Sacred Heart

Photo: Stained glass window, Sacred Heart Church, Georgetown, CT

What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard,

and what has not entered the human heart,

what God has prepared for those who love him,

this God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

For the Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God.

1 Corinthians 2:6-10

A Wikipedia article on Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus may be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Heart

Promises of the Sacred Heart

1. I will give them all the graces necessary for their state of life.

2. I will give peace in their families.

3. I will console them in their troubles.

4. I will be their refuge in life and especially in death.

5. I will abundantly bless all their undertakings.

6. Sinners shall find in my Heart the source and infinite ocean of mercy.

7. Tepid souls shall become fervent.

8. Fervent souls shall rise speedily to great perfection.

9. I will bless those places wherein the image of My Sacred Heart shall be exposed and venerated.

10. I will give to priests the power to touch the most hardened hearts.

11. Persons who propagate this devotion shall have their names eternally written in my Heart.

12. In the excess of the mercy of my Heart, I promise you that my all powerful love will grant to all those who will receive Communion on the First Fridays, for nine consecutive months, the grace of final repentance: they will not die in my displeasure, nor without receiving the sacraments; and my Heart will be their secure refuge in that last hour.

Maya (Illusion) in Hindu Philosophy

In the last post, we considered the problem of infinity, also known as the "continuum problem." If the world is made up of many, many, many small particles (an infinite number of atoms) that are somehow all separated by space, then what is it that unifies the world? What makes the world a continuous, solid, unified whole?

Put into mathematical terms by George Cantor, the father of set theory, the question is how many points can be counted on a simple line, AB, in Euclidean space.

Because a single point is defined, in geometry, as having no height, no width, and no depth, the answer is paradoxical and extremely counter-intuitive: A simple line that begins at point A and ends at point B may contain an infinite and unlimited number of points between the two end points.

By that very fact, every segment of the line AB also contains, within the smaller subset, an infinite number of points between the two endpoints of the segment. Like its Father (the line AB or BA), the Son (a baby segment of the whole) can be infinite.

But how, wondered George Cantor, can there be such a thing as a small infinity within a larger infinity? Wouldn't this make the Father (big line) and Son (little line) identical? Beginning with these questions, Cantor developed his theories of infinite and well-ordered sