Popular Piety: A Vision of the Sacred Heart

About a year ago, I took one of my many trips to Utah, which has become my go-to vacation spot. I have a ton of friends out there, including one of my best friends. She’s your typical California hippie, open to anything spiritually. Lately, she’d been going to a Christian reiki healer who, supposedly, really knew what she was doing.

I’m not a spiritual prude. I’m a self-described Midwestern Lumberjack mystic, but I also nurture a pretty severe skeptic streak. I’m a bit suspicious of weird practices, like our recent interview with the Cajun Faith healer. Maybe because I was trained by Scottish Presbyterians and hung out with atheists for five years. Whatever it is, I’m not inclined to believe, even if someone (like my friend) testifies. I want to believe, but I need to see for myself.

Still, I love and trust my friend, so I agreed to go. When we got to the healer’s house, I was struck by how, well, domestic Kara seemed, with her minivan in the driveway and her comfortable clothes. I was a little disappointed because I wanted a full on earth mother dressed in a hippie costume. She turned out to be a very lovely and calm person.  She put me at ease and led me to her “work” room, as she called it, inviting my friend to sit in with us.

After some questions, she asked me to lay on the table and get comfortable. My friend set at my left by my feet and I let myself relax. At the very least, I thought, I might fall asleep and get a much needed nap. It had been a long week.

She explained to me that the body has seven energy centers where our chakras reside. I nodded my head, pretending to understand what she was saying. The inner skeptic screamed like a banshee and blocked out most of the information.

Kara told me she would lay her hands on each center and do clearing work. She asked me to close my eyes and envision the thing that was most precious to me. At first, I tried to picture Jesus in my head.  But for some reason,  I’ve always had a hard time picturing Jesus, because I always try to be accurate, and all my pictures of first century Jewish Jesus seemed vaguely anti-Semitic. A frustrating situation, until an idea popped into my head.

“Do you have the item you want to focus on?”

I nodded, “Yeah, its the-”

She held up her hand. “I don’t want to know right now. This is just for you.”

So, as she prayed to Jesus, I pictured the Sacred Heart of Jesus. A lot of Catholic Popular Piety has some Protestant overlap, but the Sacred Heart has no comparable cousin. It’s a thing all its own. No one is exactly sure when devotion to the Sacred Heart started, although most church historians think it originated around the 12 and 13 century, when a devotion to Christ’s sacred wounds started to appear all over Europe. The devotion exploded in popularity when St. Margaret Mary Alacoque had a series of intense visions that led to the 17th Jesuits embracing the practice.

Everyone agrees, however, it was a very personal devotion found among the mystics.

In most depictions, it’s a heart on fire, wrapped in a crown of thorns that pierces the surface of the heart. Each wound drips blood, representing Christ’s suffering for us. Divine light shimmers around it. In some depictions, light even pours from the wounds.

Before this visit to the energy healer, I never had a devotion to the Sacred Heart. It seemed at least to me, something old Catholic ladies or ultra mystical weirdos talked a lot about. The whole thing seemed full of maudlin sentimentality to me.

But, as I lay on that table, relaxing, trying to picture the Sacred Heart, I felt my body warm, as if someone had turned on a tanning bed. My inner vision focused, and I actually saw the Sacred Heart. And no, I don’t mean I saw an image in my head or in my imagination. I saw a dark red heart beating slowly, pierced each time it contracted. Beams of white energy poured out of the wounds, and I heard a faint groaning. My whole body felt massaged by the heat of the light.

“Ohhh … do you feel that?” Kara asked. “That’s God’s love, do you feel it? Wow.”

I’d said nothing and had no physical reaction. My eyes were closed the entire time. But the moment she said that, I burst into tears, something I rarely do. My ex-wife says I only cried at the birth of my children. The light grew intense, radiating heat, filling the room. My friend told me later that both she and Kara wept. I didn’t know. I babbled out a prayer but can’t remember what I said.

When I got up from the table, I felt like jello, relaxed, exhausted and ready to eat a burrito the size of my very large head. When I sat up, they both had stunned looks on their faces. Kara half-smiled and said, “Well, that was interesting.”

“Yeah. Um, what about those negative bonds?” My friend had told me about them, about how evil or messed up people could get their hooks in you.

She laughed. “Do you really think anything bad could withstand that blast of God’s love?”

“So, that kind of thing happens all the time, right?” I asked, waiting for my inner skeptic to kick in. Part of me wanted her to say “all the time” so I could dismiss what happened to me.

She shook her head and stared at me as if I was a rare museum relic. “Hardly ever, Jonathan. Hardly ever. Ask Jo, I’ve worked on her for hours. Nothing like this.”

After that day, my devotion to the Sacred Heart has been almost obsessive. I have a Sacred Heart altar on my desk (see the pic above). I’ve collect anything with the Sacred Heart on it, and it seems I see it wherever I go. I’d always been drawn to the Jesuits, and St. Francis de Sales was one of my confirmation saints. The Jesuits love the Sacred Heart so much they put it in their logo. The heart had always been all around me, I just didn’t see it.

To be honest, it’s a disturbing image: a beating heart eternally pierced by thorns. But, then, that’s exactly how God made the world. As Bob Dylan once said, “Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain.” That, really, is the story of not just the Catholic life, but LIFE. Suffering is part of the deal, no matter how hard we try to wish it away. It either makes us more loving, kinder and understanding, or it makes us bitter and angry.

I don’t expect anyone to believe me. Nor am I sure that Reiki healing should be a regular practice for anyone. I’m sure most Christians out there are skeptical of what I just wrote. Hell, I’m pretty skeptical of it. But I only know what I saw, what I felt. I know that whatever I experienced was powerful enough to affect my friends so that they cried and afterwards felt drained. God will work as He decides to work, you know, like using Astrology to guide the Magos (wisemen) to Jesus.

In any case, I’m now an avowed devotee to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a symbol of His suffering love. That either makes me a weirdo or an old blue haired Catholic lady. To be truthful, that’s not a bad place to be.