Word Made Flesh: Meditations of the Saints on the Sacred Heart

The Sacred Heart of Jesus inspires poetry. The writing of the saints is testimony to this fact. The saints may have not written on the Sacred Heart in the form of poetry, but their words, inspired by the Holy Spirit and expressed with great love and devotion, read as if they were. There is longing, desire, peace, joy, love in their words, expressed in such ways as to inspire us to enter into the mystery of the Sacred Heart.

Devotion is a poetical practice; it involves entering into a mystery. Poetry helps us enter into mystery through prayer, just as the psalms do. As St. John Henry Newman says, poetry "demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to be above and beyond us, that we should look up to them, and that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves."

This book is on the mystery of the Sacred Heart as an experience of the harmony of Love, the harmony that transcends the worldly discord and strife that often overwhelms us. The Sacred Heart brings us into right proportion with God, with each other, and with Creation. It is the Instrument that tunes our hearts, the counterpoint to the unpoetical Machine whose din threatens to drown them out.