Birth of John the Baptist

Some figures in the icon are reasonably self-explanatory.  The presence of the Blessed Virgin is a case in point: it can serve to remind the viewer of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and its relationship to the Sacred Heart - as when, following the feast of the Sacred Heart we celebrate the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the following day. But the representation of the St. John the Baptist is not so obvious a connection with the Sacred Heart. Indeed, when people look at St. John they often assume it is St John, the beloved apostle, who stood at the foot of cross with the three Marys.  But today's feast gives us pause to think about John the Baptist through the lens of this icon.  I have commented on this elsewhere in the blog but today it struck me that John the Baptist does have really an important role to play in how we can read this image of the  Sacred Heart. First of all,  John presence reminds us that we use his words at mass when we pray in the Communion rite :  'Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world' and ask for mercy and peace. As Teilhard always reminds us, the eucharist is the Sacred Heart.  So John's presence in the icon focuses our mind on the relationship between the Blessed Sacrament and the Sacred Heart. Secondly, John the Baptist  in this icon is reminding us that a devotion to the Heart of Jesus is about (what Teilhard called ) the diminishment of our egos.  We pray that our heart - our very centre - becomes more like his, and that our heart becomes united with His heart.  For us to become fully us, we have to lose our selves.  Only the love of God can complete us and make us whole.   This requires us to become meek and humble of heart.  It requires us to learn from His heart.  And so as we say the 'Agnus Dei', we should also remember his words concerning his humility of knowing that he must decrease, and that Jesus must increase (John 3: 30).   If we are to be united with the Sacred Heart our egos have to diminish so that the Heart of Jesus can increase and expand in us. This is the core message of the Sacred Heart which John here is directing our gaze towards:  He must increase in your heart, and you must decrease.  Devotion to the Sacred Heart is essentially about decreasing and diminishment: the fire of the Sacred Heart can only shine and glow in a humble and  contrite heart.

Feast of the Sacred Heart

Reading David Richo's book has been an excellent way to prepare to celebrate the solemnity of  the Sacred Heart.  He shows how the heart is such a powerful archetype which needs to be re-discovered for our present century - despite the fact that it is so overshadowed by some of the excesses of the popular devotion of the past.  That said, the mass today was well-attended and one could not fail to be aware of how the devotion is still burning like an ember in the church.  It is as if it needs a great wind to fan it back into glowing, and vibrant life.  I was especially moved as we sang 'To Jesus', heart all burning' - words by Aloys Schlör  (1885-52) which has long been popular in its English translation.  (Listen HERE ) This hymn evoked deep memories of childhood for me, but  it also fired up  my belief that this devotion is not just a matter for spiritual nostalgia.  The people at mass were not engaging in just  sentimental nostalgia: their devotion was manifestly  alive and active.  Reflecting on this I turned to something which Blessed  John Paul said about the relevance of the Sacred Heart for us in the present century.  Speaking of the feast in 1994 in a general audience he argued:

It is important for the faithful to have deep sensitivity to the message it gives: in Christ's Heart the love of God has reached out to all humanity.  In our day this message has an extraordinary timeliness.  Contemporary men and women, in fact, are often confused, divided, as if lacking an inner principle to create unity and harmony in their being and acting.  Unfortunately rather widespread behavioural patterns intensify their rational and technological dimension, or on the contrary, the instinctual aspect. even though the core of the person is neither pure reason nor pure instinct.  A person's centre is what the Bible calls 'heart'.  At the end of the twentieth century, the long-dominant unbelief of the Enlightenment school now seems obsolete.  People feel an intense nostalgia for God, but they have lost their way to the inner sanctuary where his presence dwells:  that sanctuary is precisely the heart, where freedom and intellect encounter the love of the Father who is in heaven.  The Heart of Christ is the universal seat of communion with God the  Father; it is the seat of the Holy Spirit.  To know God, one must know Jesus and live in harmony with his Heart by loving God and neighbour as he does.......Today, devotion to Jesus's Heart offers an authentic and harmonious fullness, in the perspective of a hope that does not disappoint, to a one-dimensional humanity or to one even tempted to give in to forms of a certainly practical, if not theoretical nihilism.  About a century ago, a well-known thinker announced the 'death of God'.  Well, an unending spring of life, giving hope to every person, has streamed precisely from the Heart of God's Son, who died on the cross.  From the Heart of Christ crucified is born the new humanity redeemed from sin.  The man of the year 2000  needs Christ's Heart to know God and to know himself: he needs it to build the civilization of love.
( in C.J. Moell, (ed)  Pope John Paul:  Holy Father, Sacred Heart, Crossroads, New York.2004: pp187-8)

As we sang 'To Jesus, heart all burning' to celebrate this great feast  I think that we all felt that John Paul's message - that 21st century men and women need the Sacred Heart to know God and to know themselves - is one which has a profound relevance for our times.


