Behold This Heart: An Invitation into Cosmic Contemplation

Every image of the Sacred Heart is familiar: the flames, the thorns, the pierced and burning heart of Christ. We see it on prayer cards, in statues and paintings, and recognize immediately what it means. To hear the words “Behold this heart, that so loved men” seems logical and proper. What more fitting image of Christ’s love than His pierced heart, on fire with divine love for creation? There is no better singular representation of the reality of both the Cross and Easter.

Like the crucifix, our desire to bring the Sacred Heart into our homes and lives, to devote ourselves to it, necessitates compromise; we would no more erect a scale model of a crucifix than we would have an anatomically accurate heart on our mantle. Like the crucifix, a conditional symbolism is accepted which is neither imprudent nor improper. It is merely the reality that man can imitate the mystical to a limited degree, and that a humble attempt at devotion is better than none.

We know what the crucifix around our neck and above our doorway represents. Even though they are clean and polished, they are not sterile. The absence of God’s blood does not diminish either the symbol or the reality of what it depicts.

Yet as I studied the Sacred Heart and its images and various avenues of devotion to it, I could not help but feel that, while I was repeating the words, “Behold this heart, that so loved men,” they were little more than sterile syllables. I sensed that there was more than the physical necessity and emotional weight the heart represented.

When I was encouraged to explore devotion to the Sacred Heart, I knew nothing about it apart from the images I had often seen. I read books about it and studied saints with particular devotion to it. Yet I still did not understand it. It remained a kind of academic entity, something I had knowledge of but limited experience with.

If the crucifix recalled the horror of Christ’s death and the glory of His resurrection, what did the Sacred Heart point toward? What was I missing that God wanted me to see?

I knew I would not find the answers in books or any insight I might find on my own. As I have done so many times before, I brought these questions before the Lord in Adoration.

In the quiet chapel, God offered an image to contemplate. It was not an answer to write down but a truth to enter into.

I saw the earth from a distance, the size of an orange. Behind it, enormous, the Sacred Heart. There was no space it did not occupy, no room for anything else. It touched all, was all.

“Behold this heart…”

In beholding it, a flash of Scripture:

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col. 1:16-17)

Here was God’s great heart, not a consoling image, not a symbol of His sympathy or shared humanity, but something cosmic. The devotion had never asked me to behold a feeling. It had asked me to behold the love by which everything that exists continues to exist, the burning center that holds the atoms and the galaxies, the living and the dead, in being.

I was not contemplating Jesus’ fist-sized human heart but the heart that holds all things together.

The function of the images, the purpose of the devotion, is not a theological treatise but another avenue to know and experience God. The prayer cards are not wrong. The statues are not insufficient. They are small windows, and windows are not meant to contain the view. They only frame it, giving us somewhere to place our eyes until we can bear to look more fully.

A year has passed, and the image still arrives unbidden. It returns when I do not expect or look for it, enormous and occupying all things, and I pause. I pause because the words are no longer sterile. It is not a quaint devotion, but an invitation to remember and behold something we cannot completely comprehend.

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash