Fr Billy Swan
There is an old Irish toast that goes like this: ‘May you have warm words on a cool evening’. It makes the point that words are spoken with a certain temperature. They can be warm and loving or cold and cruel. Very often, it is not the words themselves that make the difference but the warmth and love with which they are spoken. What matters is not just what we say but the way we say it.
I have just finished reading Pope Francis’ latest encyclical ‘Dilexit Nos…He Loved Us’ which is about the human and diving love of the heart of Jesus Christ. It is a profound meditation on the love of God, expressed through the symbol of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Beautifully written, the encyclical draws from the ancient wisdom of the heart, the symbol of the heart in Scripture, the Fathers of the Church and the saints. With the warm love of Christ it re-frames the whole Christian life as a love affair where God’s heart united to ours is the foundation of everything we believe and burn to share.
Apart from the rich content, one feature of the document that stood out for me was the warmth with which Pope Francis reflects on God’s love that pours forth from the wounded heart of Christ. The words he uses are warm, affectionate and engaging. He reflects on the Sacred Heart being on fire, whose heat and light burn away our coldness and indifference. He draws from St Ignatius of Loyola whose theology of the Spiritual Exercises is based on what he calls ‘affectus’ or affection. He also points to the insight of St Bonaventure who insisted that the knowledge of Christ’s love for us must translate into an affection that changes the heart until it becomes a ‘raging fire’. It is this raging fire of God’s passionate love that Pope Francis wants everyone to experience in the heart.
In our Celtic tradition, many prayers and spiritual writings capture this warmth of divine love and have retained the truth that our faith is a love affair of the heart. Speaking of the conception of Jesus, the poet Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin wrote that: ‘For nine months the master of angels was humbly, dutifully within her, as a furnace of love within her burning’. This is just one example of many writings and insights in agreement with Pope Francis’ call to return to the heart for ‘if the heart is not alive, humankind remains a stranger to himself’ (Dilexit Nos, 12).
St Bernard of Clairvaux once said that the lack of affection in people’s lives is one of the biggest crises of our time. To all of us in the Church right now who have influence on others as parents, grand-parents, priests, catechists, teachers, writers and guides; let us remember that it is not just what we communicate that counts but the warmth and love towards others with which we do so. May our words and our witness be heart-warming – not just on cool evenings but always.
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