 I believe that this is also is the message of David's book and is precisely what Teilhard was saying:  the Sacred Heart is not just a sentimental devotion of which belongs in the past. We urgently need it today so as to know God and know ourselves.  We need this powerful archetypal symbol to enable us to  evolve  spiritually as individuals and a species.  We need it to build a civilisation of love.   That is the message this very important feast. The Sacred Heart is the ultimate response to the despair and nihilism expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche and his ilk: it is the answer to the malaise which infects post-modern societies.

David Richo's The Sacred Heart of the World (4) The wounded and open heart

Important day.  It was two years ago today that I realised that somehow I had to figure out what the Sacred heart was really all about.  Strangely it took me quite a while to come to terms with the fact that it is about suffering, pain, being wounded and being open.  That this came through Teilhard, rather than the more traditional route is surprising.  David Richo's chapter on this theme says more than I can possibly say in a short post - so I can only recommend reading it and taking his advice on how to put the Sacred Heart into practice. In economics we are fond of reminding ourselves that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  The Sacred Heart is also there to remind us that there is no such thing as an easy way to let go our your self and open up to love.  Evolution is painful, evolution is a cross- and so is our own spiritual evolution.  That hurts.  Opening up hurts.  Which is why we spend so much of our time building a protective wall or shell around ourselves: protecting our precious ego from ourselves as much as other people.  Richo shows that we have to work at pulling down the walls we invest so much time in building up, because unless we do the work - and open ourselves to God's grace - we will never become truly and fully ourselves.  We will never see the diaphany ( as Teilhard liked to call it) of God's  radiant love if we do not work on opening our heart.  We can only evolve spiritually if we put the work in.  That is what we see so vividly in the lives of the Saints associated with the Sacred Heart.  This involves spiritual action, but also social action.  The kingdom of heaven is within us - in our hearts, but it is also 'out there' in the suffering of our fellow human beings.   'Thy Kingdom come'  means being open to the evolution of the cosmos itself.  It means to see Christ in all things: the alpha and omega.  Richo's point, and it one which is central to Teilhard's message is that :' The danger we fell into in the past was to make devotion to the Sacred  Heart a Jesus-and-I relationship  with the accent on 'he will be sure to save me if I receive communion on nine first Fridays.'  But a 21st century devotion has to be more than this: much more. As Richo puts it :' Our new devotion is about how the whole world can be saved not just our individual selves'. ( p34-5)

' Pope John Paul II preached to the pilgrims in Saint Peter's Square: ' Devotion  to the Sacred Heart deals with matters of the heart which call us to a deeper commitment to Christ and to others.  Christ's love becomes our love. His mission, the work of redemption'.   The openness of the Sacred Heart of Christ and of all the saints has always been a yes to wounds, a yes to compassion, a yes to receiving love, a yes to bringing peace no matter what the assaults or dangers..' ( pp 37-8)

It is good to keep these thoughts before us as we approach the feast of the Sacred Heart this coming Friday (15th June).

David Richo's The Sacred Heart of the World (3) The Sacred Heart as a 'field'.

Richo's The Sacred Heart of the World gives us a concise description of the Sacred Heart  which enables us to make this old devotion more relevant and more central to our spiritual life in the 21st century and it clearly shows the influence of Teilhard on the author.  He  notes early on in the book that:

'The Sacred Heart does not refer to the physical heart or organ of Jesus  during his life in Nazareth.  It refers to the heart of the risen Christ, which is not an organ but a field of divine energy.  This field, as in gravitational or electrical fields, is both radial and magnetic, reaching out, drawing in.  In other words, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a metaphor for how God gives out and draws in love.  The Sacred Heart is thus a revelation of how God is love; that is, both reaching out all-inclusively and yearning to receive from all of us.' (p4)

