Wendy M. Wright is professor of theology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, and past president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. In this prescient and profound paperback, she presents a moving overview of the place of the image of the Sacred Heart in the history and devotional practices of Catholicism. The author notes: "It is also a book about the way I have come to know Jesus, whose heart images our truest heart. That heart is an open, fleshy portal that invites us into the unfathomable lure of a divine love that transcends gender, image, and present experience."
Although Wright admits that the Sacred Heart has lost some of its clout in contemporary American Catholicism, it has a long and deep history evident in shrines, monuments, statues, prints, holy cards, medals, scapulars, jewelry and devotional paraphernalia, liturgy, hymns, and prayers. She discusses the importance of this image to Origen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Gertrude of Helfta, Francis de Sales, John Eudes, Margaret Mary Alacoque, Karl Rahner, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Wright believes that the Sacred Heart tradition gives us "access to some of the richest and most insightful dimensions of Christian spirituality and theology." Among the themes she considers are the heart as embodied in the particular, the heart as a vortex where paradoxes are held in tension, the heart as gentle and humble, and the heart as a milieu of creative suffering. We were quite impressed with the author's bridge between the Sacred Heart and the difficult inner work of nonviolence — disarming the heart.
