a unique and absolutely singular manner, into the mystery of humanity; he has entered into the human ‘heart”‘(n.8). Throughout his Pontificate Pope John Paul II has returned regularly to this theme.
Unity in multiplicity
The word ‘heart’ is not understood in opposition to intelligence. Nor is the ‘heart’ merely the emotional side of a human being; it is the symbol of the integration of the whole interior life of a person. It is the centre-the self. Even if I deny such a centre, I affirm it, for I am aware that it is ‘I’ who was responsible for the denial. Our concepts may have problems in grasping this centre; it may always escape our understanding, even though it is given in experience. This reinforces the need of a symbol.
The word ‘heart’ brings the multiplicity in a human being to a unifying centre. The word ‘unifying’ is important, because a centre cannot exist in isolation; it is always the centre of something. Thus the ‘heart’ as the centre of a human being, unites body and soul; intellect and emotions; sense perception and rational judgment; passion and will. It was this combination of matter and ‘energy’ – including spiritual energy – that attracted Teilhard de Chardin to the symbol of the heart. At this centre, we find the dynamism that moves and unites everything else – we find love. And Jules Chevalier, following St Augustine, claims that we are what we love.3
Love sums up the whole person;
it is the whole person,
concentrated at one point.
All the rays converge on this one centre;
everything harmonizes:
attraction, feeling, instinct, intelligence, will; and
all of it echoes together
at the same time
in the heart.
Jules Chevalier 4
This integrated view of the human person is not a recent development in theology as is sometimes supposed; nor is it exclusively biblical. It seems to me essential also, for example, in Aristotelian and Thomistic anthropology and epistemology. It is a misnomer to refer to every theory that accepts parts in a human being as dualism; for dualism, strictly so called, considers the material side of a human being in negative terms. Sometimes this accusation of dualism comes from people who are at least ‘closet’ monists. Although the seminary in which Jules Chevalier studied took Descartes as their prime model for philosophy, 5 the young seminarian was able to maintain a more integrated view of human nature, which both influenced and was influenced by his approach to Sacred Heart devotion.
In this mysterious being called man,
the masterpiece and summary of creation
the soul lives with a bodily life
and the body united to the soul,
of which it is the organ,
lives with the very life of the spirit.
Human functions are neither completely spiritual
since we are not pure spirit
nor completely bodily because we are not merely matter.
Jules Chevalier 6
Cardinal de Bérulle (1575-1629) had a strong influence on the spirituality in which Jules Chevalier was formed. He also was fascinated by the multiplicity in unity that is a human being. “A human being is composed of completely different elements. On the one hand a miracle, on the other a nothing. He is heavenly on the one hand, and earthly on the other. On the one hand he is spiritual, on the other corporal. He is an angel, he is an animal; he is a nothing, he is a miracle; he is a centre, a world, a god”?
The fact that a human being is a unity in multiplicity and a multiplicity in unity may appear so obvious and trite that it does not need to be mentioned. It is obvious, but our tendency to simplify matters is also obvious. For example, we can be reluctant to hold together elements that our intellect and concepts distinguish and even separate. Symbolic language, symbolic objects and symbolic actions not only ease this problem but give us the means to cope with it. The human ‘heart’ is one such symbol.
The heart symbolizes not only the inalienable individuality of the person, but also an essential relationship with others, for the heart is a symbol not only of who we are, but also of love. Everything exists in relationship with others. For a Christian, in fact, interrelatedness belongs to the very notion of being. This applies even to the reality of God who is essentially Father, Son and Spirit. Since there is one Creator, there is also one humanity. We are all inalienably individuals, but each individual is also inalienably part of humanity.
Though composed of different members,
humanity is formed by one same body and blood.
The heart which gives life
to all the members of this great body
is the Heart of Jesus.
He alone unites us together
and he alone unites us to God.
As soon as we separate ourselves from him,
we separate ourselves from one another
and we lose the true feeling of the human family
by losing the life of God which is its source.
This divine Heart is then the centre
around which all hearts gravitate.
Jules Chevalier 8
We are loved
The ‘heart’ symbolizes (i.e. re-presents, makes present) the self as loved infinitely by God. Though over-simplifying, Hans Urs van Balthasar has beautifully said that when God tells us who we are for him, then we are a person. His love should convince us that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor rulers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from God’s love that is in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:38f). The human heart certainly unites us with all things, but at the same time it symbolizes the uniqueness of our being a person. Jules Chevalier speaks of this in a daring but valid way.
Each shares in the divine life
in time by grace
and in eternity by glory.
But each receives this grace and this glory
in their own proper, personal measure.
This makes each one,
for all eternity,
a special being,
able to say like God:
I am he who is;
I am this, this particular someone
who is not and never will be someone other.
Just as He Who Is takes his name from his Being,
and calls himself the NAME,
the supreme name,
since he is the supreme being;
in heaven,
each will receive the name of his being,
a personal name,
different from every other,
which will say for all eternity
who is the one who bears it.
Jules Chevalier 9
We are created
We only understand something fully when we understand where and what it comes from. And this includes human beings. To understand the human person properly we have to turn to God the Creator who gives us existence. Creation is not limited to how things begin, but also to how they continue to exist and develop. Evolution does not contradict creation; it describes the sort of universe that God holds in existence – the God in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). However, we have to keep in mind that in the New Testament God is always the ‘God of Jesus Christ’ and this gives us a fuller vision when speaking of creation: there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist (1 Cor 8:6). We find the same in John’s theology of the Word. In the New Testament God and creatures are not viewed independently of Christ.
If the act of creation is not merely a giving of existence in the past but the holding of things in existence at every moment, what is created would return to nothing apart from God. No matter how great a created being may appear, it is and will always be ‘from nothing’. This does not belittle creatures; on the contrary, it enhances their significance and dignity. We can revel in their beauty and their grandeur, but at the same time see all this as nothing in comparison with the infinity of God.
Look at the universe!
If all beings should form
the most marvellous harmony
in honour of God,
if there were not a discordant note
in this harmony,
if it were prolonged during ages and ages,
during eternity,
ever more varied, ever more united,
ever more beautiful,
never, never
would it attain the heights of infinity.
Jules Chevalier 11
Bérullian spirituality laid great stress on the ‘nothingness’ of human beings. This would seem to be completely out of line with the modern stress on self-development and self-esteem, which are rightly considered essentials in any modern spirituality. Any effort to bring the word ‘nothingness’ back into currency would probably be futile and even dangerously misleading. However, we need to avoid reading back into the past our preoccupations without making an effort to understand that same past. Independently of what words we use, a sense of the absoluteness of God remains always basic.
The stress on self-development gives an impression at times of a jejune, or even non-existent understanding and experience of the absoluteness of God in general and of the nature of creation in particular. Added to this, an egalitarian ethos can colour even our relationship with God. This creates unnecessary hurdles in finding common ground in dialogue with Buddhists and also with Hindus who take the Upanishads seriously. It also betrays ignorance of the very strong apophatic tradition within Christian spirituality.
We are created and loved
God looks with immense love
on the smallest, the least of the beings
created by him.
He takes in the whole magnificent scene
with a look of absolutely indescribable love.
Nevertheless, absolutely nothing of all this,
neither the details, nor the whole,
nothing merits to be looked at by God.
Everything there is limited;
God is without limits;
what is the finite in the face of infinite?
Jules Chevalier 12
Statements about ‘nothingness’ made by de Bérulle and his followers have to be seen in their proper context. Even if at times the emphasis did lead to an overly pessimistic view of human nature, at its best it did not downgrade human beings, but on the contrary stressed the utter gratuitous nature of God’s love for them – a love which infinitely transcends the limits of our qualities or defects, our talents or lack of them, our success or failure, our self-development or diminishment. Consequently, this love gives each and every person inalienable worth and is, because of this, a sure foundation for self development. The most powerful influence on a sense of self-worth is the experience of being loved; only counterfeits are built up outside of that Without it the ideal of human maturity can be just as crippling as the much-decried search for spiritual ‘perfection’ in the. past. Thus, the acceptance of God’s gratuitous, unconditional love is the rock on which we have to build everything. We see it symbolized in the Heart of Christ-above all in the pierced heart of Christ.
While ‘nothingness’ may not be a useful word today, at least hearing it from the past can shock us into the realization that we are creatures. Significantly, the refusal to accept ourselves as creatures and to want to be like God is presented in Genesis as the original sin. To build our lives on this refusal is destructive both of oneself and others. We have to accept our greatness and our limits as human beings – fallen human beings. And it is in that situation that God comes to meet us in tl1e Heart of Christ.
For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died of the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us (Rom 5:6-8).
God’s love was revealed among us in this way. God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 In 4:9-10).
Cardinal de Bérulle presented this basis for the dignity of every human being very clearly “We should be truly a nothing (for that fits in with what we are by nature); but a nothing in the hand of God; a nothing destined for God; a nothing in reference to God; a nothing chosen by God; a nothing consecrated to God; a nothing filled with God; and finally a nothing possessed by God and possessing God; and that fits in with what we are by grace” 13.
God says to me,
I have loved you with an everlasting love!
Me!
It is specifically me
whom God has so loved,
ungrateful me, sinful me.
God of surpassing majesty, God of supreme beauty and limitless perfection,
God has loved me.
God!… Me!…
What distance!
The infinite!… and nothing!
And God has loved this nothing!
Loved!
O God of love,
make me understand this word:
Loved!
He who has always existed has always loved me,
and it is through love
that he has decreed my creation from all eternity.
Jules Chevalier 14
One with the universe
The material universe is not merely a stage on which human beings act their given role; they are part of it. Human beings are made from earth transformed by the breath of God (Gen 2:7) and their destiny is to return to the same earth from which they were made: you are dust and to dust you will return (Gen 3: 19). Modern science has dramatically expanded this vision. It tells us that the elements from which we are made are more than similar to elements found in the universe; they are elements of the universe. The devotion to the Sacred Heart we are examining here was well aware of this cosmic view of human beings.
From its natural state of inertia, of death,
God has raised up matter to the level of life in plants;
from plants he has raised it up to instinct in animals.
So already in matter there is a sort of knowledge,
a beginning of love.
At that level no matter how high it might be,
the material world is still like a new born child,
incapable of knowing its mother,
but there remains a great difference;
tomorrow the child will let its mother know by a smile
that it knows her and loves her;
but if the material world remains where it is,
it will never know who made it,
nor even know that it has been made.
In his almighty genius,
God has found the means to unite matter and spirit.
What a miracle is the human body!
God has formed this privileged matter in such a way
that the whole lower world is united in it,
summed up in it.
Jules Chevalier 15
God can create only out of love; being infinite he needs nothing. He creates in order to give himself; and what is created should naturally respond in gratitude, love, praise and, above all, adoration, particularly since all is ‘from nothing’. The universe can only respond in this way through the human person. It follows that our adoration is not a solitary religious act – a contemplative withdrawal from matter. On the contrary it brings the universe to its proper destiny. As Jules Chevalier says, In us, matter becomes religious. Consequently, concentration on the ‘heart’ of the human person is by no means an escape from the outside world nor an exclusive concern for ‘interiority’.
In the universe a human being is the eye of all that does not see,
the heart of all that does not feel,
the tongue of all that remains mute.
A human being is not only a mineral that blossoms,
a shrub that feels,
but an animal who prays, adores and gives thanks.
In us matter becomes religious.
Jules Chevalier 16
Jules Chevalier acknowledged that human beings live in a ‘fallen state’, capable of all sorts of evil, but at the same time they are by nature and by God’s design the ‘wonder par excellence’ of the material universe. From this point of view they are ‘priests’, praising and adoring the Creator on behalf of the cosmos; he uses the term ‘pontiff in this regard, based on a commonly accepted etymology of the word, ‘bridge builder’ (pons facere).
A human being is a king and a pontiff:
a king by reason of intelligence,
a pontiff by reason of the heart.
While your feet rest on the earth,
creation through you is one.
Thanks to your twofold nature,
an amazing point of union,
there is one world, the Universe,
singing with a single voice,
“Glory to God”!
Beautiful sight!
The world of angels, the world of matter,
the human world!
A created trinity,
one in human beings,
knowing, loving, glorifying
the uncreated, creating Trinity.
What magnificent harmony!
Jules Chevalier 17
The God who holds the centre of our being in existence is the God who is love. However, a centre does not exist in its own right; it is a centre of something and can only be understood properly in the light of that something. And thus our true centre cannot be isolated from our embodiment in the universe of which we are a part. This gives also a ground for the Christian belief in resurrection. In the eyes of God matter matters eternally.
Let us not forget
this is God’s aim:
to associate external matter in the religion of human beings,
so that he can be glorified, known and loved.
It is in order to be loved that God wishes to be known;
love is the final word for all our relationships with him,
the summary of the whole of religion.
And in us our feelings have a special organ,
the heart.
The heart is the central point where everything converges.
Jules Chevalier 18
We are not only inalienably individuals and inalienably part of humanity; we are also inalienably part of the material universe in which we live, both as individuals and as members of the one human race. Certainly, human beings bring to consciousness this immense network of existence, but it is not merely an exercise of the mind. Above all, it is love that unites everything that is ‘other’. And the symbol of this love. is once more the heart.
How marvellous is this material world!
What perfect unity in this indescribable variety!
Not a being in isolation!
Each thing is useful for the whole,
and the whole useful for each thing;
it is an immense network,
all the links of which hold together and converge
at a central point:
the human being.
God’s aim is to associate external matter
to the religion of man,
so that He can be glorified, known and loved.
It is in order to be loved
that God wishes to be known;
love is the final word
for all our relationships with him,
the summary of the whole of religion.
And, in us, the affective life has a special organ,
the heart.
The heart!
See the central point where everything converges.
Jules Chevalier 19
May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph 3:17-19).
1 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.76.
2 op. cit., p.65, quoting Mgr Baudry. The reference is to 1 Cor 3:22f.
3 Quoting St Augustine in epistolam S. Joannis tract II, n. 14. ‘You love the earth? You will be earth. You love God? What shall I say? You will be God? I do not dare say this of myself. Let us listen to the Scriptures, “I have said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” (Quoting Ps 82:6)
4 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.103
5 See Jules Chevalier, Notes in times, Presentation et annotations: Jean Bertolini msc, Rome: Missionari del Sacra Cuore, 1986, p.13.
6 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.88
7 Cardinal de Bérulle, Oeuvre de pieri quoted by Yves Krumenacker, L’ecole
8 Messager du Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, 7(1865) 529.
9 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 83.
10 op. cit., p.28l
11 op. cit., p.67
12 op. cit., p. 66
13 Cardinal de Bérulle, Correspondence t. III, Letter 683, October 1627. Quoted by quoted by Yves Krumenacker, L’ecole fran_aise de spiritualite, Paris: du Cerf 1998
14 Retraite, p. l7f.
15 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.64
16 op. cit., p. 63 & 64. The first sentence, taken from page 63, is a quotation from Mgr Gay
17 op. cit., p. 67
18 op. dt., p. 65
19 op. dt., p.64f
3. The Heart as Centre
When ‘heart’ is used with its full symbolic overtones, it means much more than a bodily organ. This wider usage has concentrated so much on the heart as a symbol of love that we have overlooked three other basic aspects: the heart as what constitutes the human person; the heart as the meeting place between God and human beings; and, following from these two, the heart as the focal point of the incarnation of the Word of God.
The heart as the whole person
The heart as a symbol of love is generally considered to be central in Sacred Heart devotion. And it obviously is. But we need to keep in mind that ‘heart’ is not used as a symbol of love in the Bible. There the word refers to the whole interior life of a person. The heart is not only the source of emotion, but also of understanding, reasoning and decision. More importantly it stands for the whole person. W. Eichrodt, in his Theology of the Old Testament, describes ‘heart’ in the Bible as “a comprehensive term for the personality as a whole, its inner life, its character.”1 To know the heart is to know who and what someone really is. The Lord does not see as mortals see. They look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart (1 Sam 16: 17).
This contrast between the outward appearance and the reality within is an important theme in the Bible, particularly in the teaching of the Prophets and of Jesus. It is a mistake, however, to see this in older Liberal Protestant terms as a separation or opposition of interior and exterior religion, which leaves interior religion as sufficient in itself and the only genuine religion. The heart manifests itself in deeds, and the deeds manifest the heart, for the heart is the centre from which all else emerges. Thus it is too limiting to think of ‘heart’ simply as interiority, as though the symbol was relevant only to introspective personality types. As a symbol of love it is just as typically outgoing as inward looking. Symbols usually do not fit into neat categories.
The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45)
Since the heart is the symbolic centre of a human being, it unites matter and spirit; creativity and responsibility; emotion and intelligence; desire and will. It is the summary of all that a human being is. There is a danger that we think of a centre as though it were independent of what it is a centre of, like a precious stone in a box. On the contrary, a centre only has meaning in so far as it is a centre of something. The heart as centre is the self at its deepest level; and this self, though ineradicably individual, is not an isolate. As centre it is a unifier; and unity comes from love. Thus, Chevalier sees the meaning of heart as both ‘centre’ and ‘love’.
Love is the life of the heart.
If the heart wants to live,
it is impossible for it to be without love.
Our love is ourself.
It is to the heart,
as an expression of the soul,
that one attributes all that belongs to the soul:
faults and qualities,
vices and virtues,
good points and bad points.
Our heart is our self.
According to St. Jerome,
“If Plato put the soul in the head,
Jesus Christ put it in the heart.”
God wants us only for our soul;
and he wants the soul because of its love –
for its heart.
My child, give me your heart (Proverbs 23:26).
Jules Chevalier 2
The meeting place with God
The meeting of God with human beings takes place of necessity in the heart where the reality that is God meets the reality of our being; that is, the meeting has to take place where we are truly ourselves, and where God is truly God. In dealing with God the supreme reality, there can be no place for unreality or mere appearances. And what we really are is found in our hearts. This should not be understood as the interior life in antithesis to our external life. The heart manifests itself in what we do; interior and exterior can be distinguished but not separated. The attempt to put a religion of the heart in opposition to external forms in an individualistic sense is biblically speaking an oddity. Thus, Isaiah can point to lack of social justice in Israel as a sign that their hearts are far from me (Is 29: 13). Jesus refers to the same text (Mt 15:8-9).
Genuine conversion takes place in the heart (Ps 51: 10, 17). And in the new Covenant God writes his law in the hearts of his People. In this way he becomes their God and they become his people (ct. Jer 31:33; ct. Jer 24:7; 32:37-40; Ps 37:31; Ezek 36:26-28 cf.11:19; 18:31). The law of God can be written in books and read, but it only becomes alive when it is lived; that is, when it touches what and who we really are – our hearts. Again, this use of the word ‘heart’ goes deeper than our usual contrast of ‘heart’ and ‘intellect’, for when we enter into the unifying centre of the human person – the depths of the self – we are at the point that unites everything.
The ‘heart as centre’ is in no way a promotion of ego-centred psychology or spirituality. The much-quoted words of Irenaeus (c.130 – c.200), The glory of God is a living human being”, are weakened if they are taken out of their context and humanistic limits put on them. The full text does not lessen in any way the glory of human life but stresses its limitless potentiality. “The glory of God is a living human being, and the life of a human being consists in beholding God. For if the manifestation of God, which is made by means of creation, affords life to all living beings on the earth, much more does that revelation of the Father, which comes from the Word, give life to those who see God. ” 3 We become what we are meant to be in our relationship to others; we become completely what we are meant to be in our relationship with the Other, who is Father, Son incarnate and Spirit, the centre (Heart) around which all else turns.