This idea that we have to see the Sacred Heart less as an organ and more of a field of divine energy is what first grabbed me as we embarked upon the process of writing the icon.  Hence, right at the top of the icon we see the old creation - planetary systems showing their gravitational fields - being rolled up  in preparation for the New Creation in Christ.  Teilhard himself preferred to think of the Sacred Heart less as a 'devotion' than as an 'attraction': which is pulling us and drawing us to the core, 'the centre of all hearts'.   I think David is right to invite us to think about the Sacred Heart as this idea of field in order for us to restore, reclaim and re-centre the idea of the Heart of Jesus in our spiritual life.  My own reflection on this is that, in truth, I find it very had to let go and give way to this field.  I hold on to so much stuff in my life because I am rather afraid of the power and pull of ' placing all my trust' in love.  I think that when we consider all the many saints associated with the Sacred Heart they all have one thing in common: they let go, they did not hold on tight, they allowed themselves to be drawn into the divine milieu.  And yet, that is what we do, we hold on and hold back.  We don't give ourselves completely and wholly: we don't give our heart.  And yet as the great attractor, Christ is calling us to realise that human beings have to realise that our personal evolution as well as the evolution of our species is all about realising our potential for love of God and our fellow creatures.  We cannot truly progress without letting go and placing our trust in love for only then can we become fully human, and fully us.   Love completes us.

Although our devotion to the centre of all hearts must draw on the past, as water from a deep well, we must not hold on to the past: we have to go on and go deeper.  I think that was Teilhard's message, and as I read it, the message of David's book. Hence, as his book shows, we have to start with understanding   the truly universal symbol of the heart, and the universal language of the spirituality of the heart.  When we do this, we can appreciate why Teilhard believed that Sacred Heart - the divine centre - has to become a focus of convergence and dialogue between the spiritual traditions amongst homo sapiens.   As I read chapter one of  David's book I was reminded of a dear friend of mine, who was from Iraq. He was doing a Phd in civil engineering and sadly we have lost contact over the years.  We would often talk about Christianity and Islam, and he would often say that what matters is what is in your heart, and only God can see into your heart.  Or words to that effect.  And with other friends from the middle east we would swop quotes from the Rubaiyat  of Omar Khayyam, and speak of re-making the world closer to our hearts desire.  The fact is that the idea of or symbol of the heart is one which can provide a language in which human beings can engage in dialogue: the heart is an idea which Jews, Christians and Muslims can explore together.  But is is also, as David shows a powerful symbol which is common to so many spiritual traditions.  The language of the heart is indeed a point of convergence or attraction  in a world which  so often torn apart by divergence and difference.  As he observes:

'There is a collective consciousness of this image that resonates in people regardless of their religious affiliation.  A universal symbol like this is not only visible everywhere, it is in everyone's soul.' (p17)

As Teilhard believed, therefore, the Christianity of the future must be more and more centred on the spirituality of the heart: the great universal symbol.  In this way the Sacred Heart can become a symbol of ecumenism and not division and difference: but for this to happen we have revitalise our devotion to the 'sacred heart of the world'.  We really do have to place all our trust in that 'heart of the world's heart'.

David Richo's The Sacred Heart of the World (2): 'minding the gap'

There are quite a few books which provide detailed  histories of the devotion to the Sacred Heart.  And a complicated story it is. Thankfully, David Richo gives us a very simple way of understanding what that history has been about.

Stage one:  the early centuries AD, in which there emerges a focus on the the crucified and pierced Christ that draws on the Gospels - and especially St. John.  These writings from Origen and others were to inform the later medieval devotion to the pierced heart of Jesus.
Stage two: the seventeenth French tradition inspired by  St. Francis de Sales, St. Jane de Chantal, St John Eudes, and St Margaret Mary and many others. Whereas the first stage was largely biblical and mystical, the second stage was far more focused on sin and the idea of reparation.
Stage three: Is where we are now.  It is a stage which was initiated by Teilhard: it is a stage which has 'restored the biblical /mystical dimension and liberated us from the sin-centered, sentimentality, and superstition that unfortunately crept in during the seventeenth century onwards' (p8)

