June Month of the Sacred Heart

The trees are all covered now—they are thick with their summer leafage. The outline of the hedge is blurred, and the hedge trees no longer stand out spindled against the sky, but have become rich shapes of green. The meadow trees cast wide shadows, in which the cattle sleep, and the waters of the stream are dark with the reflected grey-green of the willows. But the thickest shades are in the woods. The interlacing boughs of the oaks, the denseness of the undergrowth of chestnut and hazel, have woven a tent above a hidden place of secrets and shadows. The woods have a secret heart—dense, green and living; the sunlight filters only in stray drops down into the spurge, while the moss round the trunks of the trees is still damp, though outside in the meadow the sun has long ago drunk up the dew. There is a refuge in the secret places, in the secret heart, of the woods—away from the dust that whirls in the baking lane and has parched the hedgerow, from the sun that glares down on the grass and up from the ponds, from the activity of the fields where the haymakers are at their work. The woods know neither dust nor heat nor toil, and keep their secret places cool and green.

“He came, a man, to a deep heart, even to a secret heart, hiding his Godhead from human view....” So St. Augustine the Bishop quotes the Vulgate in the Lesson from his works which is read at the Office of Tenebrae for Holy Saturday. “He came”—God came, even the eternal Word and Son—“a man”—in our complete human nature, in our flesh—“to a deep heart”—even to the participation of our human emotions, our joys, our sorrows, our fears, our indignations, which have their symbol in the human heart.

It is possible that many people who call themselves orthodox have little conception of our Lord’s humanity beyond the flesh. They believe indeed that he lived, suffered and died in a human body, but limit their conception of a body to flesh, bone and muscle. They ignore the fact that all psychological processes are also bodily, and imagine, somehow, that our Lord’s psychological processes appertained purely to his Godhead and were distinct in some mysterious fashion from the human nature he assumed. Thus we have our modern Docetists, who reduce the Incarnation to an appearance only, since the body is no more than an appearance, without the human mind which moves it. Our Lord assumed the entire man—the inward man of the emotions as well as the outward man of the flesh.

The Eternal, we are told in the theological definition, has attributes but no passions. It is not true to speak of the Most High God as feeling anger or grief or pleasure. Nevertheless by virtue of his condescension we can speak so of the Incarnate Son. For the Christ who humbled himself to our flesh humbled himself also to our emotions. Therefore we are told of him that “he was wroth,” that “he was moved to compassion,” that “he rejoiced in spirit,” that “he was in agony.” All these emotional conditions were a limiting of the Divine Nature, just as was the assuming of the mechanism of the human body. They were part of the lowliness to which the Son of God stooped when he made himself of no reputation.

Here we have one of the great contrasts between good and evil. God limits himself in his creation. He limits himself by the laws of the visible universe, just as the Word was limited by the human nature he assumed. God is continually bowing and humbling himself towards us. The Evil One, on the other hand, exalts himself by means of the material Universe. He has no power except it be given him. We can picture him as keeping himself in power and life through the created universe—drawing his life and strength and activity from that which draws its life and strength and activity from God.... Evil moves and grows in the emotional heart of man, entering by means of his primitive inheritance—the instincts on which his character is built, and which have become channels of evil instead of good owing to the first bad consent of his will. It flows into and corrupts the emotions into which these instincts grow, so that it can be said of the heart of man that it is “desperately wicked.”

But the New Life offers redemption to the human heart—offers us a New Heart with the rest of the New Creation, offers us, in fact, his own Heart as a substitute for ours. “I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh”—even his own Sacred Heart, the human nature of will and emotion which he took of Mary. By that tender stooping of the Infinite to our human joys and sorrows, all our psychological processes are redeemed—poor distressed Psyche too enters the kingdom of God.

“He came a man to a deep heart, even to a human heart, hiding his Godhead from human view.”

But April and Easter have already told us that he did not merely stoop to our humanity—he stooped to raise it. He became one with us “not by the conversion of the Manhood into flesh, but by the taking of the manhood into God.” When he ascended into the heavens, into all the gold and glory of the eternal summer sun, he ascended in our human nature, in our complete nature of emotion and will as well as in out flesh. Our human nature lives in the heaven of heavens, perfect, redeemed—but human in a sense to which our impeded humanity has never yet attained. Only perfect God could become perfect man.

“On the highest throne of the heavens I beheld a man sitting....” He is there, with all our sorrows and our joys, our fears, our indignations. His sympathy for us is not one merely of divine understanding but of divine experience—not in some distant point of history, but now, eternally—since upon the throne of God dwells all the longing, desire, striving, love and anguish of mankind, the human heart which he has redeemed and made his Sacred Heart.

“O, Sacred Heart, our home lies deep in thee” ... all the pain, the fear, the grief, the rapture, the wonder of my human heart, all those emotional stresses that I only half understand and which sometimes threaten to engulf me, all these I can bring home to that Deep Heart, to that Sacred Heart, since for my sake, O passionless Word, you stooped to know the shadows of human emotion, to know joy and sorrow, wrath and compassion, and, stooping, raised them with yourself to your high throne.