“Nothing is easier than to pursue one’s selfish interests under the cover of growing in God and of loving in God. The only real protection against that dangerous illusion is a constant concern to keep very much alive (with God’s help) the impassioned vision of the Greater-than-All. In the presence of that supreme interest the very idea of growing or enjoying egotistically, for oneself, becomes insipid and intolerable.”
The more we experience the centre of our being, the more we experience that we are not the real centre of creation or of humanity. There is the wider humanity-past present and future – to which we belong; there is the immensity of the universe of which we are a part; and there is the Creator who holds in existence not only the centre of our being, but all humanity and the whole universe. My heart, my centre, is what makes me to be me. However, I am fully me only in openness to the fullness of being; and the centre that binds together everything ‘seen and unseen’ is God’s Word incarnate in Jesus. And the essence of that Word is summed up in the symbol of the Heart of Jesus.
O Heart of the Word incarnate,
O Heart of the universal Christ,
it is you, you above all,
who, gathering into yourself all the elect,
are truly the end of all the works of God,
the universal fruit of creation.
Jules Chevalier 4
The Heart of God
For Jules Chevalier the heart is not only seen as the centre of human beings and the Word incarnate. There is a centre also in God that can be called the heart of God – what makes God to be God. And that heart is essentially love, which is the centre of everything that exists-a love that is stronger than decline, suffering, sin and death.
We know from where the Word comes;
he comes from the unfathomable depths of the divine essence,
from the Heart of God.
If he is the splendour of the glory of his Father,
he must also be the substantial expression
of the Heart of God
from which he is brought forth.
He must be love eternal.
And this infinite love,
which constitutes the very depths of God,
is contained in a human heart
born from the blood of a Virgin.
Christ is the whole of God,
his living sacrament,
his complete gift,
he is his Heart with which to love us.
Jules Chevalier 5
1 Theology of the Old Testament, Vol II, 1967, p143.
2 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 105f. The full text contains many references to other authors, e.g. Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Suarez, Gratry etc. In the text given here repetitions have been left out for the sake of greater conciseness. The reference to Jerome is his Com. in ev. Mat. Lib II, c. 15, verse 19-20. Jules Chevalier’s use of ‘soul’ here has to be kept in the context of the unity of the human being. The importance he continues to give to matter even in his treatment of heaven (op.cit. Livre III, chapters 4-9) makes this very clear.
3 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses Book IV, 20, 7.
4 op.cit., p. 76.
5 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, 146f. The original text contains a number of scriptural references. The main ones are Heb 1:3 and I John 4:8.
4. The Heart of the Word incarnate
If the Heart of Jesus expresses what makes Jesus to be Jesus, it is inescapably bound up with his humanity; and devotion to the Heart of Jesus is therefore essentially Christocentric. However, it has at times been reproached for trivializing the absolute transcendence of God, and even for a tendency to make Jesus Christ a substitute for God. If, however, the Heart of Jesus refers to what makes Jesus to be Jesus, the Gospels, the whole of the New Testament and Tradition make clear that his identity consists in his relationship to his Father. Sacred Heart devotion is Christocentric, but the *Heart of Christ, Christ himself, is not centred on himself but opens us to the God who is Father, Son and Spirit. Consideration of Jesus as Word of God helps keep this in perspective.
The Word of God
In 1848, the Sulpician Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Bourges Major Seminary, M. Pellisier, added some notes on devotion to the Sacred Heart at the end of his course on the Incarnation. The Jesuit theologian, Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876), seems to have started this practice, which remained customary in widely used text books up to Vatican Council II. Jules Chevalier, a seminarian at the time, wrote down all the notes given in class. He had known the devotion from childhood, but now he saw it as a summary of the whole of theology. It entranced him. “This doctrine went straight to my heart, and the more I went into it, the more I relished it, seeing afresh its attractiveness”1. The Professor stressed that while the devotion was “new regarding some of its practices, its principles and spirit were as old as the Church”; and it was” an excellent homage given to the person of the adorable Word incarnate”2. This emphasis on the Word of God would remain with Jules Chevalier throughout his life.
And who is the Word? From where does he come?
What is his essence? His nature?
The reply to these questions
will remove a number of veils,
clarify more than one mystery,
and throw a strong light on
devotion to the Sacred Heart.
Jules Chevalier 3
In religious circles in sixteenth and seventeenth France there was a widespread attraction to ‘mysticism’ in contrast with the growing secularism and anti-religious feeling of that period. Some felt that attention to the incarnation was an obstacle to their experience of the absolute transcendence of God or at least limited it. Cardinal de Bérulle (1575 -1629) found a corrective to this in the Carmelite mystical tradition of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. He stressed with them the absoluteness of God – it is a central point in his spirituality – but at the same time he integrated it with the incarnation. His fruitful experience of the Exercises of St Ignatius consolidated this. The linchpin in his integration of the incarnation and the transcendence of God was the Fourth Gospel’s doctrine of the Word. This was in continuity with the Old Testament presentation of the word of God and divine wisdom (Ps 33:4; Prov 8:22-31; Wis 7:22-28); but at the same time the New Testament went beyond it. Because of his interest in this point, the Cardinal became known as the ‘apostle of the Word incarnate’.
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being…
And the Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have seen his glory,
the glory of the Father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.
John 1:1-3, 14
The integration of the humanity of Christ and experience of God as Mystery does not mean that we concentrate exclusively on Jesus, but it does mean that the nature of the Mystery we experience has to be referred back to him, because, in him crucified and risen, God has revealed definitively who and what he is. This does not require that God cannot and does not reveal himself in other religious traditions, but it does imply that God cannot be properly understood apart from his Word incarnate. Certainly, the Light that enlightens everyone (c.f. Jn 1:4) can be found in a variety of ways in all religions and in all secular movements that promote good. And this light coming from the same Spirit of God enlightens us also about that Light which is incarnate in Jesus Christ. I am the light of the world (Jn 8: 12; c.f. 1 Jn 1:5-7)
In the Old Testament God makes himself present through and in the cosmos and events, but though he makes himself present, he remains always beyond our comprehension, otherwise he would cease to be God. By definition infinity can never be fathomed – even in heaven. This applies also to God’s Word incarnate even though in him the whole fullness of divinity dwells bodily (Col 2:9).
The Word of God uttered in and through the dead body of Jesus on the Cross is unique in the history of religion. God is identified with self-giving. In this precise sense it is concrete fact that No one has ever seen God. It is God’s only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (Jn 1:18; c.f. Mt 11:27).
Since God is essentially beyond our comprehension, our words will never be sufficient to exhaust our knowledge of him. At the same time, his Word about who and what he is remains definitive, particularly in the death of Jesus. It is there that he reveals that he is self-giving (Phil 2:7-8); in other words, that he is love (1 Jn 4:9-10). St John of the Cross, writing for fellow Christians, warned them against seeking new revelations and visions that bypassed the incarnation: “God has given us everything – his only Son. Therefore, anyone who wished to question God or to seek some new vision or revelation from him would commit an offence, for instead of focusing their eyes on Christ they would be desiring something other than Christ or beyond him. God would then answer: ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, hear him’. In my Word I have already said everything. Fix your eyes on him alone for in him I have revealed all and in him you will find more than you could ever ask for or desire”.
St Teresa of Avila repeats the same advice: “It is clear to me that if we wish to please God and to receive graces in abundance from him, it is God’s will that these graces should come to us through the hands of Christ in most holy humanity, that humanity in which his Majesty has proclaimed that he is well pleased… It is by this door that we must enter if we wish his Supreme Majesty to reveal to us great and hidden mysteries. No other way should be attempted, even by those who have reached the heights of contemplation. “4
One of the advantages of referring to the Word incarnate of God is that it shows us the other dimension to the person of Jesus Christ – person here being used in its strict theological and commonsense meaning as the answer in depth to the simple question “Who are you?” 5
Jesus Christ does not begin in the crib at Bethlehem
nor does he come to an end
on the mount of Olives.
He existed from all eternity
in the thought of God.
He fills all ages with his presence.
He shines
on all races, tribes and peoples,
like a mild sun.
He hovers over the universe.
Christ was in all the mysteries,
in all the sacrifices,
in all the rites,
in all forms of worship,
and finally in the whole of religion,
of which he was the substance.
Jules Chevalier 6
A summary of all devotions
Cardinal de Bérulle made a distinction between the ‘mysteries’ and ‘states’ of Jesus; it was a central point in his spirituality. ‘Mystery’ in this context does not refer merely to a puzzle but to God’s plan for the world, which is certainly beyond our reckoning but nevertheless made present and manifest in certain events – in this case the events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Word incarnate. On the other hand, contemplation of the ‘states’ of Jesus concentrated on what these incidents revealed about his enduring attitudes. In this way the emphasis was on the interior life (heart) of Jesus manifested in the various events of his life. Nevertheless, Sacred Heart devotion did not feature significantly in the spiritual life of the Cardinal. It was his close follower, St John Eudes (1601-1680) who would make this transition. With him, the person of the Word incarnate, became the Heart of the Word incarnate. The emphasis, however, remained the same – the depths of the person of Jesus Christ. However, the introduction of a language of the heart did make a difference. Bérulle’s theology was beautiful, but high-flying-sometimes referred to as “the metaphysics of sanctity”. Attention to the Heart of Jesus did not take away theological depth, but did make the practice of the devotion more accessible, simple and human. St Francis de Sales (1567-1622) remains the classic example of this.
Concentration on the interior ‘states’ of Jesus led the Cardinal to go beyond any particular mystery in the life of Jesus (his birth, infancy, hidden life, public life, death and resurrection) and concentrate on the essence of Jesus as manifested in all of these mysteries. For this reason, he introduced for the Oratorians in France a liturgical ‘Feast of Jesus’ which would sum up all the other liturgical feasts. It is clear that St Jean Eudes had the same intention when he instituted the Feast of the Heart of Jesus – that is, what makes Jesus to be Jesus? Bérulle spoke of the person of the Word incarnate, St Jean Eudes of the Heart of the Word incarnate, but both had the same basic idea. The aim was to arrive at the central point that summed up everything that made Jesus to be Jesus.
The special object of each devotion concerning the Lord
is divine love in one of its particular manifestations;
but the object of devotion to the Sacred Heart
is the love of the Christ-God
seen as a whole
in all its manifestations
and in each one of them.
Jules Chevalier 8
Berullian Spirituality
As a tradition, Sacred Heart devotion comprises a number of converging and even diverging spiritualities. What is generally called the French School of Spirituality is an important one of them. Cardinal de Bérulle was certainly the major influence upon it and is generally accepted as its founder though an English Capuchin, Benedict Canfield (1562-1610), had already mapped out some of its main lines in a book that was widely read throughout Europe. It was only in 1928 that Henri Bremond (1865-1933) popularized the title ‘French School of Spirituality’ in his Literary History of Religious Sentiment in France. Umbrella titles, however, too easily cover over the variety that can be found in most movements. Thus it is probably more helpful to apply the term ‘Berullian spirituality’ to those who followed him more closely. If one wants to use ‘French School of Spirituality’ it can be used to cover both the teaching of de Bérulle and also the various offshoots and even degenerations of it that occurred after his time. It is not possible to understand adequately the Sacred Heart devotion we are examining without reference to this tradition based on the Word incarnate.
Like any founder of a spirituality within Christianity, de Bérulle channelled past currents to the needs of his day. Moreover, what he had to say was ‘in the air’ at the time, but undoubtedly he was the one who expressed it most effectively. As in all Christian spiritualities the Scriptures were basic. There was, however, a wide range of influences on the Cardinal. Among these were the Greek Fathers (especially the two Gregories and Clement of Alexandria) with their stress on the ‘divinization’ of creation through the incarnation; Augustine with his stress on the continuation of the incarnation in the Body of Christ, the Church; also the writings of the Spanish mystics Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Ignatius of Loyola who in their different ways integrated the experience of the absolute transcendence of God and the incarnation.
In the whole of this tradition, we must always remember that the One God was Father, Son and Spirit. But the same God was also Father, Son incarnate, and Spirit. Following the Greek Fathers this involved a ‘divinization’ of the material universe. It was in this context that Teilhard de Chardin was able to see in the Sacred Heart of Jesus the origin of his view of the cosmos.
In Jesus and through Jesus
the whole world shares in the divine life!
His bones,
solid as rock and possessing the same natural qualities,
are the bones of God;
that flesh that lives like a plant
is the flesh of God;
that life of sensations and instincts that make up an animal is,
in Jesus, the life of God;
the same for his rational life:
in Jesus,
this life is not only a human life,
it is the life of God.
Jules Chevalier 9
Although, as we have seen, Sacred Heart devotion did not feature significantly in de Bérulle’s spirituality, his closest followers would express it in the language of the heart. The following are the main points:
- A deep realization of the absoluteness of God and, in comparison, our ‘nothingness’. This ‘nothing’, however, had infinite value because it was loved infinitely by God.
- The infinite, transcendent God had united himself with this ‘nothingness’ and made it his own through the incarnation. Thus the Word incarnate brought together and summed up in unique way the union of the Creator with the whole of creation.
- Our relationship with Christ was essentially communion with him and with others. This communion prolonged his presence in history through the Church, with a special emphasis on the Eucharist.
- The human response to all this had to be one of adoration and self-offering in union with Christ.
- To be united with Christ was not simply the result of an ascetical process of imitation, but the transformation of our minds and hearts into his.
Galatians 2: 19f was a key text: I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me (c.f. also Phil 2:1-8). The Gospel and Letters of St John as well as the Letter to the Hebrews also had a great influence.
Bérulle’s spirituality was thus founded on the humanity of Jesus and its prolongation on earth, but always in the context of the Word incarnate of the transcendent God. Each of these elements in Bérulle’s spirituality would have a part to play also in Fr Chevalier’s spirituality based on the ‘heart’ of the Word incarnate.
Though Bérulle stresses the ‘nothingness’ and ‘sinfulness’ of humanity, that is not his starting point. In fact, it is always a dangerous mistake to build on negative ideas, a danger that some of his followers failed to notice. Berulle’s starting point is not negative, but supremely positive. It is in the context of the infinite Creator that he sees the ‘nothingness’ of creatures; and it is in the context of God’s infinite, unconditional love that he sees both the worth and the sinfulness of those same creatures.
There is always a danger that the elevated theology that was an essential element in Bérulle’s spirituality could be too daunting for many. It needed to be balanced with the ‘devout humanism’ of St Francis de Sales who shared Berulle’s spirituality, but was able to bring it within the reach of all.
Jules Chevalier was influenced by these two closely related traditions within French Spirituality. And a challenge facing Sacred Heart devotion today is to provide a path that can integrate mysticism, humanism, and Church, plus apostolic and social involvement.
Jules Chevalier did his seminary training under the Sulpicians, who were founded by Jean-Jacques Dlier (1608 1657). Though Cardinal de Bérulle strongly influenced Dlier and Louis Tronson (1622-1700), Olier’s successor as Superior General, they both introduced some significantly different emphases. Consequently, at the Major seminary in Bourges Jules Chevalier would have experienced a greater stress on asceticism and a rather clerical approach to the priesthood. Nevertheless, Bishop Charles Louis Gay (1815-1892), who followed de Bérulle more closely, had a clear influence on Chevalier, who quotes him and similar authors on a number of important points in his book on the Sacred Heart.
Moreover, even from the notes he took on devotion to the Sacred Heart when he was a seminarian there are indications that the Berullian tradition was still alive in his Professors. The same influence can be found in his early sermons.10 Nevertheless Chevalier never reduced knowledge of the Word to a mere human tradition. He saw it as a gift of the Spirit.
We have been initiated into the knowledge
of the mysteries of our faith,
but if the Holy Spirit does not come to our aid,
we cannot grasp the harmony of these mysteries,
just as we cannot contemplate
masterpieces in a room,
nor admire their beauty,
if the light does not shine on them.
From a supernatural point of view,
the book of the truths of our faith
and the book of nature,
without the Holy Spirit,
remain closed to our eyes.
Jules Chevalier 11
1 Jules Chevalier, Personal Notes. English Translation by Sheila Larkin FDNSC, Rome: Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, 1986, p.14.
2 Manuscript, MSC General House Archives.
3 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 139.
4 Ascent of Mount Carmel Book 2, Chapter 22
5 The Book of Life, Ch.22, 6-7.14
6 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 4. Quoting Mgr. Berteaud.
7 Cf. Dictionnaire de Spiritualite, Vol I, col. 1557-1559.
8 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.148f
9 op. cit. p.69
10 See Jan Bovenmars’ collection Manuscrits sur Ie Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, Fontes MSC. Series I, Opera Jules Chevalier, Vol. 4.
11 Meditations pour taus les jours de l’annee, Vol. I, p. 576f
5. The Heart of the Universe
He is the image of the unseen God,
the first born of all creation,
for in him were created all things
in heaven and on earth:
everything visible and everything invisible,
whether thrones, ruling forces, sovereignties, powers;
all things have been created through him and for him.
He exists before all things,
and in him all things hold together
and he is the Head of the Body,
that is, the Church.
He is the Beginning,
the first-born from the dead,
so that he should be supreme in every way;
because God wanted all fullness to be found
in him and through him
to reconcile all things to himself,
everything in heaven and everything on earth,
by making peace through his death on the cross.
(Col 1:15-20).
Christ and the universe
Some might prefer to contemplate the cosmic dimension of Christ; others might prefer to focus within the limits of his earthly existence. This is legitimate, provided we recognize that the two views are aspects of the one reality. The humanity and divinity, the cosmic and earthly dimension are certainly distinct objects of thought, but they form one reality. With regard to the humanity, we should remind ourselves that in order to really know someone we need to know their past. We cannot know the risen Christ unless we keep in mind his existence on earth. Jesus the carpenter of Nazareth and the cosmic Christ are one. This is a basic principle of our faith which expresses for us the nature of God who is Father, Son and Spirit.
Contemplation of Jesus pierced to the heart on the cross (cf Jn 19:37) is contemplation also of the transcendent, incomprehensible Creator God. To the eyes of faith, the inglorious death of Jesus on the cross does not hide the glory of God but manifests it by revealing the very nature of God as love (1 Jn 4:9, 16). As Hans Urs von Balthasar has expressed it: God’s Word speaks to us most loudly in the silence of the dead Jesus on the cross. In the visions of the Apocalypse, the risen Christ in glory continues to be the Lamb who was sacrificed (Apoc. 5:6, 9, 12).
If the ‘heart’ of Jesus stands for the centre of all that makes Jesus to be Jesus, it is there that we find also the centre of that mystery which is the Word made flesh-through whom and for whom all things were made. In the heart of this Word incarnate the fullness of the deity dwells bodily (Col 2:8). And in him we share in this fullness-we have come to fullness in him (Col I: 10). In the Word made flesh the creation of the cosmos and the gift of redemption are united in the one great unifying act brought about by him who is Head of the Body, that is, the Church (Col 1:18).
When God looks at Christ,
he sees the entire world;
when we look at Christ,
we see him whole and entire
in his Sacred Heart.Jules Chevalier 1
Some feel uncomfortable with the cosmic view of Christ because it seems to remove Jesus from us by diminishing the familiarity we feel when contemplating his humanity. When expressed in the language of the heart of the Word incarnate, we may achieve a more suitable balance. The Heart in and through which all things are reconciled is a pierced Heart, close to us in our life, suffering and death. Jesus is not only the self-expression (Word) of God through the human words he utters but through what he is in the reality of his life, his death on a cross and ultimately in the reality of his resurrection (Phil 2:8; ct. Col 1:20). This continues in word and in sacrament in the Church where we recall and relive the Creator-God’s Word to us – his living presence with us.
Since matter becomes conscious of itself in human beings, we are necessarily related to matter-indeed consubstantial with it. The same applies to the Word made flesh. All things were made for him is not a statement about the eternal Word of God in isolation but also a statement about the destiny of the material cosmos and of humanity as part of it.
It is in this context also that Cardinal de Bérulle wrote of the relationship between the risen Word incarnate and the universe, describing his risen body as containing in itself the immensity of the universe: “a body which contains in its essential greatness both the earth and the sun, all the stars and the whole expanse of the heavens, a body that governs all bodies and all heavenly spirits “2.
The incarnation
It is through the Word incarnate that we know the eternal Word. And in a particular way it is through the pierced Heart of the Word incarnate that we know that eternal Word. The eternal Word and the pierced Word are certainly distinct, but they form one Word spoken by the Father. And if the heart of a matter is the essence of the matter, the Heart of the Word is what makes this Word to be Word.
There exist today Christologies ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. Sacred Heart devotion is open to either way, or preferably to both, provided they stand by the basic, staggeringly beautiful fact, central to Christian orthodoxy, that Jesus is fully human, fully divine – as embryo, baby, adolescent, adult, corpse, risen. Berullian theology and spirituality lays stress more on a Christology ‘from above’, but with uncompromising emphasis on the reality of the incarnation, which does not mean that a part of Jesus is divine (the more spiritually refined part) and part human (his material existence). Jesus is fully human. Strictly speaking, it is not simply my mind that thinks, my hand that feels, my mouth that speaks; it is me, not some part of me in isolation, that thinks, feels and speaks. So too with Jesus. In the mystery of the incarnation, God continues to be God; and humanity continues to be humanity, but in such a way that God is born, grows, eats, laughs, cries and dies.
The Church’s understanding of our faith can be likened to a structure that is continually being built, and will be so until the end of time and even in eternity. But the dogmas of our faith are like hewn stones that have to remain part of that structure even as it continues to be built. If they are removed, the building becomes something it was never meant to be. The Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451) is such a stone. It allows for the building to continue, even adjust to changing times and styles, but it has to remain an essential feature of the building.
“Following, therefore, the holy Fathers, we all teach with one accord that the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, is to be confessed as one and the same, that he is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body, one in being with the Father as to the divinity and one in being with us as to the humanity, like unto us in all things but sin (Heb 4: 15). The same was begotten from the Father before the ages as to his divinity, and in the last days, as to his humanity, was born for us and for our salvation, from Mary the Virgin Mother of God… just as formerly the prophets and later Jesus Christ himself have taught us, and as the Creed of the Fathers has handed down to us “. (Council of Chalcedon, 451).
Jesus thinks, Jesus speaks, Jesus walks;
it is God who thinks, who speaks, who walks.
Descending into the lower stages of human life,
the blood that flows in Jesus’ veins,
the vital spirits that animate his nervous system,
the phenomena that made up his vegetative or animal life belong to God;
they are of God and for God.
In Jesus
all is divine in an absolute sense
that is proper to him alone,
both the details and the whole.
Jules Chevalier 3
The reality of the incarnation and the magnificence and beauty of the universe in no way lessens belief in the infinite transcendence of God. On the contrary, that transcendence is the starting and finishing point of the Sacred Heart devotion that we are considering here.
God looks with immense love on the least of creatures;
he takes in the whole magnificent scene
with a look of absolutely indescribable love.
And now I am saying, and I repeat, and it is equally true:
absolutely nothing of all this,
neither the details nor the whole,
nothing merits to be looked at by God.
Everything there is limited;
God is without limits;
what is the finite in the face of the infinite?
Jules Chevalier 4
In agreement with Berullian spirituality, Jules Chevalier accepted that in fact the incarnation was for the purpose of redemption from sin. As said in the creed, the incarnation was for us and for our salvation. But the purpose of the incarnation was to be found also in the purpose of creation itself: All things were created through him and for him (Coll:16); and There is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist (1 Cor 8:6).
This cosmic dimension of the incarnation was in harmony with the nature of all human beings. We are not aliens descended from another world, and imprisoned in this. We are essentially consubstantial with matter and in this way in solidarity with the universe in which we live. In us, matter becomes conscious of itself. Matter also becomes religious. If God becomes incarnate, he is automatically not only one with human beings, but one with the universe.
From its natural state of inertia and death,
God has raised matter to the level of life in plants;
from plants he has raised it up to instinct in animals.
So already in matter there is a sort of knowledge,
a beginning of love:
a first draft, an outline perfect in itself,
wonderful, entrancing,
but only a distant sketch, a long way from its model!
At that level, no matter how high it might be,
the material world is still like a new born child,
incapable of knowing its mother,
but there remains a difference,
tomorrow the new born child will let its mother know by a smile
that it knows her and loves her;
but if the material world remains where it is,
it will never know who made it,
nor even that it has been made.
Jules Chevalier 5
Uniting the infinite and the finite
A major point in Berullian theology and spirituality was the idea that only an infinite being can give God adequate gratitude and praise.
Similarly with regard to sin, God required infinite satisfaction, which could only be given by an infinite being. On both counts, no answer could be found among created beings, even though by nature they are open to all that exists and all that is good, and consequently to God himself. However, this openness enables them only to recognize the gap between themselves and God and respond with adoration and praise; but the gap remains. Only God, who as Trinity is infinite self-giving, can completely bridge this gap.
Even if one is not in favour of basing a theology of redemption on the need for infinite satisfaction, the gap between the finite and the infinite remains; and it is turned into tragedy by sin. And the incarnation of the Word can alone bridge that gap.
What can we say? Where can we go?
What light and what darkness!
Appear, Sun of suns,
light of the world,
living light,
beginning and end,
our God and our all.
Jesus, Jesus,
appear with all the splendours of your adorable Heart,
that centre of love.
Jules Chevalier 6
Though the gift was gratuitous, it answered the openness of the human spirit to the fullness of being. And this basic yearning for ‘more’ which by definition belongs to human understanding and will-to the human ‘heart’-embodies and brings to fulfillment the purpose of the creation of the universe.
It was not for its own purposes that creation had frustration imposed on it, but for the purposes of him who imposed it – with the intention that the whole creation itself might be freed from its slavery to corruption and brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God. We are well aware that the whole creation, until this time, has been groaning in labour pains. And not only that: we too, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we are groaning inside ourselves, waiting with eagerness for our bodies to be set free (Rom 8: 19-22).
The Heart of God descends in haste to his creation
with the weight of an infinite love,
and the heart of creation rises towards God
drawn by an attraction that dominates all others in it.
It is in Jesus that these two hearts meet,
and they unite so profoundly that the
two Hearts become one.
O Heart of the Word incarnate,
O Heart of the universal Christ,
it is you, you above all,
who, gathering into yourself all the elect,
are truly the end of all the works of God,
the universal fruit of creation.
Jules Chevalier 7
This whole vision of the Heart of Christ as the centre of the universe and as the purpose of creation is centred in that basic fact and principle of Christian faith – God is love. And God’s love is completely gratuitous, bestowed with infinite freedom. Such love is the source and foundation of Sacred Heart devotion.
God is essentially love.
Each Person of the adorable Trinity
loves himself
and in himself loves the other two Persons.
And if God pours himself out externally,
it is under the inspiration of his love.
If the love of God operates,
it is through his Word.
And so the Word will become incarnate
in the womb of a Virgin,
by the power of the Holy Spirit,
who is love.
The Word of God is truly
Christ and love.
Jules Chevalier 8
The Church
The exalted view of Christ in Colossians (1: 15-20) includes not only the Cross (1:20) but also the Church (1:18). Some may find this last point startling and even unacceptable. However, in the New Testament we cannot separate Jesus from his community. He is centred on it, and it on him. This applies both to his earthly and risen existence. Nor can we understand him and his community properly apart from the One who sent him. In this context, the Church is even part of the understanding a Christian should have of the Creator-God and his active presence in the world. This is not triumphalism. The community of believers is also a’ community of sinners. It is immersed in the vagaries of history. But to the eyes of faith the risen Christ is present there just as he was with struggling sinners when on earth.
One of the great gains in recent theology and spirituality is the stress on, community. A practical example is in the renewal of ecc1esiology and liturgy. But this emphasis is impoverished if it is kept on a purely human level. A good liturgy is then identified with our feeling that we have done something, A good Church is measured by its democratic structure, We can and do forget at times the primacy of what God does, The Church when seen as ‘communion’ widens and deepens this vision. In this regard, the Western and Eastern Churches need to counterbalance one another.
Certainly, the Church is never an end in itself; it is dependent on Christ for its existence, not only in the past but always. Though we are always faced with the temptation to find an easy solution to this mystery with the help of a docetist, dualistic or monistic view of the Church, it remains one Church in all its dimensions, whether they be uplifting or embarrassing, As a parish priest for over fifty years Jules Chevalier was well aware of human frailty; as the Founder of a religious congregation he was perhaps even more so; added to this, some Church authorities at times caused him much suffering, but none of this dimmed or embittered his understanding of the Church, In this he remained faithful to a strong tradition within devotion to the Sacred Heart.
Using the adjective ‘institutional’ Church can have a corrective value, but when it turns negative, even caustic, as it frequently does, it tends towards a type of Docetism.
Nineteenth century Sacred Heart devotion was able to see the Church in the light of the transcendence of God (who is Father, Son and Spirit), in the light of the incarnation (seen also in its cosmic dimension), and in the light of the Body of Christ (seen as continuing his presence on earth). Consequently, the Church in all its dimensions, even ‘institutional’, remained an essential aspect of the way it understood Christ. It took for granted that the Church on earth was also a Church of sinners because Jesus on earth sought the company of sinners.
A long tradition going back to the Fathers and medieval mystics considered the Church to be born from the pierced side of Christ on the cross. The basis was the Gospel of John (19:34-37). This was at times put in the context of the Church, as a new Eve, the mother of all, taken from the side of the new Adam9. It is probably fanciful to seek to pinpoint the origin of the Church in some precise moment of time. It is better seen as a process. At the same time, the vision of the Church born from the pierced side of Christ is not merely theological poetry. It is in Christ that God reconciles the world to himself (2 Cor 5:17-20), and the Church can only exist where Christ, the unifier, is actively present. A fitting symbol of that presence is the opening of his side on the Cross-the absolute proof that he has given himself completely for the unification of all (c.f. Jn 12:32f; Col 1:20), And the Church, in its beauty and brokenness, in its struggling and its achievements remains a symbol of that unification.
The Word,
coming from the Heart of the Father,
made the world emerge from nothing;
and from the Heart of the Word incarnate,
pierced on Calvary,
I see a new world emerging,
the world of those he has chosen.
And this creation,
so fertile, full of splendour,
and inspired by love and mercy,
is the Church,
the mystical Body of Christ,
which makes this new creation
present on death
until the end of time.
Jules Chevalier 10
1 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus op.cit., p.132
2 Discours de l’etat et des grandeurs de Jesus 5e. Paris 1639, p 536. Quoted by Yves Krumenacker, L’ecole franfaise de spiritualite, Paris:du Cerf.1998
3 op. cit., p. 69
4 op. cit., P .66f;
5 op. cit., p.62
6 op. cit., p. 67
7 op. cit., p. 76.
8 op. cit., p. 132.
9 This is found, for example, in Tertullian, John Chrysostom, Augustine. Pius XII repeats the same in his Encyclical Mystici corporis (n. 110). Jules Chevalier also uses it cf. op. cit., p A.
10 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.145f
6. The New Heart
A new heart I will give you
and a new spirit I will put within you;
and I will remove from your body the heart of stone
and give you a heart of flesh.
I will put my spirit within you
and make you follow my statutes
and be careful to observe my ordinances.
Ezek. 36:26-27.
If devotion to the Sacred Heart is to be true to itself, it has to believe firmly in the reality of sin and the reality of forgiveness. Jules Chevalier accepted that the incarnation had in view salvation from sin, but he also saw it as God’s way of bringing creation to its fulfilment and of bridging the gap between the finite and infinite. And this bridge was not completed simply at the moment of the incarnation, but by a life lived by Jesus in union with his Father – a life opposed to all that was not love. This whole project was the gift of a new heart to humanity.
Sin
The Heart of the Word incarnate is what makes Jesus to be Jesus not merely in the instant of conception, but throughout the whole time of his existence. And in this human it the universe, an infinite step beyond itself. God becomes truly one with us. But in bringing human beings and the universe to this fulfilment in Jesus, God who is Father, Son and Spirit is dealing with a twisted humanity that has to be transformed. Jesus lives, dies and is raised from the dead for our salvation (Creed).
The Old Testament prophets looked with horror, anger and grief on the failure of the people to live according to God’s word. This was partly because they saw the disastrous consequences of such a failure. The law was not concerned merely with some private area of life that could be called ‘religious’. It had explicit social and communitarian implications. The Ten Commandments made this clear and it was hammered home by the prophets.
If the People of God were to worship their God, concern for social justice was essential, for he was the God who had rescued them from Egypt. But when the prophets stressed the need to get rid of injustice, oppression and corruption, they were not merely promoting social change, but above all a change of heart: these people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me (Isa 29.13). Thus, obedience to God’s will was not merely external conformity, it had to come from the heart (Deut. 10:12; 11:13; c.f. Ps 40:8); for it implied loving God with all our heart (Deut. 6:5, 13:3; 26: 16; 30:2). And love was not measured by feeling, but by action.
Despite all setbacks, however, the Old Testament prophets could also look on failures with hope; not hope based on the human ability of the people, which had always proved itself inadequate, but on the power of God that could help that human ability transcend itself. The prayer in the psalms sums up the yearning for a better future, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me (Ps 51: 10). It would be a mistake to see this language of the heart in opposition to external activity. The request for a clean heart and a right spirit is associated with the request: rebuild the walls of Jerusalem (ib. v.18).
Experience had shown that even the words and commandments of God were not sufficient in themselves. To be shown the way was not enough; one had to walk it. Neither was it sufficient simply to conform externally to a moral or ritual code. One had to become a different sort of person – one’s heart had to change. That was basic. And this change of heart would be the result of the action of God himself. Our twisted selves could not follow a straight path. The spirit (breath) of God who had brought about the first creation (Gen 1:2; 2:7) would have to bring about a new creation (c.f. Rom 8:9-11,15-16; 2 Cor 5:17).
A too, negative view?
Sacred Heart devotion, especially because of reparation, has been accused at times of a negative view of human nature. This accusation was particularly aggressive in the sixties and seventies of the last century when a widespread belief, or rather certainty, was that religiously and culturally we had finally ‘come of age’. In the age of Aquarius, all we had to do was to let ‘human nature’ take its course and things could only get better and better. Later generations will look back in amazement and utter disbelief that people could have been so naive – so adolescent – in their claims to adulthood.
Sacred Heart devotion did concentrate on a negative side of ‘human nature’ and this did lead some into a too pessimistic view of the world. This took the form at times of political conservatism and a suspicion of new social.
movements. A notable exception to this was Leon Dehon (1843-1925), the founder of the Priests of the Sacred Heart. Jules Chevalier was politically conservative, but he had a clear vision of our dignity as persons and of our role in the cosmos. Because of intelligence and consciousness both of self and of others, human beings had a ‘natural priesthood’ that made them mediators between the cosmos and God.
From the point of view of its corruption,
our flesh deserves to be despised,
but in itself,
by its nature and by God’s design,
it is on the contrary
the supreme wonder of bodies.
Through it we give God
the homage of the lower world.
The material universe expects from us
the mysterious and exalted dignity
of our natural priesthood.
Jules Chevalier 1
Christian faith has to accept that the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith (Rom 1:16). This recognition of ‘salvation’ involves at the same time a recognition of sin. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us (1 in 1: 10). At same time, We have known and believe the love God has for us (1 in 4: 16). As the Creed says, We believe in the forgiveness of sins.
We believe in the reality of sin; and we believe in the reality of forgiveness. It would be an aberration if stress on the love of God diminished our sense of sin; and it would be an aberration of a sense of sin if it diminished our belief that God is love (1 Jn 4: 16). There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached the perfection of love. We have loved because he has first loved us (1 Jn 4: 18f; c.f. Rom 8:31-38). Belief in God who is love should, if anything, increase a horror of sin which is essentially a rejection of that love; and belief in sin should increase our appreciation of God’s love and mercy. The forgiveness of sin has always been and remains a central point in Sacred Heart devotion. For. example, traditionally it has battled against the rigid morality and pessimism of what was referred to as ‘Jansenism’. The name is not particularly important; the moral rigidity it signifies remains an historical fact.
Jules Chevalier’s integration of creation and redemption helped him walk a middle way between a dispiriting pessimism and a facile optimism. The act of creation is supremely positive; God not only brings things into being but conserves them in being, overcoming nothingness. God also recognizes creation as good. A completely negative view of human nature would consequently involve a negative view of the Creator. Orthodox Christianity has always rejected the dualism that finds good only in the human spirit and evil in material things including the human body.
The nature of a being is its likeness to God.
And so the more one is,
the more one resembles Him.
Or,
the more one resembles him,
the more one is.
It is impossible for a created being
not to resemble God;
for God is all.
Not to resemble him at all
would mean not to exist.
Jules Chevalier 2
Jules Chevalier would not have come across Devotion to the Sacred Heart for the first time during his seminary training; the devotion was already established in parishes throughout France. However, it was when he studied Christology that the richness of the devotion suddenly struck him more deeply; he was able to see it as central to and a summary of the whole of our faith. It would seem safe to assume that the Christology we find in his writings had its beginning in the teaching he received in the seminary, for it is well in line with the Berullian tradition of his Sulpician professors. In this, the incarnation is not centred exclusively on sin and its forgiveness but on the infinite gap, independently of sin, between the creature and the Creator – a gap the Creator himself wants to bridge through the incarnation. We cannot appreciate the Sacred Heart devotion that appealed to Jules Chevalier and others in the Berullian tradition unless we can recognize with utter seriousness the difference between infinite and finite being, and God’s love, present in the heart of Jesus, that bridges the difference.
What do we see in Jesus?
A God who becomes man and a man
who becomes God.
What a distance is crossed!
It is no longer only a crossing from nothing to being,
but from nothing to God.
Here divine power goes beyond the boundaries of our understanding.
It touches on the limits of impossibility itself.
Hence all marvels are united in Jesus;
or rather,
God in Jesus surpasses himself:
the Man-God is his masterpiece,
masterpiece of his infinite power,
masterpiece also of his infinite wisdom.
Jules Chevalier 3
The gift of the Spirit
The Christian sees the fulfilment of the promise of a new heart in the outpouring of the Spirit: God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us (Rom 5:5). This New Covenant (Jer 31:31; c.f. 1 Cor 11:25; 2 Cor 3:6, 14; Heb 7:22; 8:8; 9:15; 10:16) ensures that we are not simply performing acts of love of God and love of neighbour, but we are becoming the sort of person who is now drawn to do that ‘naturally’ because of the gift of the Spirit. This does not necessarily imply perfection, but it does imply that when we fail, we will be ‘naturally’ drawn to repentance and to continued effort-‘naturally’ because it will come from a heart transformed by the Spirit. Thus, ultimately the new covenant is about God who is Father, Son and Spirit freely giving himself to the world and we freely giving ourselves to him. God, as Creator, can freely bring the whole evolving cosmos into being from nothing without its consent; but he cannot make a covenant unless it is freely given and freely accepted – that is, without love on both sides.
Without doubt, by his right as Creator,
we and everything else are God’s possession.
His dominion is absolute;
but he still wants to possess all as a gift.
He gives everything and wishes that all be given him.
And since it is by love that he gives everything,
he wants everything to be given to him by love.
Since there is a gift in God that is the Gift,
the Gift that contains everything and gives everything,
the Gift that is his love itself
or the Holy Spirit,
in the same way,
there is in us a gift that is our gift,
the greatest gift of the whole of creation,
our love,
and the organ of this love is our heart
We have received the whole of God’s heart,
he wants to have the whole of ours.
My child, give me your heart.
Jules Chevalier 4
In the Spirit filled heart of the Word incarnate, in what makes Jesus to be Jesus, we find the promised heart of the New Covenant. And what takes place in him is gift (In 4: 10). We need to keep in mind, however, that the incarnation is not achieved all at once, complete at the moment of the conception and birth of Jesus. The Word of God became a human life. He really entered into time and history. The child grew (Lk 2:40). Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered (Heb 5:8). He did not pretend to learn or pretend to grow; he did learn and he did grow. To believe otherwise is to disbelieve that the Word was truly incarnate. Thus, the gift of a new heart, as found in Jesus, was not instantaneous. He had to live it. Being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross (Phil 2:6).
Love
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is not content to contemplate external acts in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ It contemplates his interior dispositions that give meaning to all his acts, and it contemplates his acts as revealing his interior dispositions. Jesus thus becomes the real symbol (real presence) of the God who is love.
If we follow our Lord in his public life,
we see his Heart pour itself out
on every sort of misfortune,
on every sort of misery,
moral and physical.
All the kindnesses
that Jesus sowed along his path,
all the miracles he worked
are so many outpourings
of the ineffable goodness of his Heart.
Thus, the Gospel that relates them
could be called the Gospel of the Sacred Heart.
Jules Chevalier 5
The new covenant is a fulfilment not only of the Mosaic Law but of the earlier promises made to Abraham, Noah, Adam and indeed to the whole cosmos. The later covenants do not repudiate the earlier ones but are a means for implementing them more and more fully. The original promises contained a blessing on all people and on the whole of the cosmos. That continued. Thus, while the new covenant concerns our becoming the sort of person and people God wants us to become, this cannot be understood properly unless we see ourselves in the context of the whole of the cosmos and the whole of history. As we have seen, the material universe comes to consciousness of itself in human beings; and, in this way, it is fulfilled.
And God’s ultimate purpose is not simply that the universe can come to consciousness, but that love may permeate everything – which is a work of the heart.
God’s aim is to associate external matter
with the religion of man,
so that He can be glorified,
known and loved.
It is in order to be loved
that God wishes to be known;
love is the final word
of all our relationships with him,
the summary of the whole of religion.
And, in us, the affective life has a special organ,
the heart.
Jules Chevalier 6
Jesus as the definition of religion
For Jules Chevalier, it is in the heart of Jesus Christ essentially that we find the perfect life that opposes all that is not love. This is not only his love for us but his love for his Father – a love that is manifested in his prayer of adoration, praise and thanksgiving. He is the perfect act of thanksgiving (eucharist) on behalf of all creatures. He embodies all that is meant by religion. In him creation is ‘outside itself in God. He is the ‘ecstasy’ of the universe. Thus, in him alone is the fullness of ‘religion’ found. He is God’s definition of religion.
Jesus is the supreme and infinite glory of God,
the revelation par excellence of his infinite goodness,
the Eucharist of the universe
and the permanent ecstasy of creation in God.
If you want to sum up in a word
what is itself a summary,
Jesus is religion,
religion par excellence
living and infinite.
It is principally to the Heart of Jesus that we give this title.
Religion is a bond of love
and so in everything the Sacred Heart is the last word.
Everything leads back to Jesus;
I am the beginning and the end he says;
and in Jesus everything leads back to his Heart.
Jules Chevalier 7
The bridge between the finite and infinite is not crossed merely by the moment of the incarnation in the womb of Mary as though it were a static, momentary event, like the linking of two carriages of a train together. It has also to be crossed by a life spent in obedience to the Father and in the worship and adoration that this obedience implies. In the incarnation two lives are united – divine life and human life. And since obedience and worship have to come from the heart, it is in and through the Heart of the Word incarnate that God will become ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15:28; Cf. 3:21-23).
Jesus is Man-God.
He reunites the whole of creation:
I am the life, he tells us:
all created life and uncreated life,
plant, animal or material life,
and spiritual and rational life.
And the heart
is the central point of his divine humanity.
On that sacred altar,
he offers to God, his Father,
constant adoration worthy of his infinite greatness.
Thus, this divine Heart is the supreme worshipper
of the divine majesty.
Jules Chevalier 8
The gift of a new heart and the forgiveness of sin are not synonymous. We can be forgiven and yet the deformity within us that leads us to sin remains. The new heart brings transformation, not just forgiveness. Sin is a form of disobedience, a refusal to walk the ways of God, a preference for created things above the Creator. Thus, sin breaks union with God, because it moves us in the opposite direction. For this reason, St Paul and the letter to the Hebrews both explain redemption in terms of the obedience of Christ. This obedience is identical with love, for love is the fulfilment of the law: The whole law is summed up in a single word, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself (Gal 5: 14; c.f. Mt 22:26). This is the new heart which is realized fully in the Heart of Christ and which we are called to make our own through the power of the Spirit. This insight is essential in devotion to the Sacred Heart. In so far as this is done, sin is not only forgiven, it is healed.
God does not condemn the intensity of love
but the disorder of love.
True love is willed by God with all the strength
with which he loves his own existence,
for he is the model and source of love.
If our will is moved and directed by love,
what other law does it need?
When God elevates nature by grace,
nature opens up and flowers.
How could we love too much,
when the model we have to follow is infinite love.
When one speaks of excess of love,
one does not really speak of love, but of egoism.
To love means to want the good of someone.
True love could not degrade its object.
The creature you love in a sinful way,
you love more than God;
you do not love it in itself.
You love it because it gives you pleasure.
This may be passion or infatuation,
but not real love.
Jules Chevalier 9
We are born into the twisted humanity that we see in Adam. However, through faith in Christ and through Baptism we are born into a new order of existence willed by God – a new Adam (Rom 5:12-21; c.f. 1 Cor 15:45-49). Obedience is central to the new Covenant. In this way it counteracts the disobedience of the first man. It is not a question here of obedience as a dour sense of imposed duty, but enthusiastic, loving dedication and loyalty (Ps 42:8; c.f. Heb 10:5-18). Nor is it simply an obedience imposed from outside; it is an obedience that promotes fullness of life; it is a path freely walked. Thus, the obedience of Jesus is not a merely external fulfilment of laws. It comes from a heart that freely lives in a way that is the complete opposite of sin – not without struggle and suffering Although he was a Son, he learned’ obedience through what he suffered (Heb 5:8).
The death of Jesus gives life because the way in which he died is the complete opposite of sin and so even in death he remains united to the Father, the source of life. The death he died he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives he lives to God. So, you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus (Rom 6: 10: 11). When we are united with him through the power of the Spirit we are ‘alive to God’. The same Spirit that was in the heart of Jesus transforms our hearts into his own relationship with his Father; God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying “Abba! Father!” (Gal: 4:6). In doing this, the Spirit necessarily puts our hearts into harmony with others: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22f). All this is the opposite to the ‘works of the flesh’ (sin): fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these (Gal 5:19f).
God’s unconditional love is the focal point of salvation. But salvation is not merely the forgiveness of sin. It consists primarily in union with that absolute love that is Father, Son and Spirit. Consequently, it consists also of communion with others and with the universe. Thus, love is the beginning and the end of the new Covenant and the new heart. This too is the essence of devotion to the Sacred Heart.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
is the essence of the Christian faith;
it is the outline and substantial summary,
of the whole of religion.
The Christian religion is a work of love
in its beginning, in its development and in its end.
The history of the Christian religion
is found wholly and entirely in the sublime statement:
God so loved the world.
Its whole creed
is reduced to these words of the beloved disciple:
We believe in God’s love for us.
That is
we believe that in God’s work
the Heart has done everything.
Christian morality is contained in the single word
Diliges
(You shall love).
That is, you will render love for love,
you will give me your heart
in exchange for all that mine has done for you.
The Christian religion,
we can say,
could not be identified so completely
with any other devotion
as with devotion to the Sacred Heart.
Jules Chevalier 10
1 Le Sacre Coeur de Jesus, p. 64
2 op. cit., p. 281
3 op. cit., p.70
4 op. cit., p.65f. The Scripture quotation is from Proverbs 23:26.
5 op. cit., p.9
6 op. cit., p. 65
7 op. cit., p.76
8 op. cit., p.74f.
9 op. cit., p.347.
10 op. cit., p. 149. Quoting Cardinal Pie. The Scripture texts are from John 3: 16, I John 4: 16 and Deut. 6:5 respectively.
7. One Heart
‘One heart’ generally calls to mind a community that lives in harmony; for example, the early Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 4:32). But we have to see a community in its context if we are to understand it properly. We cannot understand a Christian community apart from Christ; and we cannot understand Christ apart from God; and we cannot understand God apart from creation and redemption. In other words, ‘one heart’ involves the unity of all things: our oneness in ourselves, our oneness with the universe, our oneness with God in Christ, our oneness with Christ in his Church, our oneness in God’s plan for the world (his Kingdom) of which Christ and his Church are sacraments, and finally, in all this, we are to discover our mission to bring this same oneness into the societies in which we live, both national and international. Each of these aspects need to be considered if we are to understand properly the apparently simple expression, ‘one heart’.
It is widely accepted that the Fourth Gospels presentation of Jesus’ experience of God would have taken a couple of generations after the resurrection to mature. Yet expressions found within the authentic letters of St Paul show an equal profundity and are universally accepted as belonging to a much earlier date. And since some of these Pauline texts are found in what are commonly recognized as already existing hymns, we are forced back earlier still. It seems reasonable that the source of these statements, have their source in a ‘mystic’ depth in the religious consciousness of Jesus himself. If John and Paul were capable of such depths of experience and perception, why wasn’t Jesus? Has the image of Jesus put forward by nineteenth century ‘historical criticism’ hardened into a conservatism that is neither genuinely critical nor genuinely historical, based on the presupposition that Jesus had to be the moralizing, liberal Protestant acceptable in certain academic circles at that time? Do we need to counterbalance what the West calls ‘Enlightenment’ by what the East means by the same word? The core of all forms of mysticism seems to be an experience of ‘oneness’. Why not Jesus too? Is it reasonable to think that the inspirer of great mystics was not himself a mystic? Following that line of thought leads us back to the real Heart of Jesus (cf. Mt 11:25-30).
No single being can be understood properly outside of the parameters of the Creator’s plan for the universe. To understand the purpose of anything one needs to see what its maker intended it to be. To some extent we can discover this in examining the nature of anything, but it becomes clearer when we know the mind of its maker. Christian faith is incompatible with explicit or even implicit Deism. This is plain commonsense especially for anyone who accepts the God present in the Heart of Jesus. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all (1 Cor 15:28). Outside of this context, we may be in the legitimate realm of group dynamics, but outside the full reality of ‘community’ as seen in the light or the Heart of Christ. This comprehensive vision of ‘one heart’ is central in the tradition of Sacred Heart devotion we are considering.
When we see ‘one heart’ in the context of God’s purpose, it is not a matter of living with some structure imposed from outside. Nor is it a matter of being without structures. To live by the ‘heart’ is not identical with individual freewheeling. Since our hearts are made for relationships, they are essentially organizing hearts, however unpalatable that may be in some circles. Organization can become oppressive and dysfunctional, but so can a heart that follows its own whims.
The God of Jesus Christ enhances the inbuilt dynamism of human groups and their relationships; at the same time, he can take them beyond inbuilt limits. Even in doing this in the order of grace, God builds on our human potential. We cannot unite ourselves with the transcendent God, but he can unite himself with us. We are open to this because our hearts have been made open to all being.
Jesus Christ is not an end in himself. He is the ‘way’ to the whole of reality which ultimately surpasses our comprehension. He is also the way through which the whole of reality comes to us. Since the ‘Heart’ of Jesus means what makes Jesus to be Jesus, his Heart is the key to all. And since my ‘heart’ means what makes me to be me, my ‘heart’ is the entrance point into the whole of reality.
May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Eph 3: 17 -19.
Jesus Christ is the starting point,
the centre and the summit of the whole of creation,
both natural and supernatural.
He raises it up, he divinizes it,
he gives it back to its Author,
so that creation may glorify him as he deserves.
Everything is summed up in Jesus;
and in Jesus everything leads back
to his Heart!
Jules Chevalier 1
Unity in variety
Jules Chevalier used the heart as a way of speaking of the centre of a human being, the point that brings multiplicity into unity. In this way he was able to avoid the dualism that divided a human being into a ‘spirit’ that was good and a ‘body’ that was evil. God looked on the whole of his creation and saw that it was good. Consequently, it is not wrong to be a creature; on the contrary our failure to accept creaturehood and to want “to be like God” (Gen 3:1-7) is humanity’s original sin, which history shows is both personally and socially destructive. A contented acceptance of creaturehood is enhanced by the realization that finite beings are loved by God.
God created all things out of love.
An atom and an angel
are both loved by God
with an eternal love.
Jules Chevalier 2
Jules Chevalier was also able to avoid a monism that strives to reduce human beings to one or other element in their make-up and, in this way, judge the rest insignificant. He was able to accept the whole person and the whole of reality as a unity in variety, because everything had a centre, and consequently everything had its place.
Look at the works of God:
no two things are absolutely the same.
Variety is part of beauty;
the more the variety grows without harming the unity,
the more beautiful is the beauty that results from it.
And this is even more true of the order of grace.
That order,
because it is closer to God,
and even completely divine by its very essence,
must express God better
and give us a more perfect revelation of his beauty
in a greater variety and in a greater unity.Jules Chevalier 3
One of the first problems that early philosophy faced both in the East and West was the relationship between the one (particularly the ‘One’) and the many. It has been a perennial problem not only in speculative philosophy and theology, but also in politics and economics. Are humans to be treated simply as means to an end? Mere cogs within the wheel of the state or of an economic theory? Or has a person inalienable rights? Or is there to be a balance between the rights of the one (whatever that ‘one’ might stand for) and the many? The problem has had its effect also in religion. Is the ‘One’ so incompatible with the ‘many’ that, in order to attain perfection, the many must disappear completely into the ‘One’? This is the stand taken in the more extreme forms of Indian advaita.
Christian faith sees ‘otherness’ as constitutive of all being, including the Supreme Being. It does not seek to postulate some transcendent ‘One’ that ultimately obliterates the many. It does not accept that the choice has to be between either the one or the many, but goes beyond both to an absolute reconciliation of opposites in the Trinity, where oneness and otherness are combined. From this aspect, the Trinity is not to be seen merely as a problem; it is an answer to a number of problems. The Christian concept of creation stresses that nothing has existence of itself. God is the One who gives existence to all things, including the gift of being ‘other’ and in relationship with others.
Unity from within
In the Tradition of Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, ‘heart’ continues to have an emphasis on the interior life; and this emphasis has to remain if we are to understand a community in the Christian meaning of that word. The interior life is not in opposition to community; in fact, without a particular form of interior life, community, in the Christian meaning of the word, is not possible. Unfortunately, the interior life and union with Christ have become at times too individualistic and dualistic. Interiority was seen as a retreat from reality around us; and the concentration on the self as in some way opposed to others. This has been one of the accusations made against devotion to the Sacred Heart; at times rightly so. But it is not true of the important tradition of the devotion that Jules Chevalier represents.
Concentration on the interior life of Jesus – and consequently on the heart of Jesus – intensified from the time of St Bernard (1090-1153) and continued through people like St Bonaventure (1221-1274), St. Mechtilde (1241-1299), St Gertrude (1256-1302) and St Catherine of Sienna (1347 1380). The movement flowered again in the seventeenth century in people like Cardinal Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629) and reached a highpoint of popularity through the influence of St Margaret Mary (1647-1690), which continued into the twentieth century.
Cardinal de Bérulle’s followers, St Jean Eudes (1601-1680) and Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-1657), continued his emphasis on the interior life of Jesus, but spoke of it more explicitly in terms of the heart of Jesus. But the heart of Jesus (what makes Jesus to be Jesus) does not stop with Jesus. There is a greater ‘oneness’ without which the Heart of Jesus cannot be understood. There is a Heart in God (what makes God to be God). In this sense, Chevalier sees the Heart of God as uniting Father, Son and Spirit. He sees it also as being present on earth in the Heart of Jesus.
We know from where the Word comes;
he comes from the unfathomable depths of the divine essence,
from the Heart of God.
If he is the splendour of the glory of his Father,
he must also be the substantial expression
of the Heart of God
from which he is brought forth.
He must be love eternal.
And this infinite love,
which constitutes the very depths of God,
is contained in a human heart
born from the blood of a Virgin.
Christ is the whole of God,
his living sacrament,
his complete gift,
he is his Heart with which to love us.
Jules Chevalier 4
St Jean Eudes spoke of the three ‘hearts’ of Jesus: his physical heart, his spiritual heart (his whole interior life), and his divine heart (his eternal ‘oneness’ with the Father and Holy Spirit). “His divine Heart, which he has from all eternity in the adorable bosom of his Father, is but one Heart and one love with the Heart and love of his Father. And connected with the heart and love of his Father is the origin of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, when he gave us his Heart, he gave us also the Heart of his Father and his adorable Spirit’s. The oneness of this ‘threefold love’ has been central in theological developments of devotion to the Sacred Heart and is basic also in Pius XII’s Encyclical Haurietis aquas 6. It is basic also, even if implicitly, in popular piety.
Jean-Jacques Olier founded the seminary of St Sulpice in Paris and also a Congregation whose members are generally known as the Sulpicians.
The directory for the seminary, Pietas seminarii, centred its apostolic formation around oneness with Christ, particularly Galatians 2:20, it is Christ who lives in me. And this text is central in any proper understanding of Devotion to the Sacred Heart, and also in any proper understanding of community.
Pietas seminarii, formulated its basic principle as follows: “The first and last end of this institute will be to live completely for God in Christ Jesus our Lord in such a way that the interior life of his Son penetrates the depths of our heart and that each be able to say what St Paul said about himself with confidence: ‘It is no longer I that live, it is Christ who lives in me’ (Gal 2:20). This will be for all their single hope and their single thought, this also will be their one exercise: to live interiorly the life of Christ and to manifest it in action in their mortal body”.
One with Christ
The Sulpician tradition of the interior life would have been present in the formation that Jules Chevalier received in the seminary at Bourges, which was also run by the Sulpicians. It was certainly a feature of his later life and also in his book on the Sacred Heart. In fact, “To live interiorly the life of Christ and to manifest it in action” is central in any form of Sacred Heart devotion. “Make my heart like yours” has been traditionally a characteristic invocation. This is not merely a matter of imitation and ethics; it is based on an interior transformation in which the heart of Jesus (all that makes Jesus to be Jesus) takes over and a transformed self emerges. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see everything has become new! (2 Cor 5: 17). This oneness with the risen Christ is a reality now, but will be fully realized and possessed by us at the end of time.
Like iron reddened in the fire,
which becomes fire, bright and burning,
while remaining iron,
we shall remain eternally human creatures,
but in glory we shall be eternally what we are by grace,
penetrated by God,
permeated by God,
being able to say and actually saying:
I live, not I;
it is no longer I who live;
it is Jesus Christ who lives in me (Gal 2:20).
Jules Chevalier 7
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Gal 2: 19f.
Let the same mind by in you that was in Christ Jesus; who though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross. Phil 2:5-8.
I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I in them. Jn 17:26.
From the earliest information we have in the New Testament about Christians, we find them attributing to the risen Jesus of Nazareth properties and attributes that had normally been reserved for God. Just as God was present everywhere so too was his glorified Word incarnate, Jesus. Christ The same applies, for example, to creation, the kingdom, forgiveness of sin, redemption, judgment. . Nevertheless, the early Christians spoke in this way within the strict Jewish confines of monotheism. Yet while it is correct to find the roots of the New Testament understanding and experience of God in the Old Testament, at the same time, something radically new appears. God is no longer simply Yahweh; he is the Father of Jesus Christ. And both the Father and the risen Jesus Christ are spoken of globally as one divinity in action even while being clearly and personally distinguished one from the other. The same can be said for the Spirit of the Father and of Jesus Christ.
Some practical implications
The implications of this way of speaking will be made clearer and more refined through later disputes and consequent conciliar decrees, but the basis is already there in the primitive Christian experience of the one God who is Father, Word incarnate and Spirit. And at the centre of this is the experience of the crucified-risen Jesus, an experience which is the work of the Spirit, for. No one can say ‘Lord Jesus’ except through the power of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:3), and only through the same Spirit can we share the experience of Jesus and cry out with him, Abba! Father! (Rom 8: 15). And even though the Risen Jesus is transformed radically by the Spirit of God, he remains identical with Jesus the carpenter of Nazareth, with a baby in Bethlehem, with a corpse on the cross. And the symbol of the heart of Jesus (what makes Jesus to be Jesus) binds all of this together into One.
Union with Christ is thus central to Christianity. In and through Jesus Christ, God who is Father, Son (Word) and Spirit gives himself to us completely, eternally. In Christianity, Jesus is not simply a teacher or prophet. The primary emphasis is not on his words but on himself, and not on himself as an end in himself but as the self-communication of the transcendent God. This is the essence of grace. However, the ‘oneness’ achieved by God’s grace is not a oneness that takes us beyond matter by leaving it behind; it is a fulfilment, a transfiguration of it.
The nature of matter is beyond our imagining. Scientists can present it only in formulae and symbolic diagrams. The more we know about it the more it is seen to possess properties we once thought to be exclusively spiritual. Consequently, the possibilities of matter are also beyond our imagining. However, we can get some intimation of it in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus. Thus, the Heart of God and the heart of creation meet in the heart of Jesus and in this way a new creation comes about – a creation that is at the same time ‘already’ and ‘yet to come’. Christian faith does not accept that God’s evolving universe has reached its ultimate culmination in homo sapiens as we know him. In God’s plan matter has passed through numerous transformations, and we are only one small step in the process. The final step we call Resurrection, already made present in the resurrection of Jesus by the creative power of God who is Spirit.
Through sanctifying grace,
we live the very life of God;
and this life of God is communicated to us through Jesus Christ,
grace being an extension, a prolongation of the Incarnation.
And this grace is centred particularly in his Heart.
Isn’t it in the Heart of Jesus
that two loves meet:
the love of God
descending to the whole of creation
and the love of the whole of creation
rising to God?
Isn’t this divine Heart
the love of God par excellence.
Grace is love.
How could it not be love?
For God is love itself,
and grace is the life of God communicated to us.
Jules Chevalier 8
Oneness with Christ is not some out-of-this-world mysticism. It manifests itself in very practical ways in our everyday living. The entry into this sort of experience and the sure test of its genuineness is love of others. St John sums this up in the words of Jesus, This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you (Jn 15: 12). And when we look on him who they have pierced (Jn 19:37), we understand the significance of the phrase as I have loved you. Love for a Christian in general and in devotion to the Sacred Heart in particular is not defined by merely looking into the human heart. The human value of love and service is transformed in the light of the pierced Heart of Jesus, which makes present to us the kenosis (self-emptying) of God (Phil 2:6). Or as St John puts it, We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another (1 John 3:16).
The command of Jesus is not merely one ethic alongside many similar ones. Much less is it a purely humanistic ethic. We live ‘one heart’ not merely with others but with God and with the whole universe. The last point is crucial in an understanding of Jules Chevalier. The ethic of love of others is shared widely even outside of Christianity; but to understand what Jesus means, we have to understand its context. Union with the Triune God and union with what the Triune God has created is the basis and meaning of Christian love. And, once more, this union has a natural symbol in the pierced Heart of Christ.
Jesus uses the strongest terms
to express our union with God,
and he repeats them,
freely heaping them on one another:
My Father, may those you have given me
be one like us:
that I may be in them
as you are in me,
so that they be completely one.
In this union,
there is something of that perfect unity
which in God unites the three Divine persons.
Jules Chevalier 9
God, who is Father, Son and Spirit, is both one and other. We too are one and other – one with God and one with others. Everything has come from God, and everything returns to him. And so, we are destined, in and through Jesus Christ, to be one with him together with the whole of a transformed creation. Thus, Jules Chevalier sees God’s final plan for the whole of creation as simply a fuller understanding and realization of all that the symbol of the Heart of Jesus stands for – of all that makes Jesus to be Jesus.
A day will come
When we shall comprehend
the harmonies that exist in our nature.
We shall grasp the relationships between
our material life and our moral life,
between our life of the heart
and the world of intelligence and love.
We shall see our relationships as symbols
of holier and more divine mysteries
in the supernatural order.
A day will come,
when we shall know our own heart
by knowing the Heart of Jesus;
we shall be able to say with the Apostle:
Everything belongs to us,
we belong to Jesus,
and Jesus belongs to God (1 Cor 3:22,23).
Then the universe in its entirety
will appear as it really is,
as a word uttered in time
to express the secrets of eternity.
Jules Chevalier 10
One with others
A Messiah without a renewed Israel would have been incomprehensible to Jesus and his contemporaries. Thus, Jesus Christ’s mission to make people aware of his Father’s love for them was not individualistic. Nor was his concept of Israel itself ‘exclusive’ and hence from that point of view also ‘individualistic’. In line with the prophets, he saw Israel not as centred on itself-a self-imposed ghetto-but, by God’s design open to the world. As N. T. Wright has rightly said, the challenge of Jesus to his contemporaries, ‘You are the light of the world’, should not be limited to good example within a closed community; it was a call to be true to the universal mission that God had given his people through the prophets.
The love revealed in Jesus’ pierced side on the cross and poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5) of its very nature creates unity; and this unity, willed by God, does not destroy the ‘many’; on the contrary, by definition it needs the many. The point made by St Paul when speaking of the unity of the Church is not primarily that multiplicity requires unity, but that unity requires multiplicity. And so . our personal union with Christ unites us with others and creates the Church, his Body; and in this way the whole of creation is reconciled with God.
Our personal union with Jesus
is beyond all our imagining.
It is not a simple union of resemblance and of love,
it is a mysterious and profound union of life:
Jesus is the vine and we are the branches,
Jesus is the head and we are the members.
And just as the members and the head form the body,
and the branches and the vine constitute the plant,
the whole Christ is formed by Jesus and us.
Christ is not Jesus on his own.
One should not say
there is one and many,
but rather
many are one in Christ Jesus made man,
the head of the body.
And what is this body?
It is the Church.
Jules Chevalier 11
Jules Chevalier comes back to this point repeatedly: the ‘oneness’ that unites us with God who is Father, Word and Spirit does not only involve solidarity among people, but also solidarity with the world. The ‘total Christ’ is not only Christ and us, but Christ and the world. This aspect, which has had a resurgence in our time, was very much part of Devotion to the Sacred Heart in nineteenth century France as witnessed in the writings of Jules Chevalier and acknowledged also by Teilhard de Chardin. From this point of view, the eschaton – God’s final plan for creation-is summed up by Jules Chevalier as ” the reality of the Sacred Heart unveiled in its full light”. 12
He is the head;
we are the members.
The whole Man is him and us.
The complete, total Christ
is not only Jesus and us;
it is Jesus and the world.
Jules Chevalier 13
Devotion to the Sacred Heart has at times been condemned as a too individualistic form of piety. This was certainly not the attitude or practice of Jules Chevalier and others like him. For Chevalier, devotion to the Sacred Heart meant taking the Heart of Jesus (Jesus himself) seriously; that is, taking the dispositions of his Heart seriously. Associations of priests dedicated to the Sacred Heart in nineteenth century France recited each day a prayer based on chapter 17 of St John’s Gospel-the prayer that all should be one.
The social implications of Christ’s desire for unity should be clear. A commitment to unity is not just a slogan. It has practical bite. This was clear also in the thinking of Vatican Council II. The Church is the sign or sacrament of union with God and unity among all people. For this reason, the Church must, of its very nature, be concerned about justice and the development of peoples. Not to do this would be to betray the very nature of the Church which is meant to be a sign of the unity willed by God. There are also serious implications here for religious community life and for parish life. It was in this context that Father Chevalier saw devotion to the Sacred Heart as ‘essentially social’ 14. Admittedly this social concern often took a conservative, monarchist direction in the nineteenth century, but that in a sense is accidental; the important thing was that the devotion was recognized as having essentially social repercussions.
In speaking of the Church as a result of union with Christ, Father Chevalier bases himself on the Pauline and Patristic doctrine of the ‘total Christ’. That is, Jesus is not the Christ on his own. He is the Christ with others. Each one personally and in community is in a very real sense part of the whole Christ. Thus, the risen Christ is not and never will be “all that he is meant to be” without each of us sharing his life. This sort of ‘oneness’ preserves both the individual and community.
St. Paul says and repeats
that Christ is the head of everyone (1 Cor 11 :3),
the head of the Church (Col 1:18);
the Church is his body,
his fullness (Eph 1 :22,23):
the mysterious complement
without which Christ himself
would not be all that he is meant to be.
I am the vine and you are the branches (John 15:5).
Do not the vine and the branches,
the head and the members
have the same sap, the same blood, the same life
and, to sum up, the one and same nature?
Jules Chevalier 15
One Bread – the Eucharist
Devotion to the Sacred Heart has always been bound up essentially with the Eucharist, for the Eucharist is the Sacrament of unity, the Sacrament of God’s transformation of the material universe, the Sacrament of the communion of saints, the Sacrament that prefigures resurrection and eternal life. And the ‘oneness’ it symbolizes is not simply otherworldly; it involves a ‘oneness’ that embraces the Creator and the whole of creation and has social repercussions here and now.
By the Eucharist
the life of Jesus is in us
as the life of the Father is in him,
and unity is accomplished in the heart,
because communion is a union of hearts.
Do you hear the cry that comes to us across the centuries?
It is a testament of love;
it is this:”
I want everyone to be nothing but one in love,
that they have only one heart and one soul,
that they form but one single family,
that as much as possible they be united among themselves and with us
as we are in the divine essence”.
From where comes this cry,
from where comes this project of love?
From the Heart of Jesus.
To break unity is to wound him cruelly.
Jules Chevalier 16
The Pauline doctrine of the ‘total Christ’ is not merely abstract theology; it is a concrete spirituality, a concrete way of experiencing Christ and of living the Gospel. It is essentially Eucharistic, because it is specifically this reality of the ‘total Christ’ that is celebrated in that sacrament. In the Eucharist also we celebrate a material universe divinized by the incarnation and transformed by the resurrection. The Eucharist thus becomes the ‘pledge of our resurrection’. It celebrates the ‘oneness’ of this world and the next achieved by the Father and the Spirit through Christ. And the Eucharist is also the symbol of the Church in which all this is to be made present. The eucharistic aspect of Devotion to the Sacred Heart was highlighted also by the widely used expression ‘the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus’.
Adoration before. the Blessed Sacrament exposed is certainly an important practice in Sacred Heart devotion, and deservedly so, but it should not be narrowed to some form of individualistic prayer. Though using nineteenth century language, Jules Chevalier’s description of the Eucharist presents the essentials of Catholic Tradition that we find in Vatican Council II.
The Eucharist is the centre of the Sacraments
that communicate to us the power of our redemption.
It prolongs and multiplies in this valley of tears
the presence of God made man;
the renewal and immolation of Calvary;
the extension of the incarnation of the Word
in each of the members of his mystical Body;
the glorification on earth of nature and humanity;
the supreme perfection of the supernatural life
through the most intimate union
between God and his creature
that can be conceived of here below.
It is, moreover, the pledge of our resurrection
and of our glorification in heaven;
the glory of the Church
of which it is
the profound symbol and active centre of its unity.
Jules Chevalier 17
Oneness and the individual
Although devotion to the Sacred Heart has an essential ecclesial and social significance; the individual does not become insignificant or unimportant. .Our sharing in the life of Christ does not make us become stereotypes. Jules Chevalier stressed that the Wisdom of God manifests itself not simply in unity but in unity in variety; a point he returns to frequently in his book on the Sacred Heart. God loves everything that constitutes the ‘oneness’ he plans. Nothing, and certainly no one, is insignificant.
Each of us in the body of Christ
is this particular organ,
this particular fibre
and no other.
In this divine vine,
we are this branch, this leaf, this flower or this fruit.
And what we are no one else is,
nor ever will be.
Our common vocation is that we be members of Jesus
by grace and by glory.
Our personal vocation is that we be for Jesus
this particular member
and no other.
Jules Chevalier 18
The symbolism of the heart holds together ‘otherness’ and ‘individuality’, both of which help describe the human person in the full sense of that word. Because Father Chevalier saw the reconciliation of unity and otherness in the Trinity, he saw our essential individuality and our essential relatedness as a sharing in the very nature of God. In our limited, creaturely way, we can share in the ‘I am’ of God, but that very ‘I am’ puts us in relationship with God and with others.
Each receives grace and glory in a special way,
each in their own proper, personal measure.
This makes each one a special being
for all eternity,
able to say like God
I am he who is;
and to do this not in some general way,
but in particular:
I am this particular someone
who is not and never will be someone other.
Jules Chevalier 19
Just as the harmony of the universe does not exclude variety but includes it, even needs it, so the final harmony of God’s plan does not exclude variety or obliterate the individual. Just as every part has its part to play in creation now, so also in a transformed, new creation.
My adorable Saviour,
I hear the harmony of your saints.
What magnificent songs
How I would love to have a part that was mine in that harmony!
I do not ask for a brilliant or a principal part:
the least is more than I deserve;
a single note will be sufficient;
but I alone will sing that note;
it will be mine;
and something will be added to the universal harmony!
I will help the whole of heaven sing a better song to you;
you will receive from me a little bit of glory,
that without me you would not have had!Jules Chevalier 20
1 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.77.
2 op. cit., p.302
3 op. cit., p. 82.
4 op. cit., p.l46f. The original text contains a number of scriptural references. The main ones are Heb 1:3 and I John 4:8. The italics are in the original text.
5 Jean Eudes, Le coeur admirable de La Mere de Dieu, Vol. 8, Oeuvres Complet, p. 344. Quoted by Bertrand de Margerie, Histoire doctrinale du cult au Coeur de Jesus. Paris: Mame, 1992, p.l57.
6 Encyclical Letter on Devotion to the Sacred Heart, Haurietis aquas, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, Vol. 48, 1956 English Translation, Catholic Truth Society, London. Sections 26-28.
7 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.79f.
8 op. cit., p. 80.
9 op. cit., p.78. In the text, Fr Chevalier refers the reader to Jn 17:11,21,23.
10 or. cit., p.198-199. Quoting Bishop Baudry.
1l op. cit., p.80.
12 op. dt., p.290.
13 op. cit., p.284. This relies heavily on a formulation of St Augustine.
14 op. cit., p.280.
15 op. cit., p. 78
16 op. cit., p.241. The first few lines are a quotation from Bishop Baudry,
17 Le Coeur de Jesus, p.398 and reference is given to Jn, 17:11,21; Acts 4:32. 17 op. cit., p.214
18 op. cit., p.83-84
19 op. cit., p.83.
20 op. cit., p.81f.
8. The pierced Heart
Jesus said to St. Gertrude,
“The principal end I had in view
when my side was pierced
was to reveal to the world
the secret of my Heart,
so that all would understand
that my love is greater than any external signs
that I give of it,
for my sufferings come to an end,
my love never ends” 1.
The Word incarnate was sent not merely to say, ‘God loves and forgives you’, but to live opposed to whatever is not love. His death was part of that project; not so much his death in itself, which was a sinful juridical lynching that could not be approved by God (c.f. Deut. 21:22f; Gal 3:13). The attitude with which he died gave it value. His death was in harmony with the Spirit of God and his own ‘spirit’. His death was not just an evil passively endured. In dying he was being faithful to the mission given him by his Father. An analogy can be found in the execution of a patriot or martyr, where an evil is transformed into good.
Sacred Heart devotion does not concentrate principally on the physical sufferings of Jesus, but on his ‘internal’ dispositions and reactions-on his Heart. The saving element in the death of Jesus was not physical suffering by itself, but a wholehearted love of his Father and his Father’s project, even though it cost physical suffering. And here again the deeper suffering” is not primarily physical, but the bitter experience of love rejected-the whole project of his life rejected. And this rejection goes beyond the human heart of Jesus to God’s infinite love made incarnate in him. This tragic dimension of the mission of Jesus is wider than his death on the cross; it embraces the whole of his being, both divine and human. While the divine and the human are essentially distinct, they form one being in Jesus. That is basic Catholic orthodoxy; and essential in the tradition of Devotion to the Sacred Heart we are considering.
The heart is a symbol of love, but in Sacred Heart devotion the heart is a pierced heart, traditionally surrounded by thorns, surmounted by a cross. It is not only a symbol of love given and accepted, but of love rejected – of a person and all he stands for rejected. Both aspects, love and the rejection of love, are essential elements in the devotion, particularly in the tradition that stems from St Margaret Mary. She was overwhelmed by how much God loved the world, but at the same time she was shocked that too often we simply don’t care.
While awareness of the rejection of love saves devotion to the Sacred Heart from unrealism concerning love, even God’s love, there has been a risk of a one-sided emphasis on rejection. This has resulted at times in a too negative view of life. Consequently, some have accused the devotion of a too morbid concentration on suffering and a failure to recognize that God as Spirit is present in all human endeavours that enhance life and creation.
Suffering
Today there would not seem to be much danger that a spirituality would morbidly concentrate on suffering. On the contrary, suffering is almost a taboo, an obscenity-something to be ashamed of and hidden from sight. Growing numbers consider that socially approved suicide should provide an escape from suffering. They feel that life and suffering are incompatible.
