Relearning the language of the heart
photo: Alamy/Godong
There are certain words which, despite today’s overwhelmingly materialistic, scientifically reductionist and technological mindset, still carry an immense weight in everyday conversation. Foremost among them is the word “heart”. We speak of having a “heavy heart”, of a “broken heart”, and of undergoing a “change of heart”. We say we are “young at heart”, that someone’s “heart is in the right place”, and we advise people to “follow their heart”. We say our “heart goes out” to those who are suffering – and if others’ don’t, we call them “hard of heart”, and we plead, “Have a heart”.
Pope Francis’ fourth encyclical, Dilexit nos, published last week, is “on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ”. Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus conjures memories of images that seem saccharine to some, morbid to others; so ubiquitous for older Catholics that it’s never warranted much reflection; so strange to their children and grandchildren that it seems to belong to a slightly weird, lost devotional world.
Francis explains that the heart is necessary for understanding what it is to be human. The fact that we say people have a “heart of gold” shows that the human heart symbolises what is most essential to each person. Spiritual practices like recollection, discernment and the examination of conscience help us learn the language of the heart.
The heart is “the centre” of our “very selves” (9), Francis suggests. Hence, we “find it in our heart to forgive” and speak of what is in “our heart of hearts”. He invites us prayerfully to reflect on our own hearts – the “deepest” and “least known” part of us – in a world full of noise and distraction.
Openness to others is called being “big-hearted”. If we attune ourselves to our heart in prayer, Francis writes, we will connect to others. There is a peculiar spiritual truth at work here: the “mysterious connection between self-knowledge and openness to others, between the encounter with one’s personal uniqueness and the willingness to give oneself to others” (18).
This sort of self-knowledge is not easy to cultivate today. We are in danger of spiralling into an increasingly individualistic, cold and violent world – “a world that has become heartless” (23). Dilexit nos invites us to step back. “Perhaps the most decisive question we can ask,” Francis suggests, is, “Do I have a heart?”
Sixteen years ago, as a young theology student, I went on retreat to Downside. On making the obligatory visit to the bookshop, I saw an old shoebox on which was written, “Books 50p”. I picked out a crimson hardback prayerbook called The Treasury of the Sacred Heart, with an imprimatur dated 1905. It has remained my daily companion ever since.
Much of its contents was incomprehensible to me. It describes the visions granted to a Visitation nun, Margaret Mary Alacoque, in Paray-le-Monial in eastern France. It features prayers intended to “make reparation” for the “sacrilege, contempt, indifference and ingratitude” with which people treat Jesus in the consecrated host. The last of the 12 promises the Sacred Heart of Jesus made to St Margaret Mary was that those who receive holy communion on the First Fridays in nine consecutive months “shall not die under my displeasure”.
It wasn’t any of this which, ahem, captured my heart. It was the passionate intensity of the prayers themselves. My sophisticated theological education had told me that such “baroque” devotionalism was shallow and transactional, and focused on individual sanctity at the expense of working for a more just world.
Wanting to make sense of this, I read up on a generation of theologians who after the Second Vatican Council had worried that by sidelining popular devotions like the Sacred Heart of Jesus the Church might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Dilexit nos seems at first glance to join that conversation. Francis writes with a passionate intensity that matches that of even the most baroque mysticism. Given what our heart means to each of us, he writes, imagine the love which pours out from the heart of Christ. “Let us turn to the heart of Christ, that core of his being, which is a blazing furnace of divine and human love and the most sublime fulfilment to which humanity can aspire” (30).
Devotion to the Sacred Heart rapidly grew in popularity because in its emotional intensity it challenged the arid and threatening Jansenism of Counter-Reformation France. Today we face a new Jansenism, Francis warns, not only “a powerful wave of secularisation” but a distracting busyness inside the Church, “in communities and pastors excessively caught-up in external activities” and “worldly projects” (88).
Against this background, Dilexit nos gives a chapter each to two aspects that a “contemporary devotion to the Sacred Heart needs to combine” (91). The first relates to “personal spiritual experience”. Here, Francis makes inroads into new and startling territory. Some of his forebears had sought to offer a more intellectual or “mature” way of understanding the devotion, cleansed of all that strangeness I found in a shoebox at Downside. Dilexit nos instead warmly approves of the First Friday devotion as a jolt to our forgetfulness of “the strength of the Eucharist” (84). The strange idea that Jesus’ heart suffers from human contempt and ingratitude is given considerable attention – we are called to “comfort him in the midst of his sufferings” (155).
My little prayerbook includes a prayer to a Jesus “penetrated with grief at the thought of so many offences which have been committed against Thee”. Again, Francis commends this “piercing” that “purifies and heals the heart” (159). Yes, there are theological questions here – about a Christ who is so vulnerable to human failings and forgetfulness, a Christ who somehow needs our pious devotion. Francis is clear, though – let “no one make light of the fervent devotion of the holy faithful people of God, which in its popular piety seeks to console Christ”. Beware of those “who claim a more reflective, sophisticated and mature faith” (160).
But, the second part of the equation, the blazing furnace of Christ’s heart sets aflame our own hearts with missionary zeal. The practice of reparation is connected to cultivating “fraternity and solidarity” with others (190). Francis revisits the notion of “social sin”, explaining that a heartless world is socially structured in ways which “make it more difficult to offer the gift of oneself” to others through its forms of “production and consumption” (183). Pious devotion and service to the poor and work is not an either/or; the first leads to the second.
Dilexit nos is reminiscent of Francis’ first major document, the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. It leaves the neuralgic issues of contemporary Catholic life to one side. Jansenism is discussed without linking it to traditionalist “rigidity”. The vast evangelistic potential of popular piety is commended. In this encyclical we glimpse something of Francis’ heart, behind and beyond all the noise and polemics of our fractured Church and our increasingly heartless world.
Dilexit nos is published by the Catholic Truth Society at £6.95.
Jacob Phillips is Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.
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