Peace and the Sacred Heart
“I will establish peace in their homes.”
This is one of the promises Jesus made to 17th century French nun St. Margaret Mary Alocoque regarding those who practice devotion to his Sacred Heart. It is a promise that echoes in my head frequently as I go about the business of raising six children amidst the chaos of a two-working-parent home, with the nearly universal family struggles of diapers, sibling squabbles, and childhood illnesses, plus our particular challenges due to neurodivergence and related behavioral issues in the family.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus, Bernadette Carstensen
Peace in the home may not take first place in ultimate importance among the other promises Jesus made to St. Margaret Mary, such as that he would grant devotees “all the graces necessary for their state of life,” but it is one that was a particular motivator for me in deciding to round up the family for Mass the first Friday of every month to make reparation to the Sacred Heart for nine months–which quickly became twelve, then fifteen, and so on, as one thing after another interrupted the completion of our nine-consecutive-month commitment. It was a motivator in inviting our parish priest over to enthrone the Sacred Heart in our living room, at the cost of some stress as I dashed through the house to give it a semblance of order shortly before his arrival (remember: six young kids), simultaneously praying the dinner I was preparing for his visit would not burn (a prayer that was mercifully granted). And the promise of peace has been a motivator as I grasp for the patience to explain once again come Friday night why we have decided to continue our First Friday practice, even now that our Nine First Fridays commitment has been completed.
My husband, Dappled Things publisher Bernardo Aparicio, was the one who first introduced me to the Sacred Heart devotion. He started advocating for enthronement of the Sacred Heart in our home even before I had ever heard of St. Margaret Mary Alocoque and Jesus’s revelation to her of his Sacred Heart and all of the graces that would come from honoring it. I had, though, many times encountered some of the popular images of the Sacred Heart that one comes across, which, if I would have to describe in one word, I would call “sentimental.” It took awhile to find an image we felt comfortable enthroning in our home, finally settling on a carved wooden depiction. The difficulty in finding a suitable rendering of the Sacred Heart, despite the prominent place this devotion plays in the life of so many Catholics, inspired Bernardo to propose the Sacred Heart art competition that Dappled Things ended up launching in collaboration with the Benedict XVI Institute, with the winners and honorable mentions announced two years ago this June.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus, New Jerusalem Studios
Yesterday, in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, the USCCB dedicated the United States to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, on the eve of the solemnity in honor of the Sacred Heart that the Church celebrates today. Again, I hear the promise in my mind, “I will establish peace in their homes.” For a country at war internationally, divided internally by political differences, built on broken families made up of individuals with broken hearts, what a promise this is, and how grateful I am that the U.S. bishops have taken this step to point us to the ultimate source of peace and healing: Christ’s very own heart.
This past January, I joined Ascension Press as Senior Product Manager for Merchandise. On my first day in the office, I started to share with my colleagues my desire to help get the word out about some of the gorgeous, reverent depictions of the Sacred Heart that contemporary artists have made, so that Catholics desiring to deepen their devotion and consecrate their homes would have suitable images with which to do so. I of course had in mind the amazing artists from the Dappled Things Sacred Heart competition, and was delighted that Bernadette Carstensen, one of the prize winners, agreed to work with me to make reproductions of her painting of the Sacred Heart available, alongside a Sacred Heart by Ruth Stricklin of New Jerusalem Studios, whose work I have recently come to know and admire.
The Catholic faith is a sacramental faith, one which recognizes that the life of the soul is very much connected to our bodily experience of this world. Having tangible reminders of God: holy water, crucifixes, images of the Sacred Heart in our living room, draws our minds back to him when our attention would otherwise be absorbed fully in the diapers, the Slack notifications, the burning dinner in the oven. At various seasons, our lives may be noisy and chaotic, or they may be dull and lonely. We experience joy, excitement, frustration, pain, upheaval–the whole spectrum of human life–but God never changes. In Bernadette Carstensen’s Sacred Heart, Jesus’s eyes are not quite symmetrical, a feature common to iconography. One eye gazes transfixed on the viewer, while the other seems to look beyond, to his heavenly Father. Even while we are still living in the world and all that entails, Jesus sees us and invites us into communion with the Trinity, the only source of true peace.