Despite all efforts to the contrary, suffering is an inescapable part of being human. Our senses open us to the experience of beauty and pleasure; they also, of their very nature, open us to hurt and suffering. Our mind, of its very nature, opens us to truth, but also to mistakes, to foreboding, to fear, to depressive memories. The human body also, of its very nature, is open not only to symmetry and growth but also to decay and disease. It follows that the Word incarnate had to endure suffering if he was to be fully human and really one with us. The Letter to the Hebrews does not only say Jesus was like us in all things, but that he was “tested in every way as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4: 15). He was not programmed for obedience like a robot, he “learned obedience through suffering” (Heb 5:8). He knew frustration (Mt 18:17), hunger (Mt 4:3), thirst (John 4:7; 19:28), foreboding (Jn 12:27; Mt 26:38), dread (Luke 22:44). Like the servant of Yahweh, he was “a man of suffering” (Isaiah 53:3). Thus, it is not only the symbol of a heart, but the symbol of a pierced heart that helps us know what makes Jesus to be Jesus. It helps us realize his solidarity with us even in our suffering. This has attracted many to Sacred Heart devotion and given them strength in moments of trial. It expresses in symbol the invitation of Jesus: “Come to me all you who are burdened “. He understands.
Galatians 2: 19-20, I have been crucified with Christ… it is Christ who lives in me, is central in Sacred Heart devotion. If he lives in me, he must live in me in health and illness, prosperity and poverty, success and failure, strength and weakness, life and death. Just as I cannot be united with Christ without sharing in his suffering, for his suffering is an inescapable part of him, neither can Christ be united with me without sharing in my suffering, for suffering is an inescapable part of me. If we are to live with Christ, we also have to suffer with him. St Paul tells us, for me to live is Christ (Phil 1:21); but in the same letter he writes, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death (3: 10). For Paul the whole of life had to be identified with Christ and so, even in adversity, he could possess everything (2 Cor 6:3-10).
Just as I am to grow into Christ’s image through all that is positive in my life; I am to grow into his image also in the way I cope with all that is negative. And it is not merely a matter of ‘coping’ – my suffering is a place where I can experience union with Christ. There is much dispute about some of the precise details in the New Testament’s association of human suffering and the sufferings of Jesus, but there is no room for doubt that the two are associated (2 Cor 1:5; Col1:24; Phil 3:10-11; 1 Pet 1:11; 4:13; 5:1). To bring Jesus into my suffering does not make my suffering cease to be suffering; nor does it remove the mystery of why there is suffering; but bearing my suffering with Jesus and as Jesus did gives it meaning and purpose. This is not to be . accepted merely as an intellectual theory, but tested through experience. In this, we can be helped by the example of those who have lived it heroically and also by our own struggling efforts to do the same.
Suffering looked at from the point of view of the ‘heart’ is not complete without consideration of compassion for others who suffer. The Heart of Jesus is pierced not only because of his own sufferings but also because of the sight of the sufferings of others (c.f. Lk 23:28, Weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children). Bearing suffering as Jesus did involves also active compassion for others who suffer (c.f. Lk 23:28). The parable of the good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37) and the description of the final evaluation of human existence (Mt 25:31-46) demand that my suffering should not make me self-centred. I can become self-centred in two ways: a reluctance or even refusal to be concerned for others and a reluctance or even refusal to allow others be concerned for me. Love is a shared experience both when we give it and when we receive it. We build up a civilization of love not only when we give love to those in need; we also build it up when we accept it gratefully from others and allow them to love by’ helping us in our needs.
If we follow Our Lord in his public life,
we see his Heart go out to every misfortune,
to every need, moral or physical.
From where comes that tender compassion
for those who suffer?
From his Heart,
always his Heart.Jules Chevalier 2
Sacrifice
The deliberate acceptance of a life of ‘victim’ was a significant current within the tradition of devotion to the Sacred Heart we are considering. The ‘little way’ of St Therese of Lisieux is but one example. This is not to be trivialized. A victim is a gift given to God on behalf of oneself and others. In Biblical terms, the offering of a victim is useless unless it symbolizes a right relationship with God and others (cf Isaiah 1:11-17; Ps 40:6-8; 51:16f).
With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, a mortal, what. is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:6-8)
Nevertheless, many today find the word ‘victim’ repulsive; they suspect masochism – a type of spirituality that considers human comfort to be somehow against the Gospel. Admittedly, the word ‘victim’ can be rightly queried if it is viewed in an exclusively passive sense; if it is understood as a means of placating the anger of God; if it values suffering in itself as a good; if it indicates a refusal to do anything to allay suffering. Liberation Theologians stressed particularly this last point; for them, a spiritualizing of suffering dampened the urgency of changing the oppressive social situations that caused it.
Aberrations can occur in any approach to religion or in anything else for that matter. Language that is appropriate and useful at one time and place can become misleading or useless in another. But rejection of a ‘victim’ spirituality would itself be open to query if failed to recognize any positive idea behind it when seen at its best as a total gift one oneself to God and to others. And a rejection of it would certainly be mistaken if it viewed suffering as somehow peripheral, even detrimental to normal Christian living and spirituality. The test case for any philosophy, theology or spirituality is how it stands up to the reality of suffering and death. Hence, even if the word ‘victim’ may be misleading and inappropriate in spirituality today, the attitude and way of life it stands for touches on the centre of Christian living.
In the letters of St Paul, the suffering on the cross is more than speculative theology. He even considers it to be beyond speculation and incomprehensible without faith. It is outside the wisdom of language and wise words (1 Cor 1: 17); a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles (1 Cor 1: 24). At the same time, the suffering on the cross has its own wisdom: to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (ib.). Thus, to be baptised into the suffering and death of Christ is not a negative, life-denying act; on the contrary, we were baptized into his death so that we might walk in newness of life (Rom 6:3-4). This new life involves living and suffering with the attitude with which Jesus himself suffered and died (Rom 6: 10-11), that is, living opposed to sin, opposed to all that is not love. And while life with Christ always looks to a future perfection (Rom 8: 17; Phil 3: 10-11), it exists now (Gal 2:20) even in suffering (2 Cor 4: 10, 11). In this way, St Paul can refer to his own sufferings as the “sufferings of Christ” (2 Cor 1 :5; Phil 3: 10; Gal 6: 17) 3.
The redeeming process of Christ’s life, death and resurrection is complete and once-for-all. But while Christ’s redemptive act is complete, its effects are not complete until the end of time when God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:28). God brought about a new creation through the raising of Jesus who had suffered and died (Gal 6: 15; 2 Cor 5: 17), but it is equally clear in the New Testament that the redemption, wrought by God through Jesus Christ, is brought into the world through the Spirit of God using human instruments, not only through their preaching (c.f. Rom 10: 14-18), but also through their suffering (c.f. 2 Cor 4:7-12) and through their prayer (c.f. 1 Thes 3:12-13). This is one of the ways in which Paul can say: It makes me happy to be suffering for you now, and in my own body to make up all the hardships that still have to be undergone by Christ for the sake of his Body, the Church (Col 1:24). God has accomplished all, but it is our task to freely offer that ‘all’ back to him and be his instruments, both in prayer and action, in bringing it to others.
This is the teaching of the great Apostle:
everything belongs to us,
the world, life, death,
things present and things to come.
We have to offer them to Christ to whom we belong.
And Christ, in his turn, offers them to God
to whom everything must return.
In a temple everything is made for the altar.
In this great temple of the visible universe,
there is an altar
a unique centre for all that is made.
On this altar the fire of love must burn incessantly.
And what victim will this fire consume?
It is not a pm1icular, determined victim
chosen from others of less esteem.
Our heart is this altar of holocausts.
Everything that is, everything that happens,
every creature and every event
should be offered there to God
and, as it were, burnt, consumed
in his honour.
Jules Chevalier 4
Intercession and the daily offering
The ‘daily offering’ is a traditional spiritual exercise of devotion to the Sacred Heart-a commitment to live the coming day united with Christ’s own offering of himself to his Father in worship and to others in service. This has been expressed in ways that may fit one culture and temperament more than another, but in principle it has firm grounds in Scripture. And in so far as it involves a commitment to live our everyday life in union with Christ, it is a basic Christian practice. I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good, acceptable and perfect (Rom 12:1-2; c.f. 1 Pet 2:4-5). Thus, the offering of all that happens each day with the commitment that everything be transformed by the renewal of our minds gives us much to reflect on.
When we speak of a ‘spiritual’ sacrifice, it does not mean less real but more real. A spiritual sacrifice is a sacrifice in which the Spirit acts. The sacrifice of Christ is not real because it fits into rituals for sacrifice found in the history of religions, or even in the Old Testament. It is real in the sense of being the fulfilment of all that ritual sacrifices were trying to express. Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said: “Here I am; in the scroll of the book, it is written of me. I delight to do your will, 0 my God. Your law is within my heart (Ps 40:6-8). Thus, our ‘spiritual’ sacrifices are a real participation in the real sacrifice of Christ. We allow him to re-live in us by living as he lived; we face suffering as he did; and we intercede as he does for the salvation of the world.
The intercession of Christ for all (Rom 8:34) expresses in prayer the purpose of His oblation of himself to his Father for the redemption of the world (Heb 7:25). His prayer of intercession and his redemptive act cannot be separated: his suffering gives point to his prayer and his prayer gives point to his suffering. Like the suffering servant (Is 53: 12) his intercession takes place in his acceptance of the suffering entailed in his redemptive mission. And our incorporation into the Body of Christ enables us to participate in his oblation of himself and also in his intercession. This is found in Church practice from New Testament times; the first epistle of John accepts firmly the atonement wrought by Christ (1 Jn 2: 1-2) and the instrumentality of prayer (1 Jn 16-17).
In teaching us to pray the ‘Our Father’ (Mt 6:9-13), Jesus teaches us a prayer of intercession – of complete openness to the Father and to his plan for the world – but this prayer also teaches us how to live. The ‘daily offering’, in Sacred Heart devotion belongs to the same tradition. If prayer is to come from our heart just as it does from the Heart of Jesus, it involves a commitment to live each day as he did.
“Christian prayer is primarily the prayer of the entire community of humankind joined with Christ himself. Each individual has his part in this prayer which is common to the one Body, and it becomes the voice of the beloved Spouse of Christ, putting into words the wishes and desires of the whole Christian people and making intercession for the necessities common to all human beings. It obtains its unity from the Heart of Christ himself” 5.
According to Jules Chevalier, “the whole substance of devotion to the Sacred Heart” is found in the practice of the morning offering. “It imposes no obligation under pain of sin. It asks simply for love-love of the Heart of Jesus. All our works, our sufferings, no matter how ordinary they might be, even the most inconsequential, become acts of love, since they are made with the intention of pleasing Our Lord” 6. Thus, the morning offering puts our day in opposition to all that is not love. And this daily commitment to build a ‘civilization of love’ is not an impersonal programme of our own; its beginning and end is Jesus dwelling in our hearts. It is not merely a proposition or a social programme like any other; it is the fruit of what we call devotion. With Jesus in our hearts we live, suffer and pray with intentions as wide as his own.
Reparation
In Sacred Heart devotion the rejection of God’s love revealed in Christ and the consequent impulse to make up for this rejection is called ‘reparation’. It has been considered an essential element. in devotion to the Sacred Heart, particularly in the tradition stemming from St Margaret Mary. The word, for a number of reasons, became distasteful in some circles particularly in the naively optimistic sixties and seventies of the last century. But more basic than that was the theology of the atonement and expiation in which it was at times expressed. Because of these negative overtones ‘reparation’ was probably one of the reasons why some people reacted. against the devotion itself. Even in religious congregations dedicated to the Sacred Heart some groups tried to have the word removed from their Constitutions. Part of the problem was that it had become associated with certain ideas and practices that seemed to be misleading or even mistaken.
Reparation is simply the noun form of the verb ‘to repair’, ‘to set things right’, ‘to make amends’, ‘to settle a broken relationship’. However, a dictionary definition is not sufficient. Since devotion to the Sacred Heart is essentially a relationship with Jesus Christ who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 2:20), it understands ‘reparation’ in the light of this mutual relationship. In other words, it does not view sin exclusively from the point of view of psychology or its human effects; it sees sin from the point of view a God who is infinitely holy and infinitely loving and who is incarnate in Christ. It experiences evil as a failure to respond to love with love; and this experience urges us to make amends.
Top level theology can be brought in to explain this, but for most people little or no explanation is needed. It is the natural way for us to react when anyone we love is rejected or offended. We feel urged to prove our love more both in word and deed. Reparation, as understood in devotion to the Sacred Heart, cannot be understood properly outside of this’ relationship.
Theologically, ‘reparation’ is necessarily bound up with how one understands the atonement and expiation. A widely accepted theology was centred on appeasing God’s anger. In its crudest form, somebody had to be punished for sin; Jesus took this punishment on himself and in this way appeased the anger of his Father and satisfied justice. This extreme version of the theory was usually modified in a variety of more acceptable ways. Many theologians, however, became more and more discontent with these slight modifications. Their basic complaint was that any explanation based on the appeasing of God’s anger and on a legalistic concept of God’s offended justice seemed to undermine the central part played by God’s love in the New Testament. However, since God’s love is central in devotion to the Sacred Heart, one can suspect the validity of the criticism made of it on this ground.
When the atonement is crudely understood as the appeasing of God’s anger, especially in simplistic legal terms, there is an obvious diminishment of the New Testament’s emphasis on God as love. At the same time, one needs to concede that the imagery of God’s anger is frequently found in both the Old and New Testament. Leaving aside unsophisticated expressions about causality and justice, the underlying idea is the absolute incompatibility between God and evil. Divine anger is also used to describe the inbuilt, destructive consequences of sin.
The image of an angry God has certainly had damaging effects in many lives and it has to be used with caution. However, this caution has resulted at times in a feeling that anger in itself is wrong and to be always avoided. This too can have damaging effects. On the other hand, it is not sufficiently realized that the image of a loving God can also be misguided when it results in a feeling that God does not really care about evil and that evil does not really matter. The two images, love and anger, are co-relatives: each can be properly understood only in relation to the other.
Our realization of God’s love for us should increase when we recognize his utter incompatibility with evil; and our perception of evil should also increase when we realize the extent of his love. Added to this, God comes to us through the incarnation with experience of what it means to be human. He shows sympathy and understanding for sinners. At the same time, in solidarity with all that is human, he comes in anger against all that is inhuman (c.f. Mt 25:31-46).
It may sound strange to us, but a common prayer people used in devotion to the Sacred Heart was the Parce, Domine: ‘Spare, 0 Lord, spare your people, be not angry with us forever’. It did not seem strange to them; after all, it sums up much of the psalms. And when we realize the absolute repugnance of God towards evil (expressed in the image of his ‘anger’), we realize too the staggering implications of his infinite care for us (expressed in the image of ‘love’). Thus, if we look at the tragic mess resulting from the world’s failure to love, and if we look at our own powerlessness in the face of it, our natural response is an urgent plea to the Lord to rescue us from that turmoil. The mercy of God is central in Sacred Heart devotion and has been one of its most attractive aspects. Nevertheless, it has never allowed ‘love’ and ‘mercy’ to be understood as indifference to evil.
The imagery of anger in the Bible not only leaves room for love but actually enhances it; for example, in Hosea (I 1: 1 -9), where anger is present but overcome by love. The image of anger is found and implied also in the teaching of Jesus (Lk 21:23; c.f. Mt 18:34). The infinitely holy God, who is absolutely incompatible with evil, transcends all boundaries, even the boundaries of sin and evil. And as Word incarnate, God becomes united with sinners – For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21).
Anger and love are both images of the ineffable God; and both are analogies. We accept this readily about ‘anger’, but tend to forget it when we apply ‘love’ to God. God transcends infinitely all that we can conceive of him. When applied to God our words are more dissimilar than similar to the reality, we are speaking about. Nevertheless, imagination is a valid category of knowing and is not to be identified merely with make believe. Imagination can bring us into Contact with reality; it can also mislead; but so, can our concepts. Imagery is an expression of the imagination; it causes problems only when we cease to let it work on us as imagery and treat it as an abstract concept. This is particularly misleading when it is not viewed in the context of a whole network of other, also valid, images. There is an even greater danger if we use one image in isolation as the conceptual basis for a whole theology or spirituality. This mistake can be made not only in developing a theology or spirituality, but also in criticising it.
Faith in God’s gratuitous love is basic in any Christian spirituality, especially one that centres on the Heart of Christ. We have known and believe the love God has for us (1 Jn 4: 16; c.f. vv. 7-12). But this faith, of its very nature, must issue in love: the only thing that counts is faith made effective through love (Gal 5:6). However, not infrequently those who oppose the use of legal imagery to explain redemption become themselves closet ‘legalists’ in the way they speak about God’s love. God’s loving forgiveness can be too exclusively viewed as an acquittal judgement made in favour of a guilty person in a law court. But no magic wand can be waved over the horrors of sin, as if, for example, a man like Hitler is simply absorbed at death into God’s loving forgiveness, and the matter closed. Our actions, like ourselves, are immersed in history; they have a past, a present and a future. And the hard fact is that wrong has to be set right (repaired), not merely forgiven and forgotten. We belittle love and forgiveness if we exclude this need to ‘repair’, that is, to ‘make reparation’.
Belief in God’s forgiveness should in no way weaken our perception of sin; on the contrary, seeing sin as God sees it should increase our appreciation of his mercy and urge us to make amends. In receiving forgiveness, we receive God’s love into our lives, and the measure of our genuine appropriation of that love is the measure of our commitment to set things right. This is basic in the teaching of Jesus. The test that we have really appropriated forgiveness is our own willingness to forgive. Certainly, we do not love in order to win God’s love; we love in order to make the love we have received a reality in our lives. Thus, the New Testament accepts not only love, but a love that sets things right, in both word and deed-and ultimately in that Word and Deed that is the Word of God made flesh.
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1 John 4:9-10.
Whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. By this we may be sure that we are in him: Whoever says, “I abide in him,” ought to walk just as he walked. 1 John 2:5. 6.
The consequences of wrongdoing (and in this sense wrongdoing itself) remain even after forgiveness. The offended and the offender, in their different ways, have to ‘set things right’. In his Father’s infinite love Jesus is sent to live in complete opposition to all that is not love despite whatever pain and perplexity that might involve. In doing this, as representative of the human race, he ‘repairs’ it, giving it a new heart The old Adam is replaced by a new Adam.
In other words, the whole project of his life, given him by his Father, was reparation (repairing), which consists basically in replacing evil with love.
The Word incarnate
is truly Christ and love.
All his actions bear love’s indelible stamp.
His law will be a law of grace,
a law of love.
He will live and act only for us:
He will not have a thought, a desire, a word,
nor any action whatsoever,
no affection in his soul,
no suffering in his body, no sensation,
no movement in his Heart,
which does not recognise divine Love as its basis and first cause.
Jules Chevalier 7
Reparation – a way of living
The Word incarnate necessarily shared in our death, otherwise he would not have been truly incarnate. In response, our task is to share in his death, that is, share in the spirit with which he died, and in this way to make his death a way of life, a way of living his opposition to all that is not love. In doing this, our Christian life does not become merely an ethic, but a transformation of heart out of which an ethic arises. Reparation is a life transformed by love, a life participating in Christ’s own redeeming love, a life of service instead of selfishness.
Reparation is not merely a form of prayer. We have to be and live reparation. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So, you also must consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6: 10-11). In Christ, humanity’s relationship with God is set right. United with him, we are to live in that same relationship. And in so far as God’s ‘anger’ expresses his utter incompatibility with sin, reparation removes that incompatibility (‘anger’) by replacing evil with love both in word and in action.
