On the Sacred Heart and Brave Love
Hello friends,
I hope you’re doing well as we creep towards summer. Here in New York it does feel like a creep—it’s raining and windy and 45 degrees as I write this and it feels more like March than May, but summer will come. I’m busy busy busy with book-writing and prepping for our move to Austin next month, but I love writing these little monthly emails. They’re a nice touchstone for me.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” - C.S. Lewis
In the Catholic Church, the month of June is devoted to the Sacred Heart. This is one the most popular and well-loved devotions of the Catholic faith. The Sacred Heart is exactly what it sounds like. It is Christ’s heart. The image itself feels deeply Catholic--a heart removed from its body, aflame with passion, crowned with thorns, radiating love. Like many of my favorite Catholic devotions, it is very dramatic and very physical. That drama and physicality is the point, though. Because, while the imagery of the Sacred Heart might feel kind of kitschy, it teaches us, with almost painful earnestness, about the way Christ loves us. Historically, the devotion to the Sacred Heart is an outgrowth of devotion to what is believed to be Christ's sacred humanity. It is a reminder of that delicious mystery: while Christ was fully divine, he was also fully human. He had the divine ability to anesthetize the pain of human love, and he chose instead to fully open himself to it. He loves us with a love fully divine, but also a love fully human, and love hurts. It just does. If you can get past the kitsch to the earnestness—if you can peel back the layers of protective irony—it’s a beautiful thing.
When tarot shows up in movies or TV shows, it’s always the easily recognizable cards that show up in the reading, usually played for max spookiness: Death, the Tower, the Devil. And often, the Three of Swords. It shows up because, while it doesn’t have a name that tells you what it means like the major arcana cards do, it’s obvious what it is. A disembodied heart pierced by three swords, it can’t mean anything but heartbreak. Most people don’t view it in a positive light. You look at it, and it does seem like something to avoid, right? Nobody wants their heart to look like that.
You can imagine where I’m going with this. The Three of Swords looks like the Sacred Heart. I think it’s likely that the imagery is connected. The first instance of the Three of Swords looking the way it does now was in the Sola Busca tarot, from the late 15th century. And the Middle Ages were rife with devotion to Jesus’ sacred wounds, including the Sacred Heart. Tarot, being a Renaissance invention, borrows heavily from medieval and Renaissance imagery. When Arthur Waite created the Rider-Waite deck, he borrowed a lot of the imagery from the Sola Busca tarot, including the Three of Swords. I like to think it’s because the wounded heart was a thing that spoke to him, being that he was Catholic.
I won’t argue that the Three of Swords is about heartbreak. It is raw and exposed and vulnerable, and it is difficult to look at for that reason. At least, it is for me. But I do think it takes on a different connotation in the light of Christian theology and the Sacred Heart. As Christians, we are directly called to love one another as Christ loves us. You can look it up, it’s John 13:34. If the Sacred Heart shows us how Christ loves us, then our hearts should look like that too. They should look like the Three of Swords. They should be open. They should be vulnerable. They should be wounded, because the woundedness is the proof of love. If you open your heart, you open it to everything. You open it to profound joy, but you open it to deep suffering as well. You simply cannot have one without the other. This is what I think about every time I pull the Three of Swords. Love hurts, and we have to love anyway, and seen in this way, the Three of Swords becomes not something to avoid but something to actively seek out.
To do this—to love in this way—takes the sort of insane and foolish courage that doesn’t come naturally to me. I talk a big game about this, but I’m not good at it. It’s precisely because I’m not good at it that I have such a devotion to the Sacred Heart. This open-hearted love is the whole point of Christianity (I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say this). I think that, in some ways, one’s vocation in life should be whatever gets you closer to that love. Mine is marriage and motherhood (which isn’t to say I can’t do other things, just that marriage and motherhood peels open my heart). Loving my husband and loving my children brings me very close to that exquisitely painful vulnerability, that willingness to love enough to be hurt by it. I felt a deep anxiety after the births of my two children, and I think it had a lot to do with this fear of sacred and vulnerable love, this fear of what the Sacred Heart asks us to do. The anxiety didn’t really go away, it’s just a constant hum in my mind that raises or lowers in volume according to all kinds of little variables. My husband and I haven’t had more children, and it’s not even necessarily because we don’t want more children. More than anything, it’s because I’m afraid. How much potential wounding can a heart take?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I want my heart to be able to take as much potential wounding as it can, and so I cling to the Sacred Heart, this embarrassingly earnest devotion. I need that constant reminder to be open, to be vulnerable, to allow the woundedness to come in, to let it happen and know that it will hurt. I’m not good at it, not at all, but the alternative is so much worse. The alternative, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, is cowardice, and I’d rather be hurt and brave than safe and faint of heart.