There is a heartless Christ outside his door. A long story explains how he got there. He is made of hand tooled copper over a meter tall from the waist up, a representation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, his hands lifted up to Heaven, as if to lead his children there, as if offering them and himself to the Father, saying: “Here are my children whom you have saved.”
It is meant to encapsulate inside those thoughts a story of the passion and resurrection. He exhibited the image at a public place over a year ago. And then, one cold rainy morning, somebody stole its heart. It was an unimaginable occurrence for him. Even if it seemed divine comedy when he told his friends how he was disheartened by all these.
It was a beautiful heart despite the mixed reactions it derived. Not everyone loved it. And when it was lost, he wondered if it was really some random event not much different from a cellphone-snatching; Or, if it was meant to test him in a sense both of resolve and faith. He is like that. He wonders if there is a divine logic behind everything that happens. He can not be absolutely sure.
A heartless Christ suggests to him the nature of the world such as it becomes, the way the news describe it for us. What other words describe it better than heartless and disheartened? He cannot help wondering if the image of a heartless Christ contributes to it.
If only to be on the safe side, he resolved to replace the stolen heart. He has procrastinated on it a year too long. After writing this, he will take his pencils and sketchpad to make his studies. He has a year’s worth of random ideas in his head already. But no vision yet. We must excuse him for that. It is a difficult question he must try to answer: What should the Savior’s heart look like if the stolen one was not good enough? What would it contain if the stolen one did not contain enough?
There are standard icons, of course. They have been there for hundreds of years. But he wants his heart to stand for the here and now looking into the years ahead. As always, he starts from the core-substance, the reading of the fixed narrative.
There is nothing in the Holy Book to tell us what Jesus’ heart looks like. We have to read the narratives as if they are prophetic poetry, describing less the ancient days than the here and now.
That seems the essence of the Holy Bible. Most of us read it that way. We are not trapped in a previous time and place.
We know the story of Jesus unfolds here for us even now. He walks among us. What is in his heart must also be in ours.
If we could only feel it who in our prayers say to ourselves and to the Father:
“Here is the world; here, my family; here, my children; here, I; whom I try to save as best I can. Given my limitations as a human being. Given the world as it is. Given my own ignorance of the examples you set for me. Given that, more than anyone else, it is I who needs most your saving.”
Christ’s true heart would have to be all of that in perfect form. It must have to be the classical ideal of that conception, the perfect essence of it. What Plato called in principle, “the horse-ness of the horse” must have to translate in this case to the Sacred Heart-ness of the Sacred Heart. To capture that, at the onset, is a clear impossibility.
He will strive instead for a simpler, more humble heart; Christ’s heart as only a person who is imperfect and sinful can conceive it. It would have to be a just and gentle heart. It would have to be forgiving even of thieves.
It would have to be every good teacher’s heart since Christ was his children’s best teacher.
It would have to be the heart of every lonely person, every man or woman who ever loved, every mother and father, every child, every animal, every plant, every planet, every star, every heart who ever died, and every heart who was ever alive and knew joy.
The Modernist Immanuel Kant had a theory he called the Form of Purpose. In this particular case he takes it to mean: If he keeps all these in his heart and mind while he conceives and hammers the shape of his heart, it will in the end and in that way contain all of these inside the abstract of its forms.
Inside the limits of his faith he prays it will be even more than that.
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