O Paray!

If all goes well, details here soon about not only a new weblog, but a website dedicated to the Sacred Heart.

In the meantime, I will use this space for some other fragmentary and perhaps cryptic remarks. For instance, concerning the Sacred Heart ...

The Sacred Heart I felt so powerfully at Paray-le-Monial ... The astonishing Paray-le-Monial, where the Master revealed his Sacred Heart to Saint Marguerite-Marie in the latter seventeenth century.

Now below, I reproduce a personally very striking text by Valentin Tomberg about this revelation of the Sacred Heart in Paray-le-Monial.

A strange thing! This text is from a book variously entitled Covenant of the Heart or Lazarus Come Forth. It is a book less well known than Tomberg's Magnum Opus. I read it years ago ... and then forgot. Completely forgot.

Only after I had journeyed to Paray perhaps twenty times ... Paray the most astonishing place I have found in this world ... Paray where one can feel still the Sacred Heart bathing and cleansing oneself ... Only after discovering Paray, did I rediscover these words by Valentin Tomberg and my jaw dropped open ...

My jaw dropped open, for among other things, these words serve to make so much sense, as to what I have experienced in this most astonishing of places ...



"There have been (and still are) times in Europe and elsewhere during which for whole nations the life of the soul as such has been (and still is) in grave danger, having been smothered and reduced to a minimum.

This holds not only with respect to the tidal wave of materialism that has flooded across the world in this century, but also for the outpouring of "intellectual enlightenment" during the age of rationalism in the eighteenth century which paved the way for materialism.

At that time the danger facing the human soul was so great that, in order to avert it, a special intervention from heaven proved necessary as a preventive measure.

This took place during the second half of the seventeenth century. It was then that the revelation of the most sacred heart of Jesus occurred.

This led to the cult of devotion to the most sacred heart of Jesus which spread rapidly in Catholic countries and took root there. Devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus was to save the soul of humanity.

For, with the intellectual enlightenment the danger threatening to break in upon human beings was that of the centaur.

Human beings would have been turned into a kind of centaur -- a being consisting of head and limbs (intellect and will), but without heart -- that is, a "clever beast".

Devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus had the task of rekindling the heart. Thereby the light, warmth, and life, streaming from the heart of Jesus, was to counteract the will-to-power and the intellect serving this will."

Here in speaking of the Centaur, Valentin Tomberg is speaking of what I sometimes call The Borgification of the World ... Intensified Will. Intensified Thinking. No heart.

Few I know will read these words of tragedy and hope, except perhaps some personal friends ...

I hope then I may be forgiven for being so fragmentary and cryptic. Still if any other interested party should discover this in time and seek to understand more, more will be forthcoming at the upcoming web project and in a book I plan to publish before long ...