Hearts of flesh.

I wrote this some time ago and didn't polish it, and haven't time to do so today, but I thought I'd put it up for its timeliness, as today is the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

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I will take your heart of stone and put a new heart of flesh within you. (Ezekiel 36:26)

And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart. (Luke 2:19)

And a sword shall pierce through your own heart.  (Luke 2:35)

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I am fond of Ezekiel 36:26 and use its language in petition whenever I need to tap into reserves of compassion I don't naturally possess.   I think we all intuitively grasp the meaning of the term "heart" in that passage -- it's not a literal reference to a blood-pumping organ, obviously, and we English speakers are surely familiar with the word "heart" to symbolize emotions, or love, or vitality, or the embedded core of something real or abstract.  And yet...  Are the English associations the ones meant by references to "heart" in Scripture and Tradition?  Why does Mary ponder in her "heart" and not in her mind?  Why does Simeon prophesy "And your own heart" [sometimes "soul" but often "heart"] "a sword shall pierce"? .  Why is there a pious devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary?  What is this "heart?"

Set aside what we moderns know about anatomy and physiology.  The ancients knew this much:  the heart is a bodily organ, necessary for bodily life, an organ in constant motion as long as the body lives.  Even if the "heart" has a symbolic meaning, representing capacity to love, or an inner core of the self in some way -- there is something fleshly about it. 

If so, it's quite different from the mind and from the will.  We believe that even dis-embodied persons -- angels, the souls of the dead, God the Father -- have a mind and a will, and therefore are capable of knowing and of loving. So if it's the mind that knows -- how can Mary ponder the mystery of her son
in her heart?  If love is an act of the will and not a feeling -- why do we represent the Sacred Heart burning with love? 

I think when we speak of a "heart" that can ponder, a "heart" that can love, we are speaking of something natural, embodied, enfleshed.  Often we speak of the flesh as being opposed to things of the spirit.  The flesh, our bodies, tempt us to turn away from spiritual goods and crave selfish things.  But
haven't you noticed that our bodies tempt us to love as well?   We have natural inclinations (for example) to care for our offspring, hormones that surge to reward us for nursing our babies, that overflow into strength and aggression to help us defend them from harm.  Could that be the heart that
loves -- the biochemical, physical mechanisms that urge us to lay down our lives for the ones we are attached to, that urge us to attach to each other in the first place? 

A body that tempts us to love:  could this be the "heart" we mean?

If so... this is a kind of love unknown to the angels -- a kind of love unknown to the universe before the advent of the human race.  God MADE this kind of love,  the love of the human heart; He did not possess it according to God's eternal nature.  Father, Son, Holy Spirit had no heart, no body with which to love as bodies love.

At least not until the Incarnation.

It is interesting to think that upon the Incarnation the Son of God received for the first time a nature through which He could be tempted by Satan in the desert.  Through that nature He could also, for the first time, be tempted by the flesh to love.  God's love is perfect and always was perfect; and yet in
creating human beings He created a kind of love that He did not possess, and that He only made his own upon His conception.  Think of the baby relaxing into his mother's arms; of the frightened toddler fleeing to the safety of his father's side; the grown man in justified anger, driving corruption from his Father's house; oxytocin, cortisol, testosterone; the heart, the body tempted to act in love.

Odd, but true: that even though the Son of God, being eternal, pre-dates the Mother of God, in a sense is His mother's own creator; but Mary's heart pre-dates the Sacred Heart.  All that it is truly came from her.  And so to take a pious formula -- to "flee to the shelter of the Immaculate  Heart of Mary" is to say, Shelter me where you sheltered the Lord; form my heart in the womb where the Sacred Heart learned to beat.

Heart:  the body that tempts us to love.

Comments

[MelanieB]

This is beautiful and profound. I've struggled for a long time to understand the devotions to the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart and they've never really made sense to me. Not really on an intellectual level and certainly not emotionally.

In fact I sort of decided at the beginning of this year that I'd dedicate this year to pondering the Sacred Heart devotion, try to understand what it means for me, what it's calling me to do.

This post has brought me closer to that goal than anything else I've read. I understand cortisol and oxytocin, the bodiliness of mother love and marital love. This is something to ponder: the bodiliness of divine love in the incarnation.

[bearing]

And if the Sacred Heart refers to bodiliness of divine love in the Incarnation, then the Immaculate Heart would refer to the bodiliness of human love as it was meant to be in the original plan.

Thank you Melanie! Sometimes I write dumb things so it's nice to know when they work. I could be pushing it on the oxytocin thing -- I am afraid that as a mother of young children I am forever seeing things in terms of amateur attachment theory (when I'm not seeing them as engineering problems). But I am pretty sure that the essence of Heart in Catholic tradition, and so the mysteries of Immaculate Heart/Sacred Heart, has to do with body, with flesh. "The bodiliness of divine love" in the case of the Sacred Heart; the truth following from that, that the Sacred Heart emerges from Mary's heart (His flesh from her flesh); that the Immaculate Heart is a bodiliness of human love untouched by original sin. I think it may help us come closer to understanding why the immaculateness was necessary, or why it was chosen if not necessary.

[Willa]

Wonderful reflection -- I never really thought about how the "heart" is the center of our body/soul fusion. But it seems true. And the thought that biologically and temporally, the Sacred Heart post-dated the Immaculate Heart of Mary, is also a wonderful thought to ponder.

When pregnant with my children, I used to reflect that just as the primary rhythm of their lives was my heartbeat, so it must have been for Jesus with Mary. It makes one think how good and generous our God is. I noticed that the Gospel reading for this Sunday was about hearts too -- and how Jesus responded to the sinful woman's loving heart more than to the Pharisee's rigorously righteous deeds and words.