The heart is a central symbol of both Judaism and Christianity. The ancients believed that the heart, rather than the brain, was the locus of our thought. Cerebral thinking in the modern sense was unknown to them. Thoughts, for them, were passionate ideas. “A heart to know thee,” as Eugene Cuskelly put it in his Summa of the Spiritual Life. In the case of Christianity, love of God, and in particular of the Risen Lord Jesus, is the core of a profound wisdom. Once again, the heart, with its capacity to feel, is the locus of Christian thought.
In St Philip Neri, the heart is also the home of the Holy Spirit within us. Love is linked to the Holy Spirit and the joy that He brings. Philip would pray in the catacombs at night. While he was praying on the eve of Pentecost, he experienced the Holy Spirit entering him as a globe of fire, coming to rest within his heart. So intense was the joy it brought him, that he was barely able to endure it. He became the supreme saint of the Holy Spirit, the saint of joy par excellence, whose motto, from Psalm 100, was “Serve the Lord with gladness.”
At moments of intensity, his heartbeat would thunder, and such was the heat it generated, according to contemporary witnesses, that even in winter he kept his windows open. It was also said by contemporaries that, when disturbed people were pressed against his chest, they experienced comfort and peace. When he died, a post-mortem examination revealed that his heart had enlarged to twice its normal size, and that several ribs had burst outward in order to accommodate it. On the coat-of-arms of many Oratories is a flaming heart. The flames are frequently stylised into a fleur-de-lis, which was on his family’s coat-of-arms.
The joy of the Lord is a sign of the true presence of the Spirit within the human heart. It is fashionable today, as in many eras, to think that sadness and sorrow are the most profound emotions, that tragedy is deeper than comedy. But this is not so. Aristotle took comedy very seriously as a profound mode of expression. Even an atheist philosopher like Nietzsche had a strong intuition that “joy is deeper than grief”, that “all joy seeks eternity.” Real joy is not mere happiness; it is a deep-seated emotion that flows from the very presence of God within us. No-one knew this better than Philip Neri. Life in eternity with God is joy without end. With his famous cry, “Paradiso! Paradiso!” Philip affirmed this. On this feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, then, we remember that we are made for joy; deep joy, beyond all sorrow. And in the example of Philip Neri, we recall that the gift of the Holy Spirit, which we have all received, can and will bring to us to a joy which is beyond all grief, and which will lead us into eternity with God.
Fr. Phillip
