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Solemnity of the Sacred Heart

Individual musing of 19th June 2020 out of a collection of Musings ...in a strange time...

 

By Rt. Rev Bishop Graham Rose.

 

 

In 1963 the American Catholic author, Flannery O’Connor, wrote to a friend of hers saying: “I have always thought it a shame that this devotion to the Sacred Heart couldn’t be explained in some way that was not just sentimental piety” These words resonate very much with the modern mind and they remind me of my own faith story – but more about that later: O`Connor’s words challenged me and got me thinking ...

 

It seems to me that we can approach the Sacred Heart in either a ‘small’ or a ‘big’ way. To put it simply, the small way sees Jesus as a player ‘inside our world’; the big way sees the world as ‘inside our Lord’. A small perspective more readily focuses on Jesus as the Good Shepherd from Galilee, the Lord who died and rose from the dead some two thousand years ago. The big perspective would add an emphasis, also, on Jesus as the second Person of the Blessed Trinity; He who, from all eternity, creates and sustains all that excists. Here Jesus is seen as Lord of the universe.

 

Let me illustrate this comparison by beginning with a humorous story. I am thinking of the film, The commitments which was set in a poorer part of Dublin, in Ireland. The scene I recall is inside a typical Irish home of the time. On the wall hang three pictures, one above the other, in order of ascending importance. I cannot remember the bottom picture (was it a politician?) but above him was the Sacred Heart and then above Him was Elvis Presley! Talk about priorities; this was surely a small understanding of the Sacred Heart!

On the other hand, the ‘big’ Jesus is to be found in St Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and Colossians. In Ephesians 1: 10 we read: “His purpose he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth”. Similarity in Colossians 1:17, Paul says of Jesus Christ: “He is before all things and in him all things hold together”. The last mentioned words are of deepest value to me.

 

I mentioned my faith story ... ! On leaving school, I found my faith had become like my old school blazer – I had outgrown it and it no longer fitted! My understanding of Jesus was too small! Around this time my uncle ( later a Permanent Deacon in Johannesburg) lent me a biography of the Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Though I certainly did not understand all I read, I discovered there a ‘bigger’ Jesus Christ! De Chardin based his thoughts both on his scientific research into the origins vision in Ephesians and Colossians. I remember reading of his great devotion to the sacred heart – he said he learned this on his mother’s knee!

 

Through his scientific research, his wide travels, and his priestly life of prayer, de Chardin deepened, and enlarged on, what he had learned from his mother. And so he came to speak of all that exists as being drawn into the Cosmic Christ. His vision has helped us to appreciate the depts and heights of the promise Our Lord made in Jn 12: 32 “ When I am lifted up from earth, I shall draw all men to myself”. Is it not classical Christianity to understand ourselves as invited and drawn into the Mystical body of Jesus Christ and thereby to make our home with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the very Godhead? How ‘big’ is that! I wonder if we do not sometimes slip into thinking that Jesus Christ, since ascending into heaven, his earthly work done, has gone into temporary retirement and will only resurface for His Second Coming. But what of His ‘work’ at the right-hand side of the Father? We are at home with both the Galilean Good Shepherd and the Cosmic Christ.

 

But there is something missing, something more. In fact, this ‘something’ goes to the core or, as in Frenchm the Coeur- the heart of the matter! This something, is what St Therese of the child Jesus discovered as the Grace of her vocation, namely that she was called to the heart in the Mystical Body of Christ. At the very centre of the work of our Lord, both ‘small and local’ and ‘big and universal’, is a Divine Fire of Love. He puts His Most Sacred Heart into it!

 

Karl Rahner writing in the 1960s, once said that the priest of the future would be blessed if he had a living devotion to the Sacred Heart. Undoubtedly, Rahner was speaking of both a ‘small’ and a ‘big’ devotion. Central to his thinking here, was the fact that the Heart of Jesus Christ was passionately in love with the Father and with His brothers ans sisters – and especially those who were suffering. The heart of Christ makes space for the smallness of each one of us and the bigness of the cosmos. An interesting anecdote: Flannery O’Connor had read some of Rahner’s writings and was in no doubt that he was a great man. However, she did add that she did not always understand what he was saying! Which will come as no surprise to those who have had to study Rahner!

 

I recall here an experience that de Chardin had when, as a stretcher bearer in the 1st World War, he received the legion of Honour for Bravery on the battlefield. Away from the battlefield, he entered a small chapel and began to pray before a picture of Christ. Gradually he saw the borders of the picture suddenly moving, coming alive, and in the face of Christ he saw the beauty of all men and woman of all times. (cf.his short essay entitled,’The Picture’.) The authenticity of de Chardin’s love of the Sacred heart of Christ is reflected in his love of the Cosmic Christ.

 

Flannery O’Connor was a short story writer: her stories were known for their strange characters, often involved in shocking actions and outcomes. She said that she drew such shocking pictures to wake up a people who had grown blind and deaf to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. She was a great admirer of Teilhard de Chardin and was encouraged to see that he shared her concern about the overly sentimental piety of the devotion of their time.

 

For his part, de Chardin would have shared O’Connor’s concern to reach those blind and deaf to the Gospel. His way to them was via the study of the origins of the human being and, built on this study, he pointed to the future of humanity as precisely in the Cosmic Christ. But he too recognised the need to warn people, to shock them awake. Remember his statement – surely shocking- that humankind “ is fast reaching the point where it will have to choose between a God of Love and biological suicide”: A God of Love, indeed, who has revealed Himself supremely in the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

 

In my chapel I have a brinze stature of the Sacred Heart- I actually rescued it from a pile of rubble about to be transported to the rubbish dump. I can only imagine that someone had lost faith in this ‘small’ Jesus – and quite possibly, preferred Elvis Presley! What a Shame; how desperately sad and tragic. May we – you and I – rediscover the love of the most Sacred Heart of Jesus in ways, both small and intimate and bid and cosmic.