While cleaning my parents’ home, I came across a framed print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that hung in their bedroom. Devotion to the Sacred Heart was not big in our home. I think someone gave the picture to my mother, a convert, when she entered the Catholic Church. Jesus always looked a little wimpy to me, and I couldn’t get into the “heart on his chest” image. I donated the print to a local Saint Vincent de Paul shop figuring someone who frequented the store might want it.
Beginning the search for an image to place in this blog, I was sure I would recognize the painting. I don’t know why, but I was surprised at the number of choices that popped up. I scrolled through the pages expecting one to jump out at me with its familiarity. In one Jesus is barely able to balance the huge gold crown on his head while balancing a globe on his left hand. Lest one lose sight of the heart, he obligingly pointed it out with his right hand.
There was the buff Jesus of Salvador Dali and countless pale, curly haired ones. In some Jesus was holding out his heart, offering it to us. In others, he held it looking for all the world like someone who wasn’t sure why he was holding his heart that should be in his chest and wondering what to do with it. Hearts were big and small, pierced, thorn-crowned, and cross-topped. Bleeding, glowing. Take your pick.
So I did. I just picked the one least offensive to me since none hit the nostalgia button. I remember the print in my parents room as warm, painted in shades of browns and gold, except of course, the heart. For my entire life I looked at it as a bit of pious sentimentality that I happily did without.
Then, yesterday, I read about St. John Eudes (1601-1680) on Universalis and changed my mind. Not that I would have any of the images that popped up on my computer screen, but I had a different take on the Sacred Heart of Jesus thanks to St. John.
He preached over a hundred missions combating Jansenism which taught that human beings were riddled with original sin and try as they might, would likely never attain the perfection required for salvation. The Church was corrupt which, as the author of the Universalis article points out, seems to be a perennial problem. It’s priests were either wealthy and busy protecting their entitlements and power or poor and uneducated.
John spent many years as a priest ministering to those who suffered from the Plague that engulfed France, isolating himself from others in his order lest he infect them with the disease. Eventually he left the order and founded a new order to educate priests. Johsn was also moved by the women he saw in the streets, women “of ill repute” who had no place to go and no one to care for them. He found women to help and eventually another order emerged to give refuge and spiritual nurture to them.
As one who has worked with poor, abused women, I am sure many in not most of those homeless women on the streets were not prostitutes by choice. Some things don’t change. Just as the Church today must deal with its issues of corruption, power-protection and scandal, women are still abused and used. This is where St. John’s take on the Sacred Heart hooked me.
The great heart of Jesus is not something isolated, like so many painting and sculptures portray. It is firmly planted within Jesus’s chest, aching, longing to help, eager to welcome. It is, as John Eudes said, “the emotional core of Jesus.” Jesus is not judgmental or condemning, as the Jansenites preached. He did not care about power or money or position. He is Love. Pure, simple, encompassing Love.
The last words in the Universalis article are: “And over and over again we find Gods grace acting through people like St John Eudes. They do not stand outside and complain or run campaigns, they go in and do things, removing the mould of worldly corruption and putting back, bit by bit, the leaven of grace. They will always be needed, until the world ends. “
I am challenged, we all are, to be the heart of Jesus in our world, in our time. How we do it depends on our gifts, our call. But the Sacred Heart of Jesus is beating in each of us. It is up to us to let Love flow from it to those who most need to feel its warm embrace.
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