The Heart at the Heart of the World – Review
The Heart at the Heart of the World: Revisioning the Sacred Heart for the Ecozoic Era, by Mary Frohlich. Orbis Books, 2024, ISBN: 9781626985629, 229 pages. RRP £24.99
This book is part of the Orbis Series on Integral Ecology, inspired by the papal encyclical Laudato Si, seeking to bring ecojustice concerns into dialogue with Christian communities, world religions and secular and scientific thought.
The Sacred Heart tradition will not be familiar to many Christians outside the Roman Catholic community and has faded in recent decades, though it retains its official feast day and place in the naming of many churches.
The first part of the book, “Heart Devotion”, provides a helpful overview of the meaning and historical development of the tradition, including contributions of medieval mystics, the 17th century nun Marguerite Marie Alocoque, and 20th century papal teaching. Mary Frohlich is herself steeped in the Sacred Heart tradition having served for decades in an order of nuns carrying that name, and argues that it still has something to offer today:
“… the wager of this book is that we are also in need of a new story that looks through the lens of twenty-first century needs at the stars of Christian revelation and sees them in a new constellation.”
In Part 2 she widens themes from the tradition to include non-human creation, exploring ideas of heart, such as heartfulness, brokenness, vulnerability and suffering, in relation to both theologian and secular writings. For example, Chapter 6, “The Emerging Heart”, investigates evolutionary Christology and the work of Teilhard de Chardin, who she identifies as following the approach closest to her own. She outlines the devotion to the Sacred Heart which he expanded during his life, providing an inspirational vision of the Heart of Christ at the heart of the world and influencing later writers including Thomas Berry and Pope Francis. Frohlich concludes that “God’s Heart is most fully manifested in the entire web of diverse creatures rather than any single type of creature -even human beings.” In Chapter 8, “Community of Heart”’, she engages with Bonhoeffer’s Living in Community and surveys recent attempts to extend his concept of community to the non-human creation. She also highlights Elizabeth Johnson’s reworking of the Communion of Saints along more ecological lines.
Part Three, “Re-visioning” sketches out how themes around the Sacred Heart can help us all to live “heartfully” in the current ecological crisis. Readers may welcome Frohlich’s idea of redefining “vision” away from its mystical sense, towards a way of moving forward, a future vision deriving from the heart rather than from rational thought alone. I found Frohlich’s engagement with the theologian Douglas Christie both insightful and helpful. In his essay “Practising Paradise: Contemplative Awareness and Ecological Renewal” Christie “explores the ancient Christian tradition that paradise is simply the world in its deepest reality.” Frohlich suggests that this can be a starting point for healing the world. “We practice paradise when we open our hearts to accompany and be in community with the web of life, just as it is.’”
This book is an excellent example of how a traditional devotion such as the Sacred Heart can be reworked theologically and spiritually to move beyond individual piety to a way of looking at and engaging with non-human creation and the ecological crisis. Frohich offers the Sacred Heart as an unusual lens through which to look at our situation today and understand the writings of a range of modern ecological thinkers.
Stephen Retout
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