The Exchange of
Hearts:
The Tradition of
Sacred Heart Devotion and the Practice of Non-Violence
Wendy M. Wright
On
Once when I was before the Blessed Sacrament, (I had found a little space of time, though the work I had been given left me little), I was suddenly completely surrounded by the divine presence. It was so intense I lost my sense of who and where I was. I abandoned myself to the Spirit, yielding my heart to the power of his love. He made me rest for along time on his divine breast where he showed me the marvels of his love and the
unspeakable secrets of his sacred heart that had always been hidden before. He opened them to me there for the first time, in such a real and tangible way. Even though I am always afraid of deceiving myself about what I say happens inside me, I could not doubt what was happening because of the effects that the grace produced in me. This is what seemed to me to happen: He said to me: “My divine heart is so impassioned with love for humanity, and for you especially, it cannot contain the flames of its burning
charity inside. It must spread them through you, and show itself to humanity so they may be enriched by the precious treasures that I share with you, treasures which have all the sanctifying and saving graces needed to draw them back from the abyss of destruction. I have chosen you as an abyss of unworthiness and ignorance to accomplish this great work so that everything will be done by me.”
Afterwards, he asked for my heart. I begged him to take it and he did, placing it in his own adorable heart. He let me see it there like a little atom consumed in a burning furnace. Then he returned it to me as a burning heart-shaped flame, and placed it where it had been, saying, “Here is a precious token of my love, my beloved. This will enclose a tiny spark of living flame within your side. It will serve as your heart and consume you until your last moment. Its intensity will be so unyielding that you will be unable to find relief, except briefly by bleeding. I will mark it so with the blood of my cross that it will bring you more humiliation and suffering than comfort. That is what I want you to ask for it in all simplicity, so that you can practice what is asked of you and be given the joy of shedding your blood on the cross of humiliation. And to prove that the grace I have just given is not imaginary
and is the foundation of all the others I intend to give you, the pain in your side will always remain, even though I have closed the wound. If up until now you have only been called my slave, I now give you the name “Beloved Disciple of My Sacred Heart.”
This presentation will be an extended commentary on the experience of the exchange of human and divine hearts, an experience that did not belong to Margaret Mary alone but which is recounted as variations on a common theme by numerous persons, mainly women in the Christian mystical tradition and which, as a part of the devotional heritage centered on the Sacred Heart, has become the common property of us all. From the rich fund of imagery associated with the devotion I would like to pick out four themes and comment on them from the vantage point of contemporary theories of non-violence. Those themes are: (1) the Heart of God is embodied in the particular; (2) the Heart is the center where all paradoxes are held in tension; (3) the Heart is gentle and humble; and (4) the Heart is a place of creative suffering.
But
first, asking your patience, I will provide a bit of background that will make
those comments intelligible. For quite some time I have been
mulling over the image of the Sacred Heart. It began a dozen years ago
when I was asked to do an article on the Salesian
tradition for a book of essays on “Spiritualities of the Heart.” Certainly I
had known of the heart language in Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal but was
not aware of the extent to which Salesian
spirituality is really a “world of hearts” – the heart of God conjoined to
human hearts through the gentle heart of Jesus, human hearts conjoined as well
as they “LiveJesus.” Then during a sabbatical I spent
time in
Being a post-Vatican II Catholic I did not grow up with what many people in the middle part of the twentieth century would identify with Sacred Heart devotion: First Fridays, prayers of consecration, adoration and reparation, the June feast. Instead, I have found myself captured quite unaware. The image itself in its manifold forms – not primarily as it is often displayed on the breast of some plaster-of-paris Jesus, his finger pointing or arms outstretched – has, quite simply, commanded my attention. In my musings and research Christ’s heart has functioned as something of a koan, one of those Zen Buddhist riddles, like “what is the sound of one hand clapping”, that are designed to crack through conceptual reasoning and open a person to an intuitive grasp of reality (i.e. enlightenment). So I have been turning my Heart koan over and over, exhausting intellective capabilities in the hopes that I will eventually “get it”.
