Church-going people, like the rest of us, have types. There are the quiet well-dressed families that stand in solemn procession down their claimed pew and disappear in just as fast a procession as soon as the service ends. There are the single men who prowl young-adult events in an hour radius scouring for their future trad-wife fantasy. There are the weird guys with close-cropped hair and glasses, probably autistic, who confuse theology for flirting and write essays for esoteric online magazines. And there are the sweet pious old women who don’t really talk much but always have a rosary in one hand and a prayer card in the other.

Mother Church, in her wisdom, has arms wide enough to embrace them all, and I am in no way seeking to denigrate any of these people. They have their place, and we would all be worse off for their absence (yes, even the nerdy one writing this piece). Still, each type has a particular temptation it falls into, and I would be failing in fraternal charity should I not prompt out the need for a course correction.

One of the ways the project of modernity has played out is that the lay Church’s collective consciousness for spirituality over the past several hundred years seems to have become increasingly dominated by sweet pieties to the exclusion of all else. Now, let me make a confession: I am not a pious man. I harbor no particular love for most devotionals in my heart, and in another life I may have lived out my days as a Carthusian in the simplicity of quiet adoration. This isn’t to say that piety is not a valid or good spirituality: I simply seek to question the piety that would be so pious as to lose touch with reality. An example will suffice.

I, like many others, will spend the month of June being bombarded with images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is actually one of the times of the year I look forward to. Perhaps one of my friends will even slip me a prayer card with the ‘litany to the Sacred Heart’ on it, and you may even catch me mumbling through it once or twice. Regardless of my words or actions, there is a part of my mind that will be reflecting, on some level, on the Sacred Heart throughout the course of the month. I know I am not alone in finding that this devotion resonates with something deep inside me.

There is, however, another side to these practices, and this is found in the ways people treat the Sacred Heart as the object of religious devotion. Perhaps I don’t seem to be saying much with that, so let me be clear that this is not the same as having a particular love or engagement with the Sacred Heart. Rather, what I mean is, there seems to be a tendency to treat the Sacred Heart as if it were, well, a pickled muscle lying on the altar of Sunday Mass. What makes the Sacred Heart powerful is not that it represents such-and-such love of God, or grants so-and-so’s wish. What makes the Sacred Heart powerful is that it beats. It is not the object of religious attention but the subject of a loving conscience. To speak of the Sacred Heart as being separate from the real, living presence of Jesus among us is to sever the Heart of Christ from his body. This would not do.

The Heart of Christ is open and loving. It is vulnerable. In most depictions, Christ’s eyes look at you while his hands invite you in the draw near to his Heart. Pause, listen— and find rest for your soul. Does the Heart of Christ stand by when the widow, the orphan, and the stranger are accosted in the land? Yes, but not in the passivity of a spectator— it is hanging from the cross of Langston Hughe’s ‘Christ in Alabama,’ one with the suffering of the most vulnerable. Christ’s heart is active, and it lives in the world today. The devotion— with all the good it promises— is not meant to be some self-referential act, by which the Christian would feel satisfied with himself for having properly reverenced God. A heart, as such, is useless. Too small to eat, too frail to keep, and too dead to beat. Its meaning only comes about, symbolically, on account of its having-been-alive, on account of its being the very precondition for the constitution and goodness of a person. Seen this way, the Sacred Heart is the sacramental of interior conversion par excellence. It has no meaning in itself, but gains meaning on account of who’s heart it is. It becomes the symbol that moves from the uselessness of the impersonal to the enjoyment of the person. It is a way for the Christian, who henceforth had been constituted by his engagement with things, the rituals and objects of the liturgy, to be moved into engagement with persons, and so most fully manifests the call of the ite missa est. “Go, it is the dismissal:” and so the things of the world, having been taken up into Christ and transformed, are now sent out from Christ back into the world to change the world. It only is a devotion because (and insofar as) it makes of us disciples, melting the hardness of our hearts into Christ’s heart, so that we can go out and change others’ hearts.

And this is why I say— enough with piety, enough with prayers and devotionals. The time for sodalities and confraternities is over. What good does it do a man to utter the same words, day in and day out, and not be transformed by them, and not transform others? The Heart of Christ is too precious, too powerful, and too sacred to let that remain the case.