How to Have a Sacred Heart
"For a party that calls themselves Christian, they’re doing a dreadful job of imitating Christ. What are we to do?" — a Hartford Catholic Worker commits to the Revolution of the Heart.
Today’s essay by Jacqueline Allen-Douçot meditates upon Pope Francis’ 2024 encyclical, Dilexit Nos—”He Loved Us”—on the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Dorothy Day loved to speak of the Catholic Worker’s revolution as a “revolution of the heart.” In a moment that calls for great courage and insight and solidarity with our neighbor, Jackie reminds us in her essay, that healing our neighbors’ wounds—or reconstructing the social order begins by healing the bitterness or woundedness in our own hearts: making them whole—that is, holy, or sacred.
Jackie’s essay originally appeared in the Hartford Catholic Worker’s Lent/Easter 2025 newsletter, and appears in Roundtable with her permission.
I encourage you to read the whole newsletter, and check out the Hartford Catholic Worker’s website to learn more about the work of loving their neighbor that their community is doing in Hartford.
Renée
“Our Hearts are Burning” for Justice
by Jacqueline Allen-Douçot
In the weeks since the election, I have really been struggling with deep despair over what is happening in our country. It is hard to reckon with the “inner life” of my heart.
I found myself angry and bitter about my fellow Americans. When I’d see a Trump sign in a yard, I felt a rage burning in my heart. I had a lot of judgmental anger and fear and a good dose of self-righteousness in there. It felt like darkness and despair were having the last word. My heart broke for the folks who were already suffering under the Biden administration. For the poor, the undocumented, the prisoner/ex-prisoner, the mentally ill, the homeless, the transgendered, the addicted, the differently-abled, life in America has always been filled with brutality and suffering. It looks like for them it will only be getting worse.
It is the time’s discipline to look at what is happening in our name and with our tax dollars and take a stand. Governments are huge and hard to fight, especially ones that are controlled by billionaires and corporations. When journalists are murdered in Gaza with no outcry and genocide is not only overlooked but funded, it is difficult to find the collective Soul of our nation.
Will Ukraine now suffer invasion from American corporations profiting from mineral rights or will it be further invaded? Our education system is under siege to censor history and ban books. The media seems to exist primarily to build up our desires to escape, to value things over people and to avoid critical thinking. The White House will now choose who gets to report from inside. For a party that calls themselves Christian, they’re doing a dreadful job of imitating Christ.
What are we to do? For me, I need to deal with my own heart first. I must heal my inner darkness to avoid casting shade on others. Only then can I act collectively to heal our world. We must feel our feelings. They are—and they are not right or wrong. What we do with them is a different story. I want to make the world a better place. I have good reasons for my bitter feelings, but they will not help with that work.
I have been buoyed up by Pope Francis’ encyclical on The Sacred Heart. It speaks of bringing our own hearts to hold Christ’s Sacred Heart within us. It dovetails nicely with Dorothy Day’s proclamation that “the only solution is LOVE.” In The Sacred Heart of the World by David Richo, he says becoming one with the Sacred Heart allows us to
“increase our capacity to forgive rather than retaliate when others fail us. Your Heart is in me, so even when my heart becomes dark in purpose or action, you have not given up on me.”
Can we believe this is true for all people? I’ve been praying every day for the conversion of heart in the President and rulers of this nation and all nations… as we are all one.
I have been working on my personal discipline to spend time in silence and contemplative prayer and to plot ways to resist institutionalized hatred and racism. For me, it begins and ends with recognizing that God’s Sacred Heart beats within mine. That Holy ‘WE’ gives me the strength to continue to love and hope in the face of fear, greed, and darkness.
During Lent I think often of Christ in Gethsemane trying to do God’s will, yet fearing the terrors to come. It was living in the heart of the Creator that allowed Christ to face his torture and death. Facing that darkness brought about the Resurrection.
I believe we are all called to—in the words of poet Wendell Berry—“practice resurrection”. It is our work to continue building the Beloved Community making sure that community reflects all of God’s creation, not just the wealthy white part.
This means fighting for the rights of all human beings to live in peace. It means refusing to follow policies that deny the dignity of the disabled, the immigrant, the young, the old, the non-white, or the non-American. We cannot abandon the poor, whom Christ held dearest in His heart. We cannot spend over $872 billion on the military this year while so many need food, shelter, and medical treatment.
Having a Sacred Heart means opening yourself to the grace of other people. Having a Sacred Heart means trusting that God will take care of us no matter what happens. We know this because we will be taking care of each other in God’s name. The Sacred Heart calls us to be Eucharist to each other.
Here at the Worker, we try to love our neighbors: we cook and feed kids, do art, teach manners and love and conflict resolution to each other. We make and clean up lots of messes, and thanks be to God for Chaz, Timmy, Anthony, Catherine, and Sasean—Green House kids all grown up—for helping us keep up with it. We hand out food bags. We share gifts from kind people, and we build community with students from Northwest Catholic, University of Hartford, and University of Connecticut. We recognize that God works through all people.
We try to love our enemies, but even harder perhaps because of their proximity, we try to love people who don’t believe what we do. We are blessed to spend time with the poor and the refugee, because knowing them as human beings, with names, families and their own Sacred Hearts, they teach us better ways to be human.
We laugh because the children who come show us their hearts filled with joy, despite the grinding racism and poverty that surrounds them. We weep when we hear news of one of our community/family suffering from mental health issues, or a car accident, or imprisonment, or cancer. Instead of despairing we choose loving.
Please read He Loved Us, by Pope Francis. Here are some excerpts:
“If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter.
[…]
Yet living as we do in an age of superficiality, rushing frantically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart.
[…]
The failure to make room for the heart, as distinct from our human powers and passions viewed in isolation from one another, has resulted in a stunting of the idea of a personal centre, in which love, in the end, is the one reality that can unify all the others.”
Jacqueline Allen-Duçot is an artist and member of the Hartford Catholic Worker. You can read their full Lent/Easter 2025 newsletter here. Learn more about the Hartford Catholic Worker and donate to support their work here.
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