CHRISTIANS say many things that they don’t really mean seriously. And a lot of that is to do with the incarnation: the connectedness that, we believe, exists between God and creation, focused and perfected in, but by no means limited to, the person of Jesus Christ. Matter matters, in other words.
Christians are not alone in this. They inherited a rich tradition of meditation on the physical and tangible from Judaism, beginning with the human body. The most important word in the vocabulary of the Old Testament here is leb, most commonly translated “heart”. It appears in its Hebrew form in the Old Testament 598 times, in the form lebab 252 times, and a further eight times in its Aramaic form.
The translation of the word as “heart” can perhaps be a little misleading to contemporary understanding, given as we are to associating the heart primarily, if not exclusively, with emotion and feeling. The brain is for thinking. The biblical tradition is much richer and broader.
A 20th-century theologian, Hans Walter Wolff, has it thus: “[The heart] frequently means the organ of knowledge, with which is associated the will, its plans, decisions and intentions, the consciousness, and a conscious and devoted obedience. . . the Bible primarily views the heart as the centre of the consciously living man [sic]. The essential characteristic that, broadly speaking, dominates the concept is that the heart is called to reason, and especially to hear the word of God” (Anthropology of the Old Testament).
It is important to bear this in mind. John-Francis Friendship has produced here a book about devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a thing that many Anglicans find easy to be superior or dismissive about. (It has to be said that much statuary and art of dubious taste have not helped.)
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and his Mother received a huge boost, courtesy of St Margaret Mary Alacoque, in 17th-century France, in reaction to a more dour and rigorist version of the Christian gospel which was then quite strong. Such devotion had, however, been well and truly locked into Christian spirituality for some time already, emphasising the love and the mercy of God shown in the Passion of Christ: God’s judgement was and is always balanced by God’s love.
Friendship’s writing comes out of a life of spiritual direction and retreat-conducting, and this current volume (I think it may be his best yet) invites the reader to begin to explore the richness and breadth of the heart as an image of love in the Christian tradition. The text is peppered with practical suggestions for prayer and meditation, and repays slow and repeated reading. The Sacred Heart of Jesus comes out of this not as a rather strange or arcane “Roman Catholic” devotion, but, rather, as something to do with both the centre and the fulness of God and creation.
The Revd Peter McGeary is the Vicar of St Mary’s, Cable Street, in east London.
Heart of My Own Heart: Deepening life with Christ
John-Francis Friendship
Canterbury Press £14.99
(978-1-78622-579-5)
Church Times Bookshop £11.99