[REFLECTION] He loved with a human heart

Toward the end of the second session of the Synod on Synodality, Pope Francis released his fourth encyclical titled Dilexit Nos (DN), or He Loved Us in English.

The encyclical is centered on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ. “The heart of Christ, as the symbol of the deepest and most personal source of his love for us, is the very core of the initial preaching of the Gospel. It stands at the origin of our faith, as the wellspring that refreshes and enlivens our Christian beliefs.” (DN 32)

During the presentation of the document, Italian theologian Archbishop Bruno Forte explained that the encyclical expresses “in a profound way the heart and the inspiring motive of the whole ministry and magisterium of Pope Francis.” Furthermore, he adds that the text is “the key to understanding this Pope’s magisterium.”

The encyclical is not merely another spiritual treatise unrelated to the magisterial teachings of the Pope. The Pope himself states in the encyclical that “the present document can help us see that the teaching of the social encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ.” (DN 217) Love, mercy, and works for ecological and social justice are all intrinsically intertwined.

The Pope laments the contemporary situation wherein there seems to be no room for the heart. The heart is devalued in today’s “liquid world,” meaning a fluid, dynamic, and unchanging world, an expression first coined by the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann.

Citing Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis observes that men and women today “find themselves confused and torn apart, almost bereft of an inner principle that can create unity and harmony in their lives and actions.” (DN 9) But the heart can unite our fragmentary world.

Even in anthropology and philosophy, with its concepts of rationalism and of materialism, the tendency is to value human intellect, will, and freedom over the heart due to its imprecision. “Many people feel safer constructing their systems of thought in the more readily controllable domain of intelligence and will.” (DN 10) It’s easier to rationalize than to embrace and be attuned to one’s feelings — an interior experience. Didn’t the prophet Jeremiah proclaim, “More tortuous than anything is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 NABRE)

On the ‘Gold-Crowned Jesus’

Applying this to our relationship with Jesus Christ, our religious attitudes can reify Jesus Christ. If our relationship with Jesus is highly doctrinal and dogmatic, our Christian faith becomes fragmented as we separate Jesus Christ from our humanity. As a result, our image of Jesus becomes that of the “Gold-Crowned Jesus,” first depicted by the Korean Christian writer Kim Chi Ha in her play of the same title. Jesus becomes impersonal and too abstract for us.

This distorted image of Jesus “seems to understand the misery of the people but does not seem to be affected by it. He is beyond the history of the people. It makes no difference whether God had once entered human history or not, if this history does not continue to be a part of his divine life,” elaborates the Indian theologian Jacob Parappally, MSFS.

Criticizing a frozen religion lacking in personal religiosity, Parappally considers the “Gold-Crowned Jesus” as “the Christ of religion” for “he is just another god. He is not the real suffering Jesus of the poor.” Therefore, Jesus Christ is confined to the academic speculations and discourses of theologians and the institutional Church distancing him from human realities.

The Pope doesn’t see the rejection of the humanity of Jesus by trapping him inside our conceptual and sophisticated categories as a problem in the past and concerning theologians only.

As he states in the same encyclical, “in our societies, we are also seeing a proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love, but are new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality.” (DN 87) What is urgently needed as an antidote to this “disembodied spirituality” manifested in the image of the “Gold-Crowned Jesus” is no other than “The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.”

Jesus in his full humanity and divinity has a heart. The Pope beautifully writes:

“The eternal Son of God, in his utter transcendence, chose to love each of us with a human heart. His human emotions became the sacrament of that infinite and endless love. His heart, then, is not merely a symbol for some disembodied spiritual truth. In gazing upon the Lord’s heart, we contemplate a physical reality, his human flesh, which enables him to possess genuine human emotions and feelings, like ourselves, albeit fully transformed by his divine love.” (DN 60)

Almost six decades ago before the publication of this encyclical, Vatican II’s pastoral document titled Gaudium et Spes affirmed with poetic language the real and tangible humanity of Jesus Christ: “For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.”