Of course, any attempt to provide a simplified history inevitably misses out a good deal, and my own journey has been far more messy and confusing than these three stages suggest.  That said, it is a useful guide to understanding the Sacred Heart.  There can be no doubt that stage two was responsible for much of the imagery which has, in my view, not helped the devotion in the twentieth century.  More than any other aspect of Catholicism, the Sacred Heart has been defined and distorted by the 'art' which has emerged since the 17th century.  If we are to rediscover the biblical and mystical dimension of the Sacred Heart, then we have to address the issue of the image: and that is what the icon set out to do.   What I have found is that the icon has served to focus my mind  - and heart- on rediscovering what happened in stage 1 and 2, all the better to understand what is necessary for stage 3.   I don't believe that it is a matter of  discounting stage 2, quite the opposite, but it does mean that we have to let the light of stage 1 shine through stage 2.   In many ways I think that David's 3 stage model has a more general applicability.  As I reflected on the three stages it occurred to me that the modern world - that is the world of after the enlightenment - has become progressively more and more detached from the medieval world.  We abandoned Aquinas for Nietzsche: so we now have abandoned our faith in science just as we 'killed God' in the 19th century. The Sacred Heart in stage 2 was - above all - a reaction against the violence of the enlightenment.  It was a devotion which emphasised the heart, and not the head.  Human progress, it asserted, was not about human beings becoming smarter, but human beings becoming more spiritual.  Progress was about harnessing our capacity to love, and not just our capacity for knowledge and power.

I think that if we are to advance in stage 3 we have to build on the earlier stages. That is what David's books shows us - well shows me at least.  It is really all about evolution, and not revolution.  In London some underground (metro) stations announce to travellers: 'Mind the Gap'.  That is, the gap between the platform (where you are) and the train (where you want to be).  Perhaps that is how we should read David's book- as a reminder to 'mind the gap' between stage 3 and 1. Some 'traditional' Catholics may read such ideas and be terribly offended by the idea that we should move beyond stage 2.  But that is not what this blog or David's book is saying:  those of us journeying towards the Sacred Heart  are  like travellers on the London underground.  David is telling us to 'mind the gap' and re-connect Heart of Jesus with its biblical and mystical past so as to move forward into the future.  That is really what Teilhard is saying as well: contra Nietzsche and his post-modern followers, we have to realise that progress - faith in the future - has to be built on both a faith in God ( as love) and on a faith in our capacity to know and understand His creation (science) .  That is what the Sacred Heart meant to Teilhard: that is stage 3.

David Richo's The Sacred Heart of the World (1)

When I first decided to rediscover the Sacred Heart through the commissioning of an icon, I determined that it should be a journey which was not constrained, but flowed  and allowed the icon to do its work.  Actually that is not quite true, because initially I was all very instrumental and academic about it - and thankfully Ian put me right as soon as we began to think about the project.  At that point in the journey I realized that the way forward was not to read all that I could about the Sacred Heart, but let the meaning of the Heart of Jesus unfold in its own way.   That said, I did find that some books have been useful - like guide books on a journey.   One such guide books which I have found absolutely invaluable as a source of inspiration and reflection is David Richo's The Sacred Heart  of the World:  Restoring Mystical Devotion to Our Spiritual Life.  ** (See HERE )  David was kind enough a while ago to write and tell me that he was following the blog, and thus I think it is about time I explored the book in a more deliberate way.  So, this is the first of a series of blogs on the book.

 Having spent some time rediscovering the Sacred Heart I think it is now is about the right time to reflect a little on the journey others have taken.  At one stage I described the the process of reading and writing an icon was rather like a pilgrimage.  And I think that is an appropriate way to think about it.  In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales the pilgrims tell each other stories.  I have never been on a real pilgrimage myself - who knows one day, but I know from what people tell me who have done so is that meeting and sharing stories with fellow pilgrims is an important part of the whole experience.  So, I suppose here I can compare notes as it were with another pilgrim intent on 'restoring mystical devotion'  by means of the Sacred Heart.

Let us start at the very beginning, which is, as Sister Maria reminds us, is ' a very good place to start'.   I seem to recall that human beings are prone to what psychologists call 'inattentional blindness'  : we see but we don't see. We are so busy looking for something that we don't  realize that  we have actually seen something else.  It was only ( a few days ago)  when I picked up  Dr. Richo's book to read  in a more focused way  -  that is to read it from cover to cover -  that I actually noticed the quote of the first page  from  Blessed John XXIII. 'Now I think of myself as living solely for the Sacred Heart'.  I was rather amazed and shocked that I had not spotted this quote before.  Why? I  don't know, must ask one of my psychology colleagues!  I have, since a child,  always felt very close to John XXIII.  Indeed, when I went to up to university I took a whole pile of economic and political science textbooks, and yes, a copy his  Journal of A Soul.  Thus I had only just opened David's book  the other day when I had to close it again and look for my copy Journal of A Soul!   Re-reading a book which I had read constantly as a student I was so surprised that I had not taken notice of the extent to which the Sacred Heart was so central to John XXIII.  How on earth did I not get that? At the same time as I was reading Journal of a Soul I was also deeply influenced by Teilhard: and yet I did not get how important the Sacred Heart was to him, either.  So the extent of my 'inattentional blindness' in respect of the Sacred Heart was rather disturbing - and  so it was with a sense of shock I returned to David Richo's book.   It begins with his account of a personal experience in the woods of Mount Subasio near Assisi. Which made me think that the young man who had been so completely blind to the Sacred Heart  - even when it was shouting out of the page of closely read books - was only ready to answer the 'who am I  question?' when I was truly open : when my heart and not just my head was open.