Along the way, I have become fascinated with the rich variety of aspects through which the heart has manifested itself over the centuries. Indeed, it is precisely as an image with a long and richly textured history that I find myself entranced. Theologian Karl Rahner has made reference to “primordial words” which have enduring resonance and in which is “signified a piece of reality in which a door is mysteriously opened for us into the unfathomable depths of true reality.” It is around these words that religious thought continues to revolve. I like to think that there are “primordial images” as well as words and that the heart is such a one, an enduring pivotal image with both verbal and visual expression around which Christian, [especially Salesian] consideration concentrates. Such images have, as it were, a developmental life history, as well as an enduring essential form. They are layered and thick with meaning. They carry with them not only the articulated meaning of the present but also all the meanings that have accrued to them over the centuries.
Life History of the Sacred Heart
Perhaps this is very familiar territory for many of you but I would like briefly to trace the developing life of the heart image in Christian history because it is from that rich past that my further reflections on the Sacred Heart and theories of nonviolence will emerge. Often when people refer to the Sacred Heart they think of Visitandine Margaret Mary Alacoque, to whom Jesus appeared in a series of visions and requested that His much neglected Heart, source of His incomparable love for humankind, be reverenced through the practice of a Thursday hour of adoration, the observance of First Fridays and the establishment of a formal feast during the octave of Corpus Christi. People think of reparation and adoration, the devotional attitudes highlighted by the Visitandine. And they think of the promises that Jesus reportedly shared with her which would accrue from the faithful practice of the devotion. Certainly, Margaret Mary is a significant figure in the propagation of the devotion and its adoption as a practice within the universal church. But the Heart of God as the focus of Christian prayer and reflection has been around, at least as promise, since the earliest centuries of the church’s life.
As I have studied this topic, I have come to think about the developing tradition of the Sacred Heart as a cumulative and communal reading of the text of God’s body. I mean that quite literally. Through reading the scriptures, through private and liturgical prayer, through ritual and philosophy, through the mediums of art and music, through mystical encounter and ascetic imitation, Christians have for centuries contemplated, peered, probed, touched, entered, ingested, integrated, and been inhabited by the very body of God as it has taken form in Jesus the Christ. They have located themselves at the privileged intersection where divine and human converge and have lingered there to plumb the mysterious depths of existence.
The Sacred Heart tradition has its roots in patristic reflection on scripture. If I may be permitted to frame this cumulative process in spatial terms we can imagine those thinkers of the early church whom we speak of as the fathers, standing reflectively before the incarnate body. Their considerations were rooted in scripture and their conclusions were highly theological. Exegetes like Origen, Ambrose and Augustine explored two primary themes. First, that the church was Christ’s bride who came forth from the side of Christ, just as Eve had come forth from the side of Adam. The living waters that flowed from that pierced side were the sacraments of the church. Second, that the breast of Christ was a fount of wisdom. Just as John, the beloved disciple, has rested on Jesus’ breast at the Last Supper, so too the one who seeks mystical wisdom must, like that beloved one, rest in contemplative intimacy with the Lord.
The early medieval world continued to explore these themes and develop new ones. But it was especially in the twelfth century that the tradition blossomed. Christian spirituality in general focused on the humanity of Jesus and became more affective and participatory. No longer were Christians content to gaze reflectively upon the body, they desired greater intimacy. The tradition of bridal mysticism associated with the Cistercian writers, especially Bernard of Clairvaux, developed the mystical aspect of the devotion through the voluptuous language of the Song of Songs. The mystic resting on Christ’s breast and the bride wounding His heart with love became a familiar topos. Even more significantly, the suffering that Jesus endured during the Passion became Christendom’s own passion. To be with the body, to experience the pain of the body, to embody in one’s own flesh the truth of the suffering God was the spiritual ideal. One need only recall the stigmata of Francis of Assisi or the revelations of Julian of Norwich to have this confirmed.
