Although I gave up the practice of Catholicism a long time ago, I have never found nor claimed that this has made me happier. However, I have always wondered since my schooldays why we were told to pray to a ‘heart’. Does it not make more sense to pray to a ‘person’?
Nuala W.
When created Cardinal, Blessed John Henry Newman took as his motto, ‘cor ad cor loquitur’ (heart speaks to heart)’. He was envisaging an intimate sharing of mind and heart. This, I think, is also what you mean in expressing a preference for praying to a ‘person’. In praying to Jesus under the symbol of his Heart we are praying to His Person. His Heart is the very centre of His Person.
The word ‘person’ or ‘persona’, by the way, does not appear in any of the books of the Bible. It is a word that originated in pre-Christian Greek theatre where it had the meaning of a ‘mask’. All the actors wore a ‘persona’ or ‘mask’ to hide their identity. This survives today in your theatre programme where it is still customary all over the world to use the Latin words, dramatis personae, literally ‘the masks of the drama’. They are placed above the list of actors and their respective roles.
This word ‘person’ was pressed into service by theologians in the early church as they grappled with the mystery of the Trinity. One important early use of the word was in a definition used by the influential St Augustine who had spent much of his youth at the theatre. ‘A person is what there are three of in God, no more, no less’. Only later was this concept of ‘person’, now so much a part of all human discourse, used to describe an independent free-standing human being like you or me. Made in the ‘image and likeness of God’ each of us, in a certain way, stands alone.
The biblical word that most closely approaches to what we have come to associate with the word, ‘person’ is the word ‘name’. We find it all through the Scriptures. ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain’. ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. ‘Holy is his name’. ‘Name’ here refers to the very being of God or what we would now call the ‘person’ of God. This manner of speaking has continued through the centuries. We have little difficulty knowing what it means ‘to be arrested in the name of the King’. It refers to all about him, especially his kingly power.
The tradition of praying to Jesus, in a ‘person to person’ way, under the form of His Heart developed gradually over the centuries in Christianity. It was Jesus himself who drew attention to His Heart in one of the most consoling of his sayings.’Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls’ Mt.11:28-29. At the Last Supper while resting his head on the breast of Jesus, St John could not have been closer to this heart. It was on this occasion, according to a long-standing tradition, that John gained his deep understanding of how love, symbolized in all civilizations by the heart, is at the centre of our religion.
Around 200 a.d., St Irenaeus, the first Bishop of Lyons, France, wrote that ‘the Church is the fountain of living water that flows to us from the Heart of Christ’. As Irenaeus was a disciple of St Polycarp of Smyrna who in turn had sat at the feet of St John in Ephesus, his writings are of the first importance for information on the authentic practice of Christian faith in its earliest days.
St Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), widely known as Father of Devotion to the Sacred Heart, invited his followers to pass, in spirit, through the wounded side of Jesus to the pierced heart within. A whole galaxy of the great men and women followed suit. Among these are St Bernard of Clairvaux, St Albert the Great, St Bonaventure, St Gertrude the Great and St Catherine of Siena. This form of spirituality took a tremendous leap forward when the Lord appeared to a Visitation nun, St Margaret Mary Alacoque in her monastery at Paray-le-monial in 17th century France. She described what happened:
‘Around the Feast of Corpus Christi, showing me his divine heart, he said ‘Behold this Heart which has so loved men that It has spared nothing even to exhausting and consuming Itself to prove to them Its love … I (also) promise that My Heart shall shed in abundance the influence of Its divine love on all those who shall honour It or cause It to be honoured.’
This extraordinary event features in statuary, stained glass windows and paintings in practically every Catholic Church around the globe. Pope Pius IX established a Feast of the Sacred Heart in 1856 at the express wish of the Lord to St Margaret Mary. All his successors ever since have encouraged the faithful to address themselves confidently to Jesus under this image.
‘When we adore the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, we adore in it and through it both the uncreated love of the divine Word and also its human love and its other emotions and virtues, since both loves moved our Redeemer to sacrifice Himself for us and for His Spouse, the Universal Church’. (Haurietis Aquas, # 86. Venerable Pius XII. 1956).
‘The Church seems in a particular way to profess the mercy of God and to venerate it when she directs herself to the Heart of Christ. In fact, it is precisely this drawing close to Christ in the mystery of his Heart which enables us to dwell on this point- a point in a sense central and also most accessible on the human level- of the revelation of the merciful love of the Father, a revelation which constituted the central content of the messianic mission of the Son of Man’. (Dives in misericordia, Blessed John Paul II. 1980).
‘Practicing Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ means adoring that heart which, after having loved us to the end was pierced with a lance and from high on the cross poured out blood and water, an inexhaustible source of new life’. (Homily of Benedict XVI. 2005).
In this year of 2011, the Feast of the Sacred Heart is celebrated on Friday, July 1st.