The Sacred Heart of Jesus

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Today is the feast of the Sacred Heart. This image, more than any other religious rendering I've ever seen, is a large part of the reason for my conversion. The reason is because if you find an authentic rendering, and buy "authentic" I mean one sufficiently charged that it would feel a little unsettling to be looking down on you at dinner time from its framed place above the mantle, it absolutely shakes with passion.

The sacred heart is the most emphatic declaration of "like us in all ways except sin." The heat is cut and aflame with passion, with jealousy, with mourning, with fury, and with despair. This very visceral moment interacts with the love it represents [since, after all, real human hearts (Even Jesus') do not glow in one's chest or spout flames]... without love, there is no point in rendering a heart at all.

If it doesn't seek to provide the theological justifications for resurrection that most scriptural sources focus upon, there is an implicit justification and legitimacy in the sacred heart that I find to be just as regorous and perhaps even more persuasive:

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