In terms of the Sacred Heart tradition, it was as though the medieval church approached the incarnate body and began to explore its inner as well as its outer reality. The tradition of devotion to the five wounds of Christ grew first, then devotion to the side wound, then, further penetration longed for, the inner recesses of God were plumbed. To be inside God, to discover the mystery of God’s very being, was the intent. Women mystics such as those centered around the Helfta monastery in the thirteenth century were rhapsodic about the Heart. For them it was profoundly sacramental and they drank of the blood that poured forth from the pierced side in graphic visions. They produced a lineage of contemplative women who underwent a mystical exchange of hearts with Jesus including Catherine of Siena, Catherine de Ricci and several lesser known Visitandines contemporary with Margaret Mary.
Gradually the heart emerged as a freestanding cultic object in and of itself. It was not simply the core of Christ’s being or a metaphor for God’s love a focus of devotion. The heart of God was a fountain, a cleft, a refuge, a fire, a furnace, a bridal chamber, a source of grace and mercy. The blood was dew, drink, milk, honey, life-giving liquid. The metaphoric imagery, in medieval fashion, was labile and luxurious. But there was a literalness to the imagery as well and a specificity to its theological meaning, for the heart was seen to be the source of the Eucharistic cup into which the blood of Christ was poured.
Medieval devotion to the Heart was widespread and flourished among devout laity as well as in the monastic world. The heart image in verbal form was carried along with the practice of meditation on the passion and, in visual form, on the pages of illuminated prayer books, on woodcuts, etchings, stained glass, painting and statuary. In different eras the devotion was prevalent among the Dominicans, Franciscans, Premonstratensians, Carthusians and Benedictines. At the dawn of the early modern era it was embraced and championed by the Society of Jesus. From a variety of sources it was integrated into the piety of the Visitation founded by Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal. As I have suggested, Salesian spirituality can aptly be described as a “world of hearts”.
By the time Margaret Mary Alacoque, as a third generation Visitandine, arrived on the scene, the stage had been amply set. The time was ripe for the image of the heart to become the common custody of all the Church. The propagation of the public liturgical devotion, intuited in the Visitandine’s revelations, had been anticipated by others, especially her contemporary, John Eudes, who composed both liturgical texts in honor of the heart and the first systematic treatise to develop a theology of the devotion. It took some time before the liturgical cult was in place and it took the efforts of a number of Jesuits, beginning with Claude de la Columbiere, to assure that official papal approval was secured. Once that was done, the spread of Sacred Heart piety was rapid. Some of its growth was politically motivated. Growing out of an anti-Protestant, anti-Jansenist climate, the devotion became a standard borne into battle against the secularism of the French Revolution and modernism. By the dawn of the twentieth century the entire world had been officially consecrated to the Heart (by Leo XIII in 1899) and that primordial image was to serve as metaphoric matrix for some of the twentieth century’s most creative Catholic thinkers, especially Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner.
The Christian community had gone from gazing contemplatively and theologically upon God’s wounded Body; to exploring it more viserally – to tasting, touching, drinking, embracing, leaning upon and entering the Body to learn the secrets of the Heart; to gazing once again, this time with intense adoration at a Heart strongly identified with the eucharist and a redemption available exclusively through the Church of Rome; to intuiting the divine Heart beating at the center of all created matter.
I have given this much time to considering the Sacred Hearts as a developing and multifaceted image because, as I suggested before, I am convinced that all the diverse meanings that Christians have culled from it over the centuries are carried in the image as it comes to us in the present day. Not in the sense that everything in the past has simply led up to, has been distilled in, or can be reduced to the present-day devotion. Rather, I would suggest that ways of experiencing, of knowing, the Heart of God, are available to us by going back and picking up strands of which we lost hold sometime in the past, and allowing ourselves to embrace insights or intuitions that illuminate our contemporary experience.
