The Social Heart by Jeromiah Taylor

I’m not sure what I expected. Being Catholic, I possess what might be too much optimism, and so I’m never entirely convinced that people won’t do the right thing. But despite not being sure of what I expected, I am still heartbroken by the election of Donald Trump.

Let me be clear: I do not look to elected officials for salvation. Neither candidate had the inclination or ability to transform who we really are—that is the work of saints and prophets. But they each told us what they wagered we most wanted to hear. My heart is broken because we most wanted to hear words of revenge, domination, and exclusion.

I believe it matters what we want to hear—it reveals something about our heart. Indeed, something ails our heart when we postpone reckoning with our genuine crises, when we succumb to the temptation of retribution, superiority, and unscrupulousness, when we reserve our bitterest disdain for those most deserving of our generosity. Americans have chosen disavowal, have not even bothered to ask whether we are our brothers’ keepers. Our collective choice to make ourselves “great” again no matter the cost reminds me of Mary Oliver’s assessment of the American heart in her poem “Of the Empire”:

They will say also that our politics was no more
Than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
The heart, and that the heart, in those days,
Was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Oliver’s description of our political heart as small, hard, and mean is reflected in Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Dilexit Nos, “On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Christ.” Francis laments that same heart condition: “[W]e may be tempted to conclude that our world is losing its heart,” he writes. The most important question of every human being, according to Francis, is “do I have a heart?”: that “core” which synthesizes all the components of our personhood into truly fulfilled people. Francis offered the encyclical a mere 12 days before the US general election, and it’s proving to be a timely address. Our situation reminds me of Oliver’s poem, of course, but also of Francis’s more hopeful, universal treatise, where the summation of one particular empire is not of consequence, but rather the summa of Catholic faith—the Word of love made flesh and ever substantially present in our midst until the end of time.

Though much of Dilexit Nos examines the personal dynamics of the heart, the Holy Father adheres to tradition by connecting the personal with the social. He tells us that there is a “political rule” of the heart, under which all of our actions need to be put. The heart alone unites the fragmentary portions of the human person—will, intellect, passion—and when united with the heart of Jesus, when embracing the destiny of each person, which is love, then the heart “proposes” the common good. The heart alone has the power to resist evil, according to Francis’s vision, and puts each person at the “service of the greater good.”

Do societies have hearts? Francis seems to think so, as does Oliver. And the prophet Ezekiel, speaking for the Lord, indicates a sociopolitical heart when he says that God shall give the wayward Israelites “one heart and put a new spirit within them.” The thing that unites the discordant wills, intellects, and passions of societal parts into an integral whole which seeks the greater good—that is the social heart. It follows then that the most important questions for our society to ask itself are “Do we have a heart?” and “What kind do we want to have?” Like I said, our resounding endorsement of Trump’s ceaseless spew grieves me, for it is a dark, sickly response to both questions, whether we asked them of ourselves or not.

In Dilexit Nos Francis repeats one of his favorite anecdotes: his grandmother’s cookies which his family called “lies” because the deep-fried dough was puffy yet hollow. His grandmother Rosa would say, “Like lies, they look big, but are empty inside; they are false, unreal.” Empty, hollow, false, unreal—Francis makes it clear that these words are synonyms for “heartless.” A heartless politics then is a hollow one. A politics interested in looking big, but less interested in accruing substance. The heart is the antidote to hollow politics: the heart insists that persons are the value, the metric, the rule. Not prosperity or safety or success or revival or even progress—but persons. Persons whom by definition depend on other persons for their personhood, without which they become, as Francis puts it, “monads.” A politics of the heart would exist as constantly aware that it has a “center,” that it has a heart that “coexists with other hearts,” and that, as Karl Rahner wrote, the “inmost core of reality is love.”

Francis’s idea of the heart lends a new dimension to the invocation of “all people of good will”—one of Catholicism’s most famous slogans. For in his schema, our wills can only be good if they are at the service of our hearts, which must be united with the Sacred One. Our communities will not be saved by stratagem, but only by a plurality of good will, a social embrace of our vocation to love. Thus, the angel’s blessing and that of our great doxology—that there be “on earth peace to men of good will”—will be realized only to the degree that we accept ourselves and each other as interdependent persons bound with mutual obligations. The prophet Jeremiah ordered the Israelites to circumcise their hearts to the Lord, and I would argue that this is the fittest prescription for Americans today. My prayer for this moment, for myself, for Catholics, for my neighbors, and yes, for all people of good will, is that the Lord’s promise to Ezekiel comes true for us: “And I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.”

This begins with our own individual hearts. To unite our hearts with the Sacred One, we must turn to our central image: the crucifix. No one living with that central image can seriously entertain greatness, for it tells us that God condescends, God accepts limits, God loves beneath himself, God accepts all treatment for the sake of love, of closeness, and of one more chance. Yet it also imposes a daunting moral challenge to all who would seek him, and it instills an alternative, otherworldly value: the value of sacrifice, of smallness, of paradox. In Mark 10 Jesus tells his ambitious disciples that if they want to be the greatest, they must be slaves to all, and he answers James and John’s request for glory with another question: “Can you drink the cup I drink?” Americans: if we want to be great, there is only one way—the person of Jesus Christ, whose body is the font of all love, all mercy; whose company is not great, but meager, painful, and scorned. ♦

Jeromiah Taylor is a Catholic writer from Wichita, Kansas. He works at National Catholic Reporter as an editorial assistant, and at New Ways Ministry as a news contributor. 

Image: Icon of Ezekiel and Habakkuk, workshop of Daniel Chorny and Andrey Rublev, ca. 1420s, Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, Sergiev Posad, Russia