25

June 8

SAINT MARGARET MARY

Imagine we are walking together through a convent that is being suppressed.

We are on the grounds of the Visitation School and Monastery in Mendota Heights, just a thirty-minute drive from North Minneapolis. The monastery buildings here are only fifty years old, but the community itself was founded in 1873, when six pioneering nuns made the journey on the Mississippi from Saint Louis to Saint Paul to start a new Catholic school for girls. When the monastic order outgrew its building in Saint Paul during the early 1960s, forty-five sisters (including a young Sister Katherine and Sister Mary Frances) made the move to the campus in the suburbs of Saint Paul. Some of the statues, paintings, and stained-glass windows came with them.

First, on the entrance drive, do you see it? It’s a white, marble statue of Jesus opening his robes to uncover his chest. His gaze is cast downward, and he points to his heart, which is external

from his body. It’s summer now, but I imagine his poor exposed heart gets covered in freezing rain and snow in winter months.

Now let’s walk through the Visitation School main entrance. There, in that stained-glass window: that’s Jesus with a red, pulsing heart wrapped in a crown of thorns and topped by a flame. Look down—there, a nun in full habit, kneeling before Jesus. Jesus is looking at her and pointing to his heart, which shoots golden rays that land on the nun’s chest.

That’s right: Jesus’ blood-red heart is shooting out sunbeams like a sprinkler.

Here is the last one. Do you see a statue of a nun in full habit, holding a stone tablet with the same heart? That nun is Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French Visitation sister from the seventeenth century, who had mystical visions of Jesus. She is the reason for all this strange religious art of Jesus touching his red, shining heart. The Sacred Heart devotion includes twelve promises, including one to “bless every house in which the picture of my heart shall be exposed and honored,” which partly explains why images of the Sacred Heart are so common.

Sister Mary Frances once told me a story about teaching at the Visitation high school on the feast day of Saint Margaret Mary. She was walking through the campus and overheard the teenage girls making fun of the Sacred Heart.

“It was terrible,” she told me. “To hear them laughing at this devotion, when it’s all about God’s desire for us.”

The Sacred Heart is a tradition, or cult, rooted in Salesian spirituality. The devotion is about Jesus living in our hearts and of God being love. In his writing about prayer, Saint Francis de Sales described it as “heart speaking to heart.” (An alarming aside: Saint Jane de Chantal was so enamored by this idea that she branded the word “Jesus” on her chest with a hot iron. Saint Francis scolded her for it.) At its root, the Sacred Heart language sounds similar to language I encountered in evangelical churches. When I was a child, I was first saved by praying with my mother to ask Jesus into my heart. In church, we sang out to God to “open the eyes of my heart.”

Devotion to the Sacred Heart has a long history in the church, but it was brought into the mainstream by mystic Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Though her image is all over the Visitation School and Monastery now, the sisters didn’t believe Margaret Mary when she first reported her apparitions. For a year and a half, she had visions of Jesus and his heart. Her Mother Superior initially dismissed her stories as hallucinatory. But her confessor, Father Claude de la Colombière, believed her and verified her revelations, helping to popularize the devotional practices within the greater church. The Visitation became the first religious order to formally consecrate themselves to this devotion.

Margaret Mary’s visions were popular, in part, because they countered a heresy that led many Catholics astray. The Jansenists promulgated a belief that humans were fundamentally unworthy of relationship with God. The bar for holiness was so impossibly high that Jansenists discouraged sinners from taking Communion, because who could possibly be pure enough to ingest the body and blood of Christ?

No doubt the Jansenists would have turned purple with rage at the thought of an unbeliever like Josh coming forward for Communion, or even a doubting Protestant like me. But the Sacred Heart visions told Margaret Mary that God deeply loves flawed humans and wants to be loved by them. His heart was full of suffering and pain because so many stopped taking Eucharist. Margaret Mary’s visions declared that God calls all to relationship with him.