The dangling strands which I would like to take up today are four in number: (1) the Heart of God is embodied in the particular; (2) the Heart is the center where all paradoxes are held in tension; (3) the Heart is gentle and humble; and (4) the Heart is a place of creative suffering. In the course of my considerations I will go back to those persons in the past who have explored these themes most wonderfully. The four themes have emerged out of my recent mullings about the question of violence in the contemporary world.
Martin Luther King’s Theory of Non-Violent Resistance
I would like to turn the themes over with special reference to theories of non-violent resistance articulated in the present century which have culminated in the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. I have chosen to do this because I have become convinced that it is the tradition of non-violent resistance that has the possibility of responding creatively to the violence so endemic in our present day. It contains this possibility in part because it allows for an analysis of the social structures that breed violence and in part because it gives a glimpse of the way in which an inner transformation of heart is at the root of the transformation of those violent structures and the world that sustains them.
For those of you who are not especially familiar with the literature of non-violence I will briefly outline King’s theory. This theory provides the substructure beneath the various acts of civil disobedience that King orchestrated during his years as champion of civil rights for American blacks. These seem to me to be significant not only philosophically but because they point to a radical change of heart that can potentially transform violence through the use of militant non-violence.
Martin Luther King viewed militant non-violence as the choice of the courageous. First, for him, it was not a question of whether or not one should confront evil. He felt it was a fundamental human moral obligation to do so. The only choice one had was whether to resist violently or non-violently. Second, the end sought by non-violence was not victory over one’s opponents but reconciliation with them based on the recognition of the common interests shared by all parties. For King, the goal was the creation of what he called the “beloved community” in which all would be reconciled. This implied that compromises must be made by all parties in order to find common ground. Third, the struggle for a just world was not a struggle against the impersonal forces of evil or against other people but against the structures of evil which enslave the oppressors as well as the oppressed. Thus, revenge is foreign and forgiveness commonplace in King’s vision of a transformed and transforming world. Fourth, one must be willing to accept suffering oneself rather than inflict suffering on others. Fifth, the resister must renounce both the use of physical violence and any internal spirit of violence. This inner conquest is perhaps the most difficult dimension of the non-violent platform. One must genuinely love one’s opponent not because one approves of or even likes the enemy but because a fundamental agape love has possessed one’s heart. This agape love is God’s love for humans revealed most clearly in Jesus. This agape love is a gift, a creative in breaking of the Spirit which we cannot control but which we can court by opening our hearts to grace. Sixth, and finally, Martin Luther King’s theory of non-violence assumes that there is cosmic companionship in the struggle for a just and loving world, and that the true meaning of life is discovered in the personal effort to act humanely, to live courageously and freely.
The Sacred Heart Tradition in Dialogue with Active Non Violence: an
Exchange of Hearts
If I may be permitted, after this rather lengthy stage setting, I would like to create a space, as it were, for the dialogue between the tradition of sacred heart devotion and non-violent theory. It is clear to me that it is not enough simply to pray to the Sacred Heart of Jesus to take away the violence in contemporary culture. Nor do I think it is adequate for all of us simply to devote ourselves to making reparation for the sins of humankind, although this is an intercessory practice to which some among us may have a genuine call. Instead, I would take my cue from the tradition of Margaret Mary and other women mystics and, in a somewhat less dramatic manner from the early Visitation tradition, which invite us to ask for and work for an exchange of hearts. Our hearts must become inhabited by the heart of God. When it happened to Catherine of Siena, her heart was “crushed”. Gertrude the Great describes the process as being “grasped”. Francis de Sales in less mystical fashion simply enjoined Jesus to live and reign in human hearts. Margaret Mary experienced her heart as removed and replaced by a fiery atom. No matter how one might conceptualize this “exchange”, it seems to me to be the fundamental dynamic both in King’s vision and in the spirituality of the Sacred Heart.
