Growing into the Sacred Heart

Catholic art is wonderful. Obviously. But when I was kid some of it freaked me out in a big way.

I grew up in a "cozy" railroad-style apartment. You entered on one side of the living room. To the left were the kitchen and bathroom; to the right, three connecting bedrooms: my grandmother, then me and my brother, and then my mother and sister sharing a foldout in “the last room in” which doubled as extra sitting space during family parties.

Yep. We were living large. Where was Dad? By that time, he had taken up residence at the Catholic cemetery just outside of town—the closest Mom ever got him to the suburbs. We moved to the railroad rooms shortly after he passed.

What does any of that have to do with Catholic art? To get from one end of the apartment to the other, you had to go through my grandmother’s room, which featured a lavishly dressed Infant of Prague with a Twilight Zone stare and a Sacred Heart image with eyes that seemed to follow me whenever I passed by. Both sent my over-active childhood imagination reeling—and I had to walk through that room a LOT. Thinking about it still makes me shiver a little.

The Sacred Heart is patient

Fast-forward many years to a Franciscan University of Steubenville Men’s Conference I attended with my brother-in-law. Somebody, I don’t recall who, did a wonderful presentation on the Sacred Heart, and I went home determined—childhood freak-outs not withstanding—to have a Sacred Heart image hanging in my home. Decades after darting through Granny's room, trying not to make eye contact with Jesus, the Sacred Heart finally got through to me.

Getting a Sacred Heart image wasn't a hard sell for my wife (whose photograph is displayed with affection in Catholic gift shops nationwide). So we looked around and settled on a lovely image from the EWTN Catalogue (while shopping, I came across the same image my grandmother had and took a hard pass).

The Sacred Heart is powerful

Fast-forward even more years to an evening where I sat watching one of my all-time favorite bands, Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives, on the cleverly named “Marty Stuart Show.” After the band performed a spiritual, the camera cross-faded to a Sacred Heart image hanging on the show’s set. Neither Marty nor anyone else in the band is Catholic, which made me marvel at such a Catholic image being the go-to for the band's religious numbers—episode after episode, that picture followed every Christian song.

As far as I know, the Sacred Heart was the only rendering of Jesus the show ever used. Though a uniquely Catholic devotion, it was featured on a TV show coming out of Nashville, a town not known for it papistry. The powerful message of that image reached beyond some set designer's unfamiliarity with the devotion, demonstrating that the art that has sprung up around the Sacred Heart speaks a universal truth to Christians everywhere: Jesus’ heart burns for us with a love we can only begin to imagine.

The Sacred Heart is passionate

As part of my ongoing effort to interest Catholics in singing happily about the Faith outside of Mass (just as we sing about all sorts of other things far less important), I wrote a song with Marty and the boys in mind, hoping it might be a way to evangelize—inside and outside Catholicism—about the passion contained in Our Lord’s heart and how our lives could be changed by allowing even the smallest ember of it into our own.

In this month of the Sacred Heart, I’d like to share it with you. The song is here. The lyric video is here.