The Heart part 3

by Rev. Gabriel Baltes, O.S.B.  |  03/02/2025  |  A Message from Our Pastor

Dear Parishioners,

In last week’s bulletin article, I offered a very abridged history of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In that brief sketch, I failed to include a fascinating feature from the early seventeenth century which impacted this devotion. Around this time the first modern atlas of human anatomy got published. Soon afterward, William Harvey published his treatise on the movement of the heart and the circulation of the blood. This scientific description of the body’s blood pumping muscle fueled the religious imaginations of people, particularly artists. They, in turn, reflected this anatomical understanding in their iconography. All of this demonstrates that religion and religious practices are typically not created in vacuums.

More often than not, they are the result of the interfacing of the various disciplines that exist at any given time in history. These disciplines include: science, philosophy, politics, geography, theology as an academic endeavor, as well as pious customs and practices that emerge from a grass-roots level from common folk that are sometimes tainted by superstitious beliefs. The life of the church, including its liturgies and devotions, are the products of a mixed bag of realities.

When we look at devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that Pope Francis is advocating a re-claiming of, it is clear that the Holy Father wants Christians to understand the human heart beyond the biological sense. It is the symbolic or metaphorical understanding of the heart that he reflects on. The pope is following the image of the heart as a source of love which, like the biological heart, pumps life throughout the whole body, namely the world. In Jesus, this human and divine heart come to a perfect combination.

The pope laments the narcissism and self-centeredness that have come to characterize many modern societies. In his view, they have become heartless – the direct opposite of what the Sacred Heart visualizes. This heartlessness makes it impossible to cultivate an openness to God because individuals are absorbed in themselves – their needs, their ideas, their goals, their understanding of what constitutes good or evil. But if the heart is once again recognized as the locus for a personal encounter with Jesus whose love is directed outwardly, then not only will there be a deepening in one’s relationship with God, but such an encounter will overflow into the people’s relationship with one another and even with the very planet we inhabit. What the pope is calling us to is a fuller heart-to-heart friendship with Jesus. By emphasizing the image of the human heart, this friendship moves away from abstract concepts to notions that are concrete, personal, and even somewhat graphic, in the richest sense of that word.

In this Jubilee Year, the focus of which is Christian hope, the image of the heart is ideal. As we reflect on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the source of divine and human love that permanently and unconditionally abides with the human race, there lies the reason for our hope. If people can be convinced of this belief, they will never be able to lose heart.

Rev. Gabriel Baltes, O.S.B.