What does it mean to experience this exchange? What are the aspects of a heart inhabited by the heart of God? Let me explore my first theme: the Heart of God is embodied in the particular. The central, utterly stunning, insight of the Christian religion is the idea of incarnation. As a historical and theological concept, the incarnation of God in human form is familiar to all of us. But if we read the incarnation as a more wide-ranging symbol, a rich insight that invites us into a fundamental truth of existence, we can see that incarnation speaks of the conjunction of the visible and the invisible, the meeting of heaven and earth. Most specifically, it proclaims that spirit is discovered in matter, that the infinite is encountered precisely in the finite. This is not to be pantheistic, reducing God to the world, but to invite us into the paradox, to paraphrase Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem about the Virgin Mary, that infinitely is cloistered in a dear womb. Her womb, our wombs, the womb of the world.
What this means for us is that our hearts cannot be fixed on the general, the generic, or the ideal but must learn and exercise love through the particular. We are called to encounter God in the specific, embodied persons and events with which we come in contact. The extended tradition of contemplation on the Sacred Heart makes this abundantly clear. In much of that tradition the distinctive, bodily heart of Jesus is the focus. I have come to love the stunning fleshiness of it all, the sense that in gazing upon the organ itself one can know the depths of God. I admit it took me a long time to adjust to this concept and that originally I came to my study prepared to focus on the Heart in a more conceptual manner. But the tradition is un-ambivalent. God does not love only with a free-floating, “Vispiritual” love but with the rush of blood, the tensing of muscle, with the tearing of tissue and bone. And so must we love.
To have a heart inhabited by God’s heart we must love specific people in all their idiosyncrasies. We must practice an energetically engaged love, which mucks in the messiness of things. The medieval women mystics were so good at grasping this truth. For them, the God who died on the cross was as much a woman in childbirth as a sacrificial victim. God for them had the heart of a mother whose love is inextricably linked to the unrepeatable flesh and blood of her child. To quote a famous passage by Julian of Norwich,
But our true mother Jesus, he alone bears us for joy and for endless life, blessed may he be. So he carries us within him in love and travail, until the full time when he wanted to suffer the sharpest thorns and cruel pains that were ever or will be, and at the last he died. And when he had finished, and had borne us so for bliss, still all this could not satisfy his wonderful love.
The God who bears us like a mother also loves us as one. God’s heart becomes the mother’s breast at which we suckle in search of nourishment to sustain our lives. Catherine of Siena explored her mystical understanding of the open side of Christ as God’s nourishing breast:
And just as a baby draws milk through its mother’s breast, so souls in love with God draw God to themselves through Christ crucified… Let your heart and soul burst with the heat of love [as you drink] at this breast of charity through the flesh of Christ crucified.
To have such a maternal heart ourselves means we must be tender lovers of all that is created, to have our eyes opened to the deep spirit that slumbers within the substructure of rocks, courses through crystalline streambeds, and echoes in the oceans’ primordial depths. Teilhard de Chardin, whose spiritual vision was contoured by loving gaze upon the Sacred Heart as well as by his scientific training spoke of this reality in “My Litany”:
“The world-zest
The essence of all energy
The cosmic curve
The heart of God
The issue of
Cosmogenesis
The tide of cosmic convergence
The God of evolution
The universal Jesus …
Focus of
ultimate and universal
the cosmic sphere of cosmogenesis
Heart of Jesus,
Heart of evolution,
Unite me to yourself.”
This incarnational intuition that the finite is the gateway to infinity and its corollary that love then can only be exercised in the particularity of finite persons and situations dovetails well, I think, with the insights from non-violent theory which insist that reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community is the end which we seek. We cannot love our enemies if we cannot see them as potential friends, if we cannot find some vestige of humanity in them, if we cannot find God in all things as they are, even if we would wish them otherwise. To perceive the infinite in the finite requires an act of the imagination, a capacity to pierce beneath stereotypes and appearances to the vestigial core of goodness that lingers in all created things. It requires enormous faith to suspend our own expectations and wait for God’s illumination in the darkness. But that is what the embodied heart of God invites us to do.