Pope John-Paul II gives us the same message: Reparation is a way of life. “Close to the Heart of Christ, the human heart learns to know the true and unique meaning of our life and destiny, to understand the value of a genuinely Christian life, to avoid certain perversions of the human heart, to join filial love of God with love of one’s neighbour. Thus, the civilization of love, the reign of the Heart of Christ, will be able to be built on the ruins accumulated by hate and violence. This, in reality, is the reparation asked for by the Heart of the Saviour” 8.
According to Karl Rahner, “Reparation means the endurance of the godless situation with and in the Son, in Gethsemane and Golgotha, and fellowship in Christ’s apparently fruitless love for the sinful world.”. And “In the cult of the Sacred Heart we worship our Lord under the aspect of the Word incarnate’s redemptive love. Consequently, the devotion must necessarily include reparation, which is a participation in this redemptive love, and a sharing of its fate.” 9
In virtue of our baptism,
we become adopted children of God;
consequently, our actions are no longer merely human.
Moreover, in devotion to the Sacred Heart
God offers us a means of salvation
and a remedy for the ills of society.
Our Lord makes his divine Heart
supplement our weakness
in order to raise our prayers and merits
to infinite proportions.
He makes it also an easy means
that human nature can use
to accomplish, in its perfection,
the great precept of love,
and fulfil all the obligations contained in it.
Jules Chevalier 10
We are called to share in the reparation made by Christ. We do this above all in the Eucharist where the once-for-all offering of Christ is again made present in a special way. In devotion to the Sacred Heart a personal relationship with Christ present in the Eucharist is central. This sort of personal devotion is not incompatible with the universal and community dimension of the Eucharist. The Eucharistic Christ, after all, is the one who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 2:20; c.f. Phil 3:7-11), but if our relationship to Christ is limited to that, it belittles the full meaning of what St Paul meant by Eucharist. The sacrament makes the ‘total Christ’ present. It covers the whole creative and redemptive action of God who is Father, Son and Spirit; and it covers that action in its past, present and future manifestations. In the tradition of devotion to the Sacred Heart that we are considering, this emphasis on the total Christ is also central. In fact, Jules Chevalier saw Jesus himself as the ‘Eucharist’ of the whole of creation.
Jesus is the supreme and infinite glory of God,
the revelation par excellence of his infinite goodness,
the Eucharist of the universe
and the permanent ecstasy of creation in God.
If you want to sum up in a word
what is itself a summary,
Jesus is religion,
religion par excellence
living and infinite.
It is principally to the Heart of Jesus that we give this title.
Religion is a bond of love
and so in everything the Sacred Heart is the last word.
Everything leads back to Jesus,
I am the beginning and the end he says;
and in Jesus everything leads back to his Heart.
Jules Chevalier 11
Consoling Christ?
Memory is essential for an awareness of identity; and awareness of identity brings with it a sense of personal, enduring responsibility for our past actions, both good and bad. Our identity as Christians also depends on our memory of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus; and this too brings an awareness of how responsible or irresponsible we have been in following him.
There is a method of prayer in which we make ourselves a contemporary of the events of Jesus life, death and resurrection. This is not freakish or unduly complicated. It is a common occurrence when we share deeply in another’s memory of the past. It is a commonplace experience in drama. If we need to conceptualize it in order to give it validity, it may help to see this form of prayer as a sharing in the risen Christ’s memory of his earthly existence. We do this naturally, without conceptual distinctions, when we pray to Jesus with images of his earthly existence in mind.
Not only is this a method of prayer, but it had a role to play in the formation of the four Gospels themselves. The Evangelists, aware of the Risen Christ, reflected on what he had said and done. This continues to happen when we reflect on what they wrote in the Gospels.
Mainly through the influence of St Margaret Mary, Sacred Heart devotion became identified with regular contemplation of Christ in Gethsemane112. And the Holy Hour became a popular prayer-form of reparation in response to the complaint of Jesus – Could you not watch one hour with me (Mt 26:40). This helped give rise in popular piety to an urge here and now to respond to the sorrowing Christ, making amends for the grief we and others caused. These expressions of ‘consolation’ have raised problems particularly with theologians. There were grounds at times for criticising this practice, but at times also the criticism was based on a too narrowly conceptual view of human consciousness and language.
If there is to be any communication between God and human beings, it has to be in human terms. For example, we may know intellectually that we cannot inform God about anything or ‘change his mind’. Yet we readily use expressions of information and persuasion in prayer because it is the natural (and arguably the only way) in which we can express our needs. It would be a misconception to argue merely from the use of such language to a mistaken understanding of the nature of God. The same is applicable to the language of ‘consoling’ Christ. Use of such language is indeed optional, and at times it may even be mistaken make-believe, but care has to be taken in condemning those for whom it is an authentic form of prayer. Jules Chevalier makes the point that in the Old Testament God is frequently presented as complaining. The Risen Christ also complains (c.f. Ap 3: 16). Looked at strictly such language is inadequate; but so is language that makes God indifferent to evil. Perhaps one answer to this is precisely the incarnation of the Word who can feel distressed by rejection and indifference.
The very fact
that God has freely drawn the world out from nothingness
means that he must maintain relations with it
in keeping with his nature as Creator;
and in their turn,
creatures must conduct themselves towards him
as being the work of his hands.
To break these relationships
is to ignore his authority;
it is to refuse him what is his;
it is to despise his will.
Can God remain indifferent to this outrage?
Why be astonished that he complains about it?
Jules Chevalier 13
There can be no bypassing the risen Christ. At the same time, we can certainly relive the memories of the risen Christ with varying degrees of intensity, just as we can relive with our parents and those we love their memories of past difficulties and suffering. And this experience can increase our love of them and also encourage us to respond with greater love and care for them now. We can also grieve over memories of hurts we may have caused them while rejoicing at the same time about any reconciliation that has taken place. We can make up to them now for past indifference or hurt we have caused. The same applies to our relationship with the Risen Christ and can even give grounds for certain expressions of consolation. Neat categories of past and present lose their significance when, for example, we relive with Jews their memories of the shoah.
Holy theologians tell us
that Jesus Christ,
today glorified and impassible,
cannot suffer:
the expressions in question are figurative;
God accommodates himself to our way of speaking;
and so we would be mistaken
to take these words in their usual sense.
This is true.
But God, certainly, speaks this way
in order to tell us something.
Jules Chevalier 14
Could it be that theologians have something to learn from this form of popular piety? I don’t know of any theologians today who would be Docetists – people who feel that matter is ‘unworthy’ of a human person. For example, all stress the real humanness of Jesus who was, like us, an animated body – animated matter. Some theologians, however, give the impression of being Docetists with regard to the risen Christ. They seem to forget that the resurrection is a statement about the very purpose of matter. Science is opening our minds more and more to its ‘mystery’. The nature of matter is not based on our sense experience of sticks and stones. We easily forget that computers and nuclear energy are also matter. Even on a purely human level, it would be highly imprudent for us to draw limits to its possibilities. This is particularly relevant when we take into consideration the omnipotence of the Creator of matter.
Distress and joy are not incompatible. I visit a hospital and am distressed by what I see; in sympathy I can even share the suffering of others, but at the same time this increases more than ever my appreciation and enjoyment of my own good health. Could there be some analogy with the risen Christ? In the gospels he is often described as deeply moved. Has this ceased? Does his glorified state mean that it has to cease?
As every human heart is sensitive,
even more so the heart of Jesus was sensitive.
We cannot doubt this.
Why should it not be more sensitive now?
Would sensitivity be an imperfection in the Word incarnate?
Since sensitivity is inherent in human nature
Jesus possesses it in his glorified state.
We have to admit his sensitivity is transformed
but it exists.
Although we cannot be precise about its operations or effects,
Jesus loves all he used to love
with the love with which he loved it;
his affections have not changed
and have not grown cold.
Jules Chevalier 15
Eternity strictly speaking is an infinitely perfect and, for that reason, immutable ‘now’, not needing a past or a future because by definition it possesses the fullness of being ‘now’. Eternity defines God and it is his property alone. Finite beings are only eternal in a loose sense. By definition the humanity of Jesus, as humanity, is finite, though his divine nature is eternal in the strict sense of the word. Where there is matter, there would seem to be also the possibility of ‘before and after’, in other words some form of time even if not the same as our chronological time. Is there some sense in Gerald Vann’s suggestion years ago in The Divine Pity (1945) that there is necessarily ‘desire’ in the risen Christ? He will not be fully ‘Christ’ until all things are united with the Father through him. Only then is Christ fully the ‘total Christ’. Paul seems to have this idea.
When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Cor 15:28).
I Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus p.33.
2 op. cit., p. 9.
3 Perhaps it is better for us to translate the expression ‘sufferings of Christ’ simply with a hyphen, ‘Christ-sufferings’. We also have to accept that the author may not have wanted to be as precise about the connection between the two words as we might want him to be.
4 op. cit., p. 65. The Scripture reference is to 1 Cor 2:2.
5 Paul VI, Apostolic Constitution Canticum laudis promulgating the revision of the Divine Office.
6 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 421
7 op. cit., p. 148
8 See Letter of the Holy Father to Fr. Peter Hans Kolvenbach, Superior General of the Society of Jesus in Prayer and Service, Vol. I, 1987, p.3.
9 Karl Rahner, “Some theses on the theology of the Devotion”, in Joseph Stierli ed., Heart of the Saviour. A Symposium on Devotion to the Sacred Heart. New York: Herder & Herder, 1957, p. 142, 147.
10 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p.225. 11 op. cit., p.76
12 In 1674, St Margaret Mary experienced the Lord saying to her, “Every week between Thursday and Friday I will grant you to share in that mortal sadness which I chose to feel in the Garden of Olives … You shall keep me company in the prayer I then offered to my Father”.
13 op. cit., p.219
14 op. cit., p.218
15 op. cit., p.221
9. Our Lady of the Sacred Heart
Before the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December 1854, Father Jules Chevalier made a novena promising Mary to honour her in a special way if he could get the necessary aid to found the religious congregation he had in mind-the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The success of his prayer in this and other crises made him consider Mary as the Foundress of the Society. Consequently, from the beginning he thought of Mary as connected in some way with the Sacred Heart. In reflecting on a title for Mary, however, he went well beyond a connection between her and a Congregation dedicated to the Sacred Heart. Around 1857, he decided on honouring Mary under the title ‘Our Lady of the Sacred Heart’. Just as the ‘of in titles like Our Lady of Lourdes referred Mary to Lourdes and Lourdes to Mary, the new title referred Mary to Jesus (named Sacred Heart) and Jesus to Mary. Thus, the one title mentioned explicitly both Jesus and Mary, reminding us that any celebration of Mary has to be (like her own Magnificat) a celebration of God and his Word incarnate.
‘Our Lady of the Sacred Heart’ was more than an honorific title; it was a way of understanding Mary and her. Son. It had an extraordinary success and rapidly became worldwide. By 1864 there were 100,000 members of the Association Jules Chevalier had formed; in 1868, 2,000,000; in 1882, 14,690,000; in 1891, 18,000,000. In popular piety there was an obvious stress on the powerful intercession of Mary, but the greatest thing we could ask from her was that our hearts could become like the Heart of her Son, Jesus.
O Mary
obtain that our hearts be made one
with the Heart of Jesus
and with yours,
which is like his in everything.
Then the desire of the great Apostle
will be realized:
‘Have the same mind in you
as in Christ Jesus’ (Phil 2:5);
and we will be able to exclaim with him:
“It is no longer we who live,
but the Heart of Jesus who lives in us.”
Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, hear our prayer! Amen.
Jules Chevalier 1
One of the leading theologians of the twentieth century, Yves Congar O.P, remarked that the popularity of devotion to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and its pilgrimage centre in Issoudun, France, was not the result of some Marian apparition, as was often the case, but the fruit of the pastoral concern and theological reflection of a parish priest. This made the widespread attraction of the title even more extraordinary. Already by 1862, Father Chevalier had developed a very comprehensive view of Sacred Heart devotion; and it gave him also a very comprehensive view of the significance God had given Mary. This was what he wanted to express in the title ‘Our Lady of the Sacred Heart’. For this reason, all aspects of the relationship between Jesus and Mary remained the context and basis for her intercession. Mary had to be seen in the light of the Heart of her Son and her word to us was always, Do whatever he tells you. (In 2:5).
The Heart of the divine Master is the centre
on which everything in the Old and New Testament converges
the pivot around which everything in Catholicism turns.
That is how
I understand devotion to the Sacred Heart:
it embraces everything,
it is the answer to everything.
Jules Chevalier 2
When deciding on a title, Father Chevalier also decided on how the new devotion would be depicted. He used one of the most popular statues of Mary, that of the Immaculate Conception. It presented Mary standing open-handed gazing down with great love and tenderness on the world. However, in the original statue of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, the young Jesus stands in front of her, not nursed in her arms as an infant, and Mary looks down at him with all a mother’s love and pride. Father Chevalier asked the sculptor explicitly that Jesus be depicted as twelve years old; the age when St Luke tells us he showed his independence in the Temple (Lk 2:41.49) and showed also his readiness to do what Mary and Joseph asked of him (Lk 2:51). Mary accepts her Son’s independence and with open hands offers him to the world. He points to his Heart, to the very centre of his being where he shows his love for his heavenly Father and for us. At the same time, he points to his Mother, the one through whom he has come into the world; the one whose task it is to lead all to the Heart of her Son. Thus, the statue helped tie together the Heart of God, the incarnate Heart of the Word, the human heart, and Mary as the instrument chosen by God to enable all these to be linked together.
There is a mysterious bond
that binds the heart of human beings
to the Heart of Christ,
and the Heart of Christ
to the very Heart of God!
And the sacred ring
which serves as a link
is Mary,
who has formed from her own blood,
by the power of the Holy Spirit,
the sacred Heart of Jesus.
Jules Chevalier 3
The original statue received official Church approval, but at times other loose imitations of it presented Mary as too dominant over her Son. Exaggerated language about Mary’s power of intercession also alarmed authorities in Rome. Consequently, while the official statue was, allowed to be used in those shrines where it was already erected, future statues had to be along the traditional lines of Mary holding the infant Jesus in her arms.4 As in the original statue, the infant points to his Heart and also to his mother. Today when nineteenth century exaggerations are less a danger and the meaning of the statue is properly explained, permission is being given for the reproduction of the original version. Another image that is growing in popularity is that of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, pointing to the pierced side of her Son. There is a beautiful example of this statue on the sanctuary of the Basilica at Issoudun, harmonizing with the traditional statue that can be seen in the shrine at the back of the church.
In his book on the Sacred Heart, Father Chevalier continually refers the reader back to Mary, the Mother of the Saviour. With practically every fresh insight into the significance of the Heart of Jesus, he reflects prayerfully on how this throws light on the significance of Mary. Rather than repeat everything here, it would be sufficient for readers to reflect back on quotations from his writings cited in this book and in the light of them to reflect on Mary, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, through whom that Heart has come into the world.
This Heart where God works such wonders
and from which he receives so much love;
this Heart which reunites so many wonderful things,
where heaven and earth meet with a kiss of peace;
this Heart from which life flows
and to which life returns;
this Heart, the centre of creation,
is the Heart of your Son.
It is you who have given it to the world,
who have given it to heaven and to God.
May you be blessed in time.
May you be blessed in eternity.
Jules Chevalier 5
It was particularly in dealing with the cosmic dimension of the incarnation that Father Chevalier was able to highlight the significance of Mary and of women in general in God’s creation of the world, for it was through the instrumentality of a woman that God’s achieved his plan for the whole of creation.
To achieve such great things
this adorable Heart uses an instrument,
and you are that instrument,
O Mary.
It is you who have made spring forth
this source of life, light and blessing.
It is through your hands
that such riches come to us.
Since the Heart of your Son
is the centre where all converges,
the meeting place of all worlds,
the glorification of all beings,
the dwelling place of all the elect,
lead us to this incandescent centre
where all is transfigured,
all is divinised.
Jules Chevalier 6
Father Chevalier popularized a special prayer, ‘Memorare to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart’, which became used worldwide. Today a new version of it is used, written in view of developments in theology and the approach to Mary chosen by Vatican Council II.
Remember,
Our Lady of the Sacred Heart,
The wonders the Lord has done for you!
He chose you for his mother.
He wanted you close to his cross.
He gives you a share in his glory.
He listens to your prayer.
Offer him our prayers
of praise and thanksgiving;
present our petitions to him (….).
Let us live like you
in the love of your Son
so that his Kingdom may come!
Lead us to the source of living water
that flows from his Heart,
spreading over the world
hope and salvation,
justice and peace.
See our trust in you;
answer our prayer.
Show yourself always our Mother
Amen.
1 Sacre-Coeur de Jesus, p. 194-195.
2 Letter to Father Ramiere S.1., 9 December 1862.
3 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus p. 182
4 A mistaken rumour grew up that the original statue had been condemned by Rome despite the fact that it had been given explicit permission and even blessed by representatives of the Holy See. A letter from Cardinal Patrizi to the Archbishop of Bourges (14 April 1875) made clear that the Issoudun statue had never been condemned. In some circles the rumour still wrongly persists that devotion to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart itself was condemned.
5 op. cit., p.76- 77
6 op. cit., p.85
10. A devotion or a spirituality?
During a retreat, on the First Friday of December 1939, Teilhard de Chardin jotted down the following words: “The Sacred Heart! Since my infancy it has been for me, instinctively and mysteriously, the synthesis of Love and Matter, of Person and Energy. From this there has gradually evolved in me the perception of Omega: the universal cohesion in unity. I would like to spread effectively this attraction to the universal Christ, to the true Heart of Jesus. I do not want to say ‘devotion’, which is much too sentimental and too weak” 1.
Others continue to share Teilhard de Chardin’s misgivings about the word ‘devotion’. Usually they prefer the term ‘spirituality of the heart’.
Sometimes they spell heart with a capital letter referring to the Heart of Jesus, sometimes without a capital referring more comprehensively to the human heart in general with some reference, in varying degrees, to the Heart of Jesus. They give priority to ‘interiority’ and psycho-spiritual growth – undeniably important points.
The move away from the word ‘devotion’ avoided the misunderstanding that we were concerned with a time-bound piety and not with something essential. Admittedly, it was important to avoid such a misunderstanding. The word ‘spirituality’ was preferred. This was an important and even necessary change. ‘Devotion’ could be limited to acts of piety; ‘spirituality’ reminded us we were concerned with a way of life.
With the passage of time, we may have reached a point where we can look again at the word and ask whether ‘spirituality’ is an adequate substitute on its own. For one thing, ‘spirituality’ tends to centre on us, ‘devotion’ on Jesus Christ-on the heart of Jesus Christ, that is, on Jesus Christ himself, on what makes Jesus to be Jesus. After all, he is for us the way, the truth and the life (Jn 14:6). And Peter’s response should become ours also: Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life (John 6:68). A ‘return to the heart’ is a very rich tradition in Christian and Eastern spirituality. But it is not the primary aim of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The primary aim remains always a personal relationship with him. That remains its purpose and its end. It is the source of all else. One can arrive at this point from a variety of starting points, but the goal needs to be kept in mind.
You are not to be called Rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father, for you have one Father – the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called directors, for you have one director, the Christ. (Mt 23:9-12).