Richo opens by explaining how the idea of the heart and the spirituality of the heart is common to so many of the great spiritual traditions: it is not exclusive to Christianity.   He notes that:

'The Sacred Heart is God's zeal for communion with the human world..[and that] the revelations of the Sacred Heart tell of a God who is no longer distant but who has come close, as close as our very  own 'within' ...Thus a devotion to the Sacred Heart  is a fully and richly mystical, experience.  It liberates us from dualism, God out there and we down here, and gives us  a unity that is abiding and that powerfully endures  within time and beyond it'. (p3)

Ah, that was it.  I was never really about 'mystical experiences' : for me religion was about faith and reason. 'Mystical devotion' was not my game.  Hence, I could never trouble myself to get past the sentimentalism and kitchness of those pictures and statutes: for they represented the kind of Catholicism that I believed was irrelevant to the modern world.   And yet, of course, a spiritual life without a mystical dimension is a rather shallow sort of spiritual life.  Indeed, I confess that my own spiritual life   was rather shallow without  this sense of the role of 'mystical devotion'. What Richo does in the first few pages is make the case for a restoration of the Sacred Heart  as a powerful point of entry - indeed the most powerful  point of entry - into a deeper  spiritual life.  But first we really do have to get past the saccharine  images which so many of us find does nothing for us - apart from turn us off.  It turned me off to the point where I actually could not see it: as far as the Sacred Heart was concerned I was truly  blind, and deaf!  Unlike David Richo, therefore, the Sacred Heart did not speak to me, or leastways, I was not listening.  But eventually I got it: not as a result of an intellectual process, but as a result of getting to a point in my life when I was finally meek and humbled enough to be open to God's grace. So, reading  The Sacred Heart of the World I feel rather like the workman who turns up very late  in the day, does five minutes labour and still gets paid for a full day.   David has spent 50 years listening to and puzzling over the Sacred Heart, and then finally figured out what to do.  This Johnny come lately David, on the other hand,  has spent a long time actively not listening and not troubling himself with the Sacred Heart, but here I am wrestling away - and sharing his passion for devotion which, I now more and more believe, is central to the Christianity of the future and to the spiritual evolution of mankind.

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**"The Sacred Heart of the World" renews our devotion to the Sacred Heart by attending to its scriptural and mystical origins, and expanding our spirituality to embrace universal compassion. It is the first book to tackle the issue of devotedness to the Heart of Jesus that is intelligible and appealing to people of the twenty-first century. Based on a combination of extensive research and the author's own personal devotion to the Sacred Heart - a lost treasure from our Catholic past - and his interest in mysticism, "The Sacred Heart of the World" unlocks a new future of vibrant and conscious faith. The book has a threefold purpose: to inspire devotion to the Sacred Heart, to rekindle spiritual devotion, and to center the Sacred Heart into the new cosmological realizations that will appeal both to Catholics and people from a variety of religious traditions. The book explores the symbolism of the heart in world religious traditions, and then traces the historical thread of the devotion into modern times. It draws significant links to the philosophy and theology of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner and their links with Ignatian spirituality.'

C.S. Lewis and the broken heart

 It is great to see people reading C.S. Lewis again.  Bookshops all seem to have copies of his books nowadays.  Reading The Four Loves recently, it seems to me, that when you cut through all the philosophy and theology, Lewis perfectly expresses what the Sacred Heart is all about: Jesus  shows us that God loves us so much  that  He became utterly and totally vulnerable and open.  His heart is open to us and is open to the pain and wounds of love. When we meditate on the Sacred Heart, we being called to live a life of loving God and trusting in and being open to that that love, and loving and trusting and being open to our neighbour.  And as Lewis reminds us, that hurts:

'To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.'  C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.

Christ calls humanity to live with an open and tender heart.  We must live a life with a heart that is open, vulnerable and selfless. Christ's heart, like the bread at the last supper, is broken for us.