The second insight I find revelatory in the tradition is that the Heart is the center where all paradoxes are held in tension. Christianity is a religion of paradoxes – three-in-one, fully God-fully human, life born through death – these are foundational ideas that undergird the whole Christian edifice. The tradition of the Sacred Heart seems to me to be a vehicle through which we locate the place of paradoxical convergence. The Heart is at the center of God’s body, the center of the liturgy, the center of our redemption, and the center of the universe. There all things converge but their convergence does not dilute distinctiveness into sameness. Instead, the incredible tension of holding opposites together generates intense creativity. For the center is not static but dynamic, and the existence of paradox there is not chaotic but life giving. It is the ancient image of the divine Heart as a fiery furnace that captures my imagination here and best expresses the creative potential of paradox. A passage from the life of Sister Margaret, a seventeenth century Carmelite of Beaune, illuminates the creativity and dynamism of the furnace-heart evocative of Margaret Mary’s words:
Thus He revealed His Heart as a vast and boundless furnace of love in which He enclosed her for days and nights. There were transfused so many graces at their source that her progress in perfection seemed greater in a single day than it had ever been for whole years at a stretch. That divine heart, searing like a hot fire, consumed her imperfections … She noted the two-fold movement of dilation and compression of the Heart of Jesus, experienced by other saints, and understood that the Sacred Heart contracted as if to encompass the Holy Spirit, to love its Divine Father in His own name … and that the Sacred Heart expanded to shed abroad its Spirit … to communicate to His Mystical Body, the Church, all its vital warmth.
Dilation and expansion, creative, dynamic movement. These are the qualities of God’s own heart. So should they be ours. Non-violent urges us in much the same direction.
Classically, that theory does not identify itself with any preconceived political or social agenda for it is not an ideology as much as an approach to life which does not seek to push forward special interests as much as to arrive at the “beloved community” by whatever available non-violent means. To have a heart thus fixed is to have a flexible heart, one married to the ultimate good of all concerned not its own solutions. This means that one must hold in one’s heart the incredible paradox of one’s own truth as well as the truth perceived by others. This is a tension-filled but ultimately creative undertaking which burns away our little, carefully bounded selves.
If we are to have hearts like this we must learn to live with the kind of searing paradox that burns off our narrow preconceptions, our petty self-protectiveness and our need to control. Rather, we must be burned hollow enough to allow that divine expansion to communicate itself to us, to move freely and fluidly between us, to make us passageways through which the Spirit flows.
The third
aspect of Sacred Heart devotion which recommends itself to me as rich in
reflecting on the question of a nonviolent heart is the insight, perhaps most
fully developed in Salesian spirituality, that God’s
Heart is gentle and humble. The Salesian tradition,
which has its twentieth century incarnation in
Since the heart is the source of
all our actions, as the heart is, so are they. When the Divine Spouse invites
the soul, he says, ‘Put me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm.’
Yes, for whoever has Jesus Christ in his heart will soon have him in all his
outward ways. For this reason … I have wished above all else for you to engrave
and inscribe on your heart this holy and sacred motto, ‘Live Jesus!’ … With
To let Jesus live, His gentle humble heart must become one’s own. Such a heart is not weak but infinitely strong because it has the power to disarm and transform all that comes into it. In a letter to her sisters in religion, Jane de Chantal as mother superior of the Visitation Order, wrote:
As for gentleness of heart, my dear daughters, this is a heart which does not resist anything, is not angry at anything done to it, that bears all, endures all, that is compassionate and full of affection for its neighbor and that does not have any bitterness in it. No, I am not talking about a heart of flesh but a heart [united with God’s will and] of the superior part of the soul. Therefore contradictions,
persecutions, obstacles and difficulties which come to the truly gentle heart are immediately weakened as soon as they approach it.
