IN THE HEART
INTRODUCTION
The title of my homily for this feast of the Sacred Heart
is, “Love Is A Hole In The Heart.”
That’s a quote from a guy named, “Ben Hecht.
It’s from his 1958 play, Winkelberg.
I don’t know the scene or the setting, but someone says, “Love
is a hole in the heart.”
FEAST OF THE SACRED HEART
i haven't done my research on why describing Jesus as THE Sacred Heart had so much impact on so many people.
My guess is that when religion becomes too rational - too heady - the pendulum swings from the mind to the heart.
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque had her visions starting back the 1630's and they were sculpted into Jesus the Sacred Heart. Was rationalism being born at the time and this counter intuitive image showed up.
Sister Faustina Kowalska had her visions in the 1930's. She described what she saw to the artist, Eugeniusz Kazimirowski. He painted what he heard and it became the Divine Mercy image of Jesus.
It's my wondering if the image of the Sacred Heart had dropped out so much that the image of Divine Mercy popped up to take it's place.
It has Jesus with light coming out of him - but notice the light is coming out of his heart.
HEART AND BRAINS: PHYSICAL
Obviously, we know that the heart is a pump - with 4
chambers - and the blood of our whole subway system makes its rounds all day
long - 24 / 7.
And a hole in that system would be dangerous - very
dangerous.
Obviously, we know that our brain is our center - our
capital - our caput - where we have our computer system - our Random Access
Memory - our cloud - our thinking system - our supreme court, our congress, our
library system, our files, our laws - our president, etc. etc. etc.
And sometimes we have headaches - and we hold our head -
and we shake our head and say at times, “Too much! It’s too much for me.”
Then again we have this heart in the center of our chest
- for most folks on the left side - and sometimes in stress we put our hand to
our heart and go, “Oh boy, oh girl, too much, too much, too much.”
HEART AS IMAGE AND METAPHOR
Love is a hole in the heart.
And that hole longs to be filled.
Or that hole needs to be emptied.
Hate can also be a hole in the heart.
So too jealousy, so too envy, so too anger… etc. etc.
etc.
Question: what is our heart filled with? What does it
long for? Where does it feel empty? Where are the holes?
GOD: THE HEART
SHAPED HOLE IN THE HEART
Blaise Pascal -
author of - Pensées or Thoughts, gets credit for triggering the phrase “the God-Shaped
Hole in the Heart”.
He wrote, “What
else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once
in us a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and
trace? This we try in vain to fill with everything around us, seeking in things
that are not there the help we cannot find in those that are, though none can
help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and
immutable object; in other words by God himself.” [Pensées VII(425)]
Isn’t that the same as Augustine’s words from his Confessions, “You have made us for
yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they find rest in you.”
Our heart is slow to realize this. Once more Augustine’s
message, “Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new. Too late I loved you! And behold, you were
within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.” [Confessions, 10:27.]
CONCLUSION
The title of my homily is, “Love is a hole in the heart.”
On the Feast of the Sacred Heart it’s a good prayer to
enter into our heart and the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ.