Maybe more significant for devotion to the Sacred Heart are Jesus’ words: All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father, except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Mt 11 :27-29).
When Father Chevalier presented his 1877 Constitutions to Rome for approval, he stated clearly in the opening paragraph that the aim of his Society was the practice and spread of devotion to the Sacred Heart as a remedy for the ills of society. Both points were essential for him: the devotion and the healing of society. The Consultor in Rome, Mgr. de Luca, was not happy with this formulation because it did not mention the sanctification of the Society’s members which was the general end of all religious congregations. Father Chevalier had not concerned himself with precise formulations about ‘ends’; he simply wanted to stress that in the spirituality and mission he was proposing, the starting point was, above all, a personal commitment (devotion) to Jesus – the acceptance of Jesus as our “one director”. His Congregation’s missionary spirituality, in other words, had to be defined by a personal relationship with Jesus. From that everything else had to flow, including sanctification. 2 In devotion to the Sacred Heart we do not go primarily to the teaching of Jesus about love of God and love of neighbour, we go to Jesus himself. We do not go primarily to Jesus the teacher of something other than himself, no matter how important that teaching may be. We go to Jesus who himself is God’s Word incarnate to us. We go, in other words, to the ‘heart’ of Jesus, to what makes Jesus to be Jesus. We start with Jesus’ own awareness of his identity and mission, and we strive to make that our own. Jesus is the centre which opens us to the whole of reality, because in him we enter into his relationship with his Father and with His Father’s plan for the whole of creation. I pray that they may be all one and the same thing; so that as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, even so they may be one and the same thing in us… May the love you have for me be in them and may I be in them (John 17:27).
The connection between devotion, spirituality and mission found in the Gospel of St John is basic in the devotion to the Sacred Heart which Jules Chevalier promoted. In the encyclical Redemptoris missio, Pope John Paul II indicates the variety of approaches to mission in the four Gospels: Mark, proclamation; Matthew, the ecclesial dimension; Luke, the importance of witness. However, the encyclical pays special attention to John just as Fr Chevalier did. John is the only one to speak of “the specific mandate, ‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you’ (John 20:21; 17:18) … The entire missionary sense of John’s Gospel is expressed in the ‘priestly prayer’… The ultimate purpose of mission is to enable people to share in the communion that exists between the Father and the Son. The disciples are to live in unity with each other, remaining in the Father and the Son, so that the world may know and believe (c.f. Jn 17:21-23). This is a very important missionary text. It makes us understand that we are missionaries above all because of what we are as a Church whose innermost life is unity in love even before we become missionaries in word or deed”. 3
The devotion to the Sacred Heart we are considering belongs to the Berullian tradition of spirituality. In it, following the great Spanish mystics, the incarnation and the highest mystical experience are integrated. Jesus and the Trinity are inseparable. This aspect of devotion to Christ has at times been played down, but it is essential to the spirituality that attracted Jules Chevalier and others. A personal relationship with Jesus was in no way to minimize its Trinitarian character. Losing sight of this, risks trivializing what is meant by devotion to the Sacred Heart.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus
is the entirety of God’s gift of himself.
The Word comes from the unfathomable depths
of the Heart of God,
who engenders him equal to himself.
God is love itself, but this infinite love,
which belongs essentially to his nature,
is contained in a human heart,
the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
God’s living sacrament,
his true Heart with which to love us.
It is through the Heart of Christ
that the love of God,
God himself,
has overflowed on to the world.
It is by grace
that God communicates and gives himself to us.
This gift is not a metaphor, but real.
The Holy Spirit descending personally into the just soul
brings with him the divine persons,
Father and Son,
for he cannot be separated from them.
Jules Chevalier 4
It would be a mistake to make Berullian spirituality the starting point of devotion to the Sacred Heart in general; but it is certainly the context in which Jules Chevalier saw the devotion and time has been spent explaining it in these reflections. But it is not the starting point. The starting and finishing point is always a personal relationship with Jesus. Berullian spirituality has been called “the metaphysics of sanctity”; his followers brought it down to earth and to everyday life by introducing the ‘Heart’ of Christ. The practical response to Jesus’ invitation, Come to me… learn from me… I am gentle and humble of heart, is far more important than any theology or ‘spirituality’ we may build around it even though they have an important role to play.
In some languages ‘cult’ is used instead of ‘devotion’. ‘Cult’ means worship. Used in this sense a spirituality of the heart is essentially geared towards worship, which can take on many forms ranging from Eucharistic liturgy to lighting a candle before a statue or icon. Worship in this sense is worship as understood by the prophets. It has essential social implications without which it ceases to be worship of the God of the Bible. If we understand whom we worship, our worship necessarily awakens in us our solidarity with others, particularly those in need. The symbol of the pierced Heart of Jesus keeps this before us.
One of the problems with the word ‘devotion’ or ‘cult’ is that it could be identified exclusively with pious exercises. People could think they had satisfied their following of Jesus simply by fidelity to these ‘devotions’. Its ecclesial and social implications could be smothered; and we could fail to realize that the devotion meant the transformation of our hearts. Jules Chevalier felt that if we were truly devoted to Jesus, that is, if we overcame indifference and really took him seriously, we would be impelled to transform not only our hearts, but also our society, our Church. He saw the devotion as “essentially social”.
‘Devotion’ is a warmer word than ‘spirituality’. It can cover simple devotional practices as well as the heights of mysticism. It brings together understanding and love; interior life and commitment to others; it integrates our emotional, intellectual and moral life. It brings together worship and life. In saying this, I am not advocating a return to an exclusive use of the word ‘devotion’, but I am urging that we look closely at the implications in getting rid of it and take steps to retain its positive points no matter what terminology we may choose. At times this has not been done sufficiently when ‘spirituality’ is used in its stead.
The Oxford Word Power Dictionary, based on common usage, defines ‘devotion’ as 1. great love: a mother’s devotion to her children; 2. the act of giving a lot of time, energy etc., to somebody or something: devotion to duty; 3. great religious feeling. In common English usage, therefore, it would seem that there is no reason to be ashamed of using the term ‘devotion’ in relation to Jesus Christ. When we speak of ‘devotion’ in this sense, we mean that we give him our love, our time and energy, with great religious feeling.
The Oxford Word Power Dictionary does not mention the common Catholic meaning of ‘devotion’ that refers to exercises of piety. Certainly, there is an unhealthy dependence on devotional exercises that one needs to grow out of. At the same time, there is an unhealthy rejection of them or a feeling that one is above them. Spirituality can become disproportionately intellectualized or smothered in activity or even overconcerned about self. Exercises of piety, particularly those shared with so-called ‘ordinary Catholics’, can keep us closer to reality, more humble and even more human and integrated in the way we live our faith and exercise our minds on it.
India for millennia has carried out an unparalleled Introspection into human consciousness. Unlike the West it does not put human and religious consciousness into separate boxes. It seems to me that we have a lot to learn from the Hindu use of the word bhakti, ‘devotion’. Perhaps it is more exact to say we have a lot to ‘re-learn’. Bhakti is one of the main streams in traditional Indian spirituality; moreover, in Indian languages, Sacred Heart devotion is usually called Sacred Heart bhakti.
In Hinduism 5 salvation, or more exactly liberation (moksa), consists in union with the One, the Ultimate, what they call Brahman.
Brahman transcends all things, is the source of all things and is the One to whom all things return. To attain this union with Brahman, there are three classical Hindu methods of sadhana (spiritual effort). They are described as three ways (margas): jnana marga (contemplation), karma marga (action) and bhakti marga (devotion). In the Bhagavad Gita especially, these three margas are not opposed to one another; they form a threefold way to union with Brahman. All are necessary, each implies the others, but there is room for a difference of emphasis.
Jnana marga is the process of seeking union with the transcendent One through contemplative experience of the ultimate ground of all things, particularly of atman – the Self of all things. Kanna marga is the process of seeking union with the transcendent One through unselfish, disinterested action in the world. Bhkati marga is union with the One through devotion (bhakti). The essential features of this bhakti are faith in, love for and complete trustful surrender of oneself to some particular, personal manifestation of Brahman (God). And the characteristic of a bhakti God is his or her concern for human beings, a concern that at times takes the form of ‘incarnations’ – avatars.
The avatar of the bhakti God in Jesus Christ goes beyond the normal Hindu avatars. In Jesus Christ God does not merely appear in human form, but: identifies himself with a human form completely and irrevocably. Consequently, he identifies himself not only with human dignity, but also with human suffering and death. He enters fully into the heart of humanity by himself possessing a human heart and all that it implies.
The divine Word wanted to take on a human nature
in the womb of the virgin.
In this way he took a heart like ours.
The heart will be the fundamental principle of his physical existence.
And when on the cross
the struggle sets in between life and death,
the Roman soldier will strike his Heart
as the source of life.
The life of Christ had already left that refuge!
But from the adorable Heart,
torn by the lance,
from which life had gone,
a new life appeared for us.
Jules Chevalier 6
For Indians, the complete, loving surrender to Jesus as the divine guru is a typical example of bhakti religion. In this there are two levels. First there is the level of conventional piety; what we generally refer to as ‘devotions’. But bhakti marga is also a way to complete union with the Ultimate One or Brahman through these ‘devotions’. And in all the margas the meeting point with Brahman takes place in the ‘cave of the heart’.
The omnipresent Reality is in all this:
the sacrificial works, ascetical practices, knowledge.
O my friend,
those who know this supreme, immortal Being
as seated in the cave of the heart,
destroy the knot of ignorance
here in this life itself.
Mudhaka Upahishad II.1.10.
If the term ‘spirituality of the heart’ did not open to us explicitly this “omnipresent Reality” seen in the light of Christian revelation; if it became limited simply to our activity; if it does not give first place to a personal relationship with Jesus, it would have nothing to do with Sacred Heart devotion, or even with the ‘Heart’ of Jesus Christ, which is essentially open to his Father. A ‘spirituality of the heart’ would be something quite different, and it would be better not to claim it as simply a different expression for ‘devotion to the Sacred Heart’.
Sacred Heart devotion, understood in the tradition presented here, does integrate within it ‘interiority’ and ‘psycho-spiritual growth’ while at the same time keeping the Heart of the Word incarnate as its centre. Sacred Heart devotion does involve exercises of piety, but their context is, as Jules Chevalier insisted, a whole world of theology that embraces the creative and redemptive plan of God who is Father, Word incarnate and Spirit. He saw it also as “essentially social”.
If ‘devotion’ is limited to saying a few prayers; if ‘spirituality’ is limited to concern about self-development, it is unsatisfactory. However, it is very doubtful whether either of these extremes exists except in the minds of those who reject either one of them. The temptation is always to simplify things we disagree with so that we can knock them down more easily. On the other hand, ‘devotion’ can be enriched by the word ‘spirituality’ and ‘spirituality’ by the word ‘devotion’. The use of both terms ensures that we understand them better and avoid deviations.
1 Quoted by R Faricy SJ in Prayer and Service, 1982, p.1l4f.
2 In the preamble to the Constitutions, Jules Chevalier refers to the name of the Society as “Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of JESUS”. The use of the capitals indicated the focus.
3 Redemptoris missio n. 23c.
4 Le Sacre Coeur de Jesus, p. 277f. This text has been much abbreviated. The final sentence is taken from a footnote to the quotation.
5 Hinduism is an umbrella term that covers a great variety of traditions. I use the word here in the commonly accepted wider sense.
6 Le Sacre-Coeur de Jesus p.145
11. A question of images
Some have rejected Sacred Heart devotion, others forgotten it because no one any longer explained it to them.
But perhaps one of the main problems for many has been images. Generally, the image and the devotion itself were closely identified. Though the result was negative, there remains, in general, something positive in the identification; for images have a central role in devotional Catholicism. In this, it remains true to an important Catholic – and human -tradition.
In 787, the second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea condemned the rejection of images (iconoclasm). The Council rightly detected behind this complex movement the influence of the Monophysites, who downplayed the humanity of Christ, and of the Paulicians, who considered matter to be evil. The Council decreed that adoration could be given only to God, while homage could be paid to the saints. Veneration of an image was not homage given to the image but to the person it rendered present to us. The Council of Trent made the same point.
There is certainly a horror of idolatry in the Bible, which is understood as honour given to creatures in place of God, which in fact is the essence of sin (Rom 1:23); but at the same time there is a recognition that God shows himself and makes himself present in and through creatures. Idolatry is the abuse of what in itself is good (d. Rom 1: 19; Wis 13: 1-9). Above all, Christ is the image of God (Col 1: 15); and with the incarnation our faith becomes even more inextricably immersed in tangible things (c.f. 1 Jn 1:1-4).
The role of the imagination
In the epistemology of Aristotle and Aquinas human knowledge of reality takes place through an intellectual insight into, or interpretation of, sense data. And this has important repercussions in theology. The senses and the imagination can deceive us; intellectual judgements can deceive us even more; but when the two work together ‘consubstantially’ as it were, our knowledge is human in the best meaning of that word. And if God is to communicate with us, it has to be through our human, way of knowing. Imagination is not merely a way of ornamenting truth; it is a human way to truth and reality. And images are the fruit of the imagination.
There is a worrying side to a lack of appreciation of symbols in particular and imagination in general. Some educationalists and brain specialists note that our ability to use our imagination creatively is being eroded by the way television and films provide us with ready-made images. A whole area of the brain is being used less and less. Consequently, we read by searching for concepts rather than experiencing those concepts embodied in the images, sounds and shapes in which they are found. If taken to extremes this seriously undermines the reading of the Scriptures which communicate largely through images. It also undermines our approach to faith which is in a sense ‘incarnate’ in images as is all human discourse. This does not take away from the importance of intellect; it is simply a reminder that our intellect has to be a human intellect if it is to function properly; and it is only human when it is associated, in a variety of ways, with how the imagination presents reality.
Certainly, people can become too dependent on images and even debase them by superstition and magic. But there is also a mistaken independence of them. We use a great variety of things to help make events and persons, human or divine, present to us. It may be a sacred book, a monument, a sacred building, a ritual act or a simple keepsake. Religious images belong to the same category. To feel that we were above such things could even be inhuman, so much are they part of our nature. After all, it is as human beings that we approach God and God approaches us.
A shrine and the veneration of an image can, in a number of positive ways, bring religion ‘down to earth’. For it is only on this earth and through this earth that the Mystery that is God comes to us.
For some decades before Vatican Council II, there was a growing antipathy in some circles to images of the Sacred Heart These had begun after the visions of St Margaret Mary (1673-1675) and proliferated during the nineteenth century. Despite this negative reaction, they remained popular among ‘ordinary’ Catholics. Dissatisfaction intensified after the Council. Some considered the use of these images to be a sign of an ultra-conservatism that was fearful of the present, imprisoned in the past and immature in faith. Sentimentalism was the word most frequently used. The accusations contained some truth, but as generalizations they were too condescending. Images cannot be summarily dismissed as sentimentalism when countless Catholics have found support in them, among them the poorest of the poor and people whose maturity of faith was tested by prolonged persecution.
Contemplating images
On 14 October 1916, in the second half of the First World War, before the Douaumont engagement on the Western Front, a soldier wrote:
“Suppose Christ should deign to appear here before me, what would he look like? Above all, in what manner would he take his place visibly in the realm of matter, and how would he stand out among the objects surrounding him… My gaze had come to rest without conscious intention on a picture representing Christ offering his heart to us. The picture was hanging in front of me on the wall of a church into which I had gone to pray… It was then, as I was keenly pondering over these things and looking at the picture, that my vision began”.
The soldier was Teilhard de Chardin. 1 I am not in favour of an indiscriminate return to nineteenth century images; some of them, however, are not without artistic merit even if, like all art, they belong to their time and many today do not find them helpful. I accept also that changing climates and emphases in devotion to the Sacred Heart allow for great variety. Nevertheless, we can be helped by trying to appreciate what these images meant and still mean to quite a number of people.
In contemplating the image of the Sacred Heart, Teilhard’s attention expanded from its details to a vision of cosmic dimensions, but he did not reject the details; they simply allowed what was beyond themselves to become present to him. Because he perceived its meaning, the image did not confine him within the limits of its details even though the details had their role to play in opening his vision. The image became a way of looking at the person of the Risen Christ and at the universe itself. In fact, contemplating the details of the image enabled him to take the image itself, and even Christ himself, beyond the limits of any particular age or culture.
An image cannot be separated from its meaning. Some years ago, I had the privilege of visiting China on three occasions. Traditional images of the Sacred Heart were prominent in Catholic homes and institutes I visited. Clearly, what these images portrayed had helped people there through periods of great persecution. They had helped give meaning to their lives. In the light of their faith, my earlier misgivings appeared superficial to say the least.
Interest in Eastern icons has taught us much. My time in India also taught me the need for explanations of religious images. Ganesha with his elephant head, the dancing Shiva with several arms, Hanuman the monkey god, are at first disconcerting or even grotesque for newcomers.
When the imagery is explained, they are seen in a different light altogether. Naturally, the artistic merit of the various images varies, but their meaning remains unchanged. In reference to Hindu iconography, we have nothing to be ashamed of in an image of the incarnate Lord showing us his pierced heart, surmounted with fire and a cross, surrounded with thorns. A God with a wounded heart has much to say to us.
Though I have given much time to explain the theological context of a certain tradition of Sacred Heart devotion, it is not merely a doctrine; it is above all a form of worship and a consequent way of life. If the pages of this book simply impart knowledge but do not lead into some form of contemplative veneration, they will not have achieved their purpose. It would be like learning from a book how to swim without going near the water. Thus, if readers have gained some enlightenment anywhere in these chapters, they should transform it into prayer. A meditative recital of parts of the litany of the Sacred Heart may help in this, or some other similar prayers. Some may be helped now and then by contemplation of an icon, even a traditional one if no other that appeals to us is available. In Jules Chevalier’s approach, the image of Mary contemplating the pierced side of her Son is particularly apt and used widely today. Contemplation of an image may help us understand a bit more fully and concretely what moved people like Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner. Hopefully, we will see these images in their proper context and grasp their meaning more fully. Only then can we create or find images for our own time that will move us into prayer, contemplation and action.
Traditional images of the Sacred Heart stress the human gentleness and compassion of Jesus; and this is obviously most important; but it is not the only approach A much different image is portrayed in a large mosaic in Dharmaram College, Bangalore, India. It comes closer to much that has been presented in this book. Jesus stands in great dignity, eyes closed, absorbed in prayer – an enlightened One. Behind his head is a triangle-shaped halo with rays of light coming out of it, symbol of the origin of all things, the Trinity, transcending human consciousness and enlightening human consciousness. At his feet is a flowering lotus, a symbol of immersion in earth and transcendence of earth. His garment has on it symbols of human endeavour: science, art, music, industry, literature, agriculture, research. Human figures surround him symbolizing the contemporary world in its complexity. And all is brought together in the ‘cave of his heart, a basic symbol in Indian spirituality.
“Disperse, O Jesus, the clouds with your lightning! Show yourself to us as the Mighty, the Radiant, the Risen! Come to us once again as the Pantocrator who filled the solitude of the cupolas in the ancient basilicas! Nothing less than this Parousia is needed to counter-balance and dominate in our hearts the glory of the world that is coming into view. And so that we should triumph over the world with you, come to us clothed in the glory of the word” 2.
1 Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe, London: Collins 1965, p.42
2 Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, p. 127f