In June I went to the monastery in my neighborhood for Mass on the feast day of the Sacred Heart. After reading about Margaret Mary’s visions, I thought about my own mystical experience in the woods that past November. My marriage counselor seemed to think “spiritual singleness” could help empower me in my own religious beliefs and practices apart from Josh, but I was curious about what the nuns might think.

After Mass, as we gathered around the dining room table for muffins and toast, I asked Sister Katherine what she thought of the term “spiritual singleness.” To my surprise, she said she didn’t like it much.

“Being single, especially spiritually, doesn’t resonate with my experience,” she said.

Christianity, she told me, is meant to be experienced in community. It’s not individuals who are the bride of Christ but the church. And monastics like herself, who live in such tight knit groups, have lived and practiced faith communally more than most.

I turned to Sister Karen and Sister Brenda to ask what they thought about “spiritual singleness.”

“That doesn’t resonate with me,” said Sister Brenda.

“I don’t really like it either,” said Sister Karen, laughing and passing the muffin basket.

The nuns hate spiritual singleness. My mind was buzzing with questions, but soon Sister Suzanne tapped me on the shoulder and said, “It’s time.” I followed her down the steep basement stairs for the monthly Visitation Companions meeting.

As I settled into the couch and greeted the others, uncertainties hummed in the background, but my thoughts jolted back to the present when someone mentioned praying a novena.

“Novena?” I said. “What’s that?” I always felt like I was playing catch-up as the Protestant in the room, muddling through saint’s days and liturgies.

Novenas, Sister Susanne explained, are prayers said in cycles of nine. Nine is a holy number because it represents the ninth hour, the hour of Jesus’ death on the cross. It’s among the hours when monastics traditionally pause to pray during the daily office. The ninth hour is characterized by suffering.

Novenas are also associated with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which includes a devotional practice to spend the first Friday of each month in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament (including attending Mass and receiving the Eucharist) for nine consecutive months. Those who complete the novena, according to the twelve promises of the Sacred Heart, “shall not die in [God’s] displeasure.” That promise sounds a lot like a formula for earning one’s salvation. And yet, in an era where many were terrified of God’s wrath and avoided taking Communion, I can see how God could use a promise of blessing from monthly Eucharist as a channel of grace. We all want some reassurance, some certainty.

With all the confusion swirling around in my marriage right now, I want to latch on to the symbolism of nine with both hands. This is our ninth year of marriage. This is the year that I am trying to respect and uphold healthy boundaries, to pick the right battles and let others slide. So often this dance feels like suffering. But in and through all of this, I am dying to myself little by little. I am choosing love over fear; we are both fighting to hold on.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque’s visions led her to a profound understanding of two things: accepting God’s goodness and his cross. I wonder if that’s my calling as well.

At Calvary on Sunday, I glimpse Margaret Mary sneaking up the stairs to the balcony. I follow the sounds of her shuffling footsteps. When I catch up to her, she is standing in the soft light that filters through tall stained-glass windows. There are no images of Jesus in these windows.

As I watch her, my mind returns to “spiritual singleness” and the way the Visitation Sisters so clearly did not connect with it. Maybe my mystic sister Margaret Mary can help me out. She was used to hearing from God in surprising and incongruous ways.

But Margaret Mary isn’t looking at me. She’s standing in front of the windows, and sunlight strikes her face and chest. I can almost hear Jesus speaking to her. Come, see my heart. Come, know my love for you. Don’t be afraid, but instead come and gaze upon my heart.

Brené Brown uses the word wholehearted to describe people who live generously, with both vulnerability and resilience. Her research on wholehearted living includes ten markers, one of which is “cultivating intuition and trusting faith.” Margaret Mary’s visions of Jesus, his heart exposed, out there for anyone to see or touch, seemed to be describing the same thing.

“If you can’t talk to God in prayer,” wrote Saint Francis de Sales, “just let yourself be seen [by God]. Don’t try too hard to do anything else.”

Margaret Mary isn’t going to turn to look at me, I know, but I stay on the balcony and watch her for a while. I realize suddenly that she is standing before these naked windows to let herself be seen. Heart to heart.