Rediscovering the Sacred Heart

Lest we neglect and forget the human love of Jesus Christ, Pope Francis is calling us to rediscover and return to the richness and centrality of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “We must never forget that the image of the heart speaks to us of the flesh and of earthly realities. In this way, it points us to the God who wished to become one of us, a part of our history, and a companion on our earthly journey.” (DN 58)

God’s love in Jesus is not abstract. In a fragmentary world, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is capable of uniting unnecessary dichotomies such as sacred and profane, spirituality and world, and most importantly, God and humans.

In promoting the theology and spirituality of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Pope Francis is drinking from the wells of Ignatian spirituality which is fondly called a “spirituality of the heart.” “The spirituality of the Society of Jesus has always proposed an ‘interior knowledge of the Lord in order to love and follow him more fully.’” (DN 144) The grace of the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola is to know Jesus Christ interiorly or, in other words, to gain an intimate “heart knowledge” of Jesus Christ.

At the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius writes this essential principle as a guide in cultivating a Christ-centered spirituality: “It is not much knowing that fills and satisfies the soul, but feeling [sentir] and savoring things internally.” Dean Brackley, SJ, unpacks the nuances and multidimensionality of Ignatius’ use of the Spanish verb sentir: “… sentir means both feeling and understanding. Interior knowledge is experiential knowledge, involving intellect, imagination, will, the ‘affections,’ even action.”

To know Jesus Christ for Ignatius is not just to know facts about him, not just the intellectual study of Christology, but a personal and heart-felt knowledge which transforms one to be a disciple of Jesus after feeling his deep human and divine love.

“The theology underlying the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola is based on ‘affection’ (affectus). The structure of the Exercises assumes a firm and heartfelt desire to ‘rearrange’ one’s life, a desire that in turn provides the strength and the wherewithal to achieve that goal. The rules and the compositions of place that Ignatius furnishes are in the service of something much more important, namely, the mystery of the human heart.” (DN 24)

Encountering Jesus

When I did my Spiritual Exercises during my novitiate at Sacred Heart Novitiate, Novaliches, my retreat master asked me during the Second Week (contemplating the life and mission of Jesus Christ) to pray for the grace to appreciate Jesus’ humanity – to encounter him with my heart.

For so long, I’ve been primarily relating with Jesus Christ through reading theology books and articles. I mistakenly equated “knowing about Christ” with “knowing Christ.” Until I realized in my prayers and reflection that it is not enough to study Jesus Christ who is also fully human. Echoing Pope Francis, I am reminded that “it is essential to realize that our relationship to the Person of Jesus Christ is one of friendship and adoration, drawn by the love represented under the image of his heart.” (DN 49)

Let me end by mentioning the six Jesuit priests of the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Joaquín López y López, and Amando López, who were brutally assassinated by the military government together with their domestic worker Elba Ramos and her 16 year-old daughter Celina Ramos on November 16, 1989.

This year is the 35th anniversary of their martyrdom for the cause of the Reign of God. These Jesuit witnesses who worked in the academe exemplified what it means to know Jesus from the depths of the heart. In spite of their intellectual mission in the university that is indeed heady, they immersed themselves in society, in suffering humanity, touching the hearts of people and bringing the liberating mission of the Gospel.

For the Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino, in his memoir Theology Without Deception, and a fellow Jesuit of UCA who was saved from the assassination since he was out of the country, their fundamental legacy is “they allowed themselves to be drawn and carried strongly by Jesus and by the poor.”

In our world today which devalues the heart, we are all invited to be “drawn and carried strongly” by the divine and human love of Jesus Christ so that we can finally “turn… to the heart of Christ, that core of his being, which is a blazing furnace of divine and human love and the most sublime fulfilment to which humanity can aspire. There, in that heart, we truly come at last to know ourselves and we learn how to love.” (DN 30) – Rappler.com

Kevin Stephon Centeno is a Jesuit scholastic. Born in Oriental Mindoro, he obtained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and spent five years of seminary formation at Saint Augustine Seminary in Calapan City. His views do not represent the position of the entire Society of Jesus.