ABSTRACT
On December 27, 1673, the feast of John the Evangelist, Margaret Mary Alacoque, a young professed religious of the Visitation convent in Paray-le-Monial, France, while praying before the Blessed Sacrament, was initiated into loving intimacy with Christ through the experience of an exchange of hearts. She narrated the incident in this manner: Once when I was before the blessed sacrament, (I had found a little space of time, though the work I had been given left me little), I was suddenly completely surrounded by the divine presence. It was so intense I lost my sense of who and where I was. I abandoned myself to the Spirit, yielding my heart to the power of his love. He made me rest for a long time on his divine breast where he showed me the marvels of his love and the unspeakable secrets of his sacred heart that had always been hidden before. He opened them to me there for the first time, in such a real and tangible way. Even though I am always afraid of deceiving myself about what I say happens inside me, I could not doubt what was happening because of the effects that the grace produced in me. This is what seemed to me to happen:He said to me "My divine heart is so impassioned with love for humanity, and for you especially, it cannot contain the flames of its burning charity inside. It must spread them through you, and show itself to humanity so they may be enriched by the precious treasures that I share with you, treasures which have all the sanctifying and saving graces needed to draw them back from the abyss of destruction.I have chosen you as an abyss of unworthiness and ignorance to accomplish this great work so that everything will be done by me."Afterwards, he asked for my heart. I begged him to take it and he did, placing it in his own adorable heart. He let me see it there like a little atom consumed in a burning furnace. Then he returned it to me
The Embodied God The Christian religion has a long and venerable tradition of imaging the divine in bodily form. At the core of this tradition, of course, is the theological assertion of the incarnation-that God became human. Parallel to this theological teaching runs the long-standing practice of lavishly depicting the embodied God-as a baby in the manger, being baptised in the Jordan and, most especially, suffering and dying upon the cross. This practice is not simply literary or artistic. It is performative as well. Within the contemplative/ meditative streams of Christian life that might well be termed "embodied mysticism." Devotees have not only gazed upon God's embodiment, they have entered that body in prayer and explored it. Especially have they enjoyed an intimacy with the body's apertures, the wounds, and with the divine heart revealed by entry into those wounds. Furthermore, Christian practitioners have affirmed that the divine body can be manifest in their own bodies. They can
become the wounded body. The wounds, indeed the heart of God itself, can take fleshy form in them once more.Margaret Mary's experienced "exchange of hearts" did not take place in a vacuum. It occurred within a rich and historically conditioned symbolic context. As a devout Roman Catholic of late seventeenth-century France, she was steeped in modes of prayer that encouraged a radical participation with the suffering of Jesus. The crucifixion, since the church's inception, had been the paradox upon which believers had dwelt to ascertain ultimate meaning. But in the medieval era Christians desired more and more to conform their lives to the crucified in a manner that can be described as literal affective participation.2 Certainly, the martyrs of previous centuries had died to become part of the victory over death ushered in by the Christ event, and the desert ascetics and monastics had undertaken a life of ascetic martyrdom in conformity with Christ. But a Francis of Assisi, with his guerilla theatre sensibilities, "acting out" the Christ event in his own flesh, took imitation of Christ to extraordinary lengths. His imitation was more than interior transformation of character, more than a disciplining of the passions, more than the adoption of a counter-cultural lifestyle. It was a theatrical embodiment, an enfleshing of God revealed as the poor, crucified Christ. This Christian spirituality of the high Middle Ages has been described as highly affective, somatic and participatory.3 And so it was. It was also increasingly personal and narrative in character. The Christ story was explored not simply as historical fact or theological truth or metaphor but as an unfolding drama to which the collective Christian imagination supplied vivid theatrical details. Spiritual followers of Christ lived into this dramatic scenerio. Francis was only one example. And his reception of the stigmata, his personal somatic realization of the wounds of his beloved Lord, was a logical outcome of a life given over to the absorption and expression of the truths of the crucified one.Scholars have noted that this affective, somatic spirituality was, Francis notwithstanding, primarily a woman's spirituality.4 The annals of the spiritual tradition from this period are full of striking female figures who embodied, "acted out", or were joined in union to the person of the crucified Lord. The
motifs and lived expressions of this embodiment were varied-stigmata, mystical marriages, intensely affective emotions and cruciform illnesses.Beyond the medieval era, this tradition of passionate, somatic identification survived in womens’ religious communities. The vivid experience of bodily and mental anguish became more and more constitutive of the unitive event. Suffering, particularly as a sacrificial victim, became a primary category through which knowledge and intimacy with God was cultivated.5 Moreover, the suffering participant became part of the redemptive movement unleashed in the Christ event. The sufferer became an alter-Christus whose own pain was efficacious. Suffering was redemptive for both self and others. By the seventeenth century, the spirituality often discovered in cloistered women's communities was of this sort. Margaret Mary Alacoque may be viewed as a direct descendent of this tradition.6 The Heart o f God Interwoven with this spirituality of the suffering body was the image of God's sacred heart. Seen in retrospect, the cumulative prayer of the Christian community, through its centuries long gazing upon the crucified body, i.e. its "reading" of the text of that body, moved more and more inward and, finally entering the body, discovered the definitive text-the heart. For the heart was known to be the core of the person, the central integrating and energizing principle from which thought, feeling and action flow. To know the heart was thus to know the foundational truth of the person. To know the heart of Jesus was to become intimate with the ultimate mystery of God.The reading of the body-text which yielded the ultimate mystery of the heart had begun in the patristic era with an allegorical reading of the pierced side and the ecclesial fountain of life that issued from it. In the early medieval era, the community probed the wounds and arrived finally at the heart where the depth of divine love was discemable. The side-wound especially became an object of cultic devotion. It became the symbol par excellence of the intimate loving relationship between creator and creatures. The sacrifice on the Cross more and more came to be understood as an expression of profound love so that the devotee in praying to the wounds, particularly the side-wound which was conceptualized as the entryway to the heart, experienced Love itself. The
flowing fountain issuing from the side wound was both eucharistic and baptismal.The mystical tradition of the high Middle Ages entered even more boldly into the heart, and in its intensely personal, affective, somatic style, sought identification with that heart. Through the lens of the Song of Songs the medieval world gave articulation to a love affair between the heart of Jesus and the heart of the mystic spouse. The one who desired union would drink from the opened side, seek intimacy inside the refuge of the wound, and be incorporated into God's body through the bleeding portal portal.Devotion to the wounds and the heart was associated with the great names of the Cistercian renewal, with the Benedictines, the mendicant orders and the Carthusians. By the thirteenth century women in the circle of the Rhineland Cistercian monastery of Helfta, like Gertrude the Great and Mechtilde of Hackborn, were recording visions of Christ appearing to reveal his Heart. Fourteenth century members of the extended Dominican family, like Henry Suso and Catherine of Siena, gave eloquent theological and mystical expression to their attraction to the Lord's wounded body.7 With the dawn of the modem era, the loving, virtuous heart had become a model for emulation and the interior transformation of the human heart. By the seventeenth century, the Catholic community was deep within the body, enraptured by the varied rich messages it "read" on Jesus' heart.One variant of this enraptured gaze was the visionary tradition of the "exchange of hearts." Within the stream of female visionary history there are a number of recorded instances of such an "exchange of hearts" taking place. Dorothy of Montau, Lutgard of Trond, Catherine of Siena, Catherine de Ricci and Jeanne Deleloe are numbered in this group.8 The details of each of these visionary and/or mystical experiences differs according to the prevailing spirituality of the era, region, and individual visionary. But all of these accounts point to an experience of radical experiential participation in the Christ event as it is focused on the heart of the crucified and the experience of loving conformity to or union with his suffering life. This participation is understood to be not only personally edifying but to be initiated by God for a greater good. God, as it were, continues the redemptive work encoded in the body of the crucified through the bodies of the women visionaries, the very core of whose beings-the heart-has been replaced or inhabited or regenerated by the heart
of God. Margaret Mary’s experience is certainly shaped by this ongoing tradition.The devotional and visual environment in which the Visitandine lived encouraged her in this spirituality. A dense tapestry of religious symbols and practices functioned together almost alchemically to transmute the Visitandine's ideational, affective, volitional and somatic reality. She was surrounded by iconographic representations of God’s heart in the form of devotional images and jewelry, she was heir to a narrative devotional tradition that provided previous examples of the exchange of divine and human hearts, she was trained in ascetic disciplines that created the conditions for the radical interior and exterior transmutation to occur and she was schooled in a prayer tradition designed to encourage imitation, in fact to produce literal embodied participation with the suffering Jesus.9In a focused way, the Salesian spiritual tradition of which Margaret Mary was a part was saturated with verbal and visual symbolism that could encourage such participation. Her religious community, the Visitation, had been co-founded by Francis de Sales (hence the term Salesian) and Jane de Chantal at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Although formal devotion to the heart of Jesus as it was promulgated after the apparitions that Margaret Mary received was not a part of early Visitation practice, nevertheless the language of "heart to heart" intimacy with God and neighbor was prominant in that tradition.10 The Salesian world was a world of interconnected hearts-the hearts of God and humankind bridged by the crucified heart of Jesus. Indeed, in the writings of founder de Sales are found exhortations to those who pray to take on, as it were, the heart of God.