Gentleness disarms, that is the sense of Jane’s insight. There is nothing passive about true gentleness. It is in fact intensely active. Gentleness wishes no harm to the other, rather it wishes only and elicits only the good. Nor does gentleness have anything weak in it. Like a young sapling which bends in a storm while a mighty oak snaps and breaks, gentleness exercises pliancy, flexibility and good humor to negotiate all difficulties.
I think of the techniques of non-violent resistance that King advocated in his civil rights work, techniques that he had learned from Mahatma Gandhi and Thoreau. He advocated the use of tactics, gestures, and words that could transform a conflict situation by disarming it. Rather than responding as a victim or as an adversary and further polarizing a conflict, the nonviolent resister was taught to disarm her opponent through unexpected responses that invited the enemy to see himself as having common interests or concerns. A situation could be reframed, creatively reinvented, or broken open by a disarmed heart employing the tactics that disarm. Hearts that allow the gentle humble Jesus to live in them contain the transformative power of God’s own gentle love: a love that conquers all and is stronger than death.
A final dimension of Sacred Heart devotion that seems to me to lend itself well to dialogue with non-violent theory, is the idea that the Heart is a place of creative suffering. The full fledged liturgical cult of the Heart grew out of the more diffuse but widespread devotion to the wounds of Christ, this focused practice being part of the spiritual emphasis of western Christendom which emphasized the human experience of Jesus, and which was especially attentive to His Passion. Bernard of Clairvaux is representative, indeed formative, in this devotion to Christ’s wounds:
Really, where is there safe sure rest for the weak except in the Savior’s wounds? … whatever is lacking I appropriate for myself from the heart of the Lord which overflows with mercy. And there is no lack of clefts by which they are poured out. They pierced his hands and feet, they gored his side with a lance, and through these fissures I can suck honey from the rock. The secrets of his heart are laid open through the clefts of his body.
Although many of us in the twentieth century find ourselves perplexed and troubled by the emphasis on suffering within the spiritual tradition, it nevertheless
Is a powerful and persistent theme. I would caution that the theme of suffering for the sake of Christ, if it is used to rationalize oppression or justify the abuse of others, could simply be disguised violence. But we have access to a long and profound heritage that, taking its cue from the cross, would see suffering incurred on behalf of the kingdom as redemptive. Much of Sacred Heart devotion falls into that category. Perhaps Margaret Mary Alacoque is the most obvious and notable exponent of this dimension of the Heart tradition. In a revelation she had before her three great revelations of the Sacred Heart, Margaret Mary was approached by Jesus:
Jesus showed her a cross-covered with flowers. Behold, the bed of my chaste spouses on which I shall make thee consummate the delights of my love. One by one these flowers will fade and nothing will remain but the thorns they now hide from your weakness.
But you will feel their points so keenly that all the strength of your love will be needed to accomplish your martyrdom.
The Visitation tradition already carried in it the idea of the martyrdom of love, an idea implicit in all Christian spirituality, but Margaret Mary lived it out with great vividness. Behind her sometimes troubling accounts of her sufferings is the idea that she, in her own body, continues the redemptive work of Jesus. Her suffering is ultimately transformative, not simply imitative. New life, healing, transfiguration, resurrection spring forth from the deep and consecrated suffering that she experiences. It is only on the level of mystic participation in which our seemingly separate bodies known to be intimately intertwined that this participatory suffering makes sense.
One of the crucial aspects of non-violent theory is the willingness to take on suffering oneself rather than inflict any harm on another. This too is transformative suffering, embraced for a vision – the beloved community – larger than oneself and giving ultimate meaning to one’s little life.
The tradition of Sacred Heart devotion gives us access to some of the richest and most insightful dimensions of Christian spirituality and theology. Of the many themes discovered there are four, that the Heart is embodied in the particular, that the Heart is the center where paradoxes are held in tension, that the Heart is gentle and humble, and that the Heart is a place of creative suffering, seem to me to lend themselves to a rich dialogue with modern theories of nonviolence and challenge us to open ourselves to the grace to ask for an exchange of heart so that our hearts might become forges of loving transformation in the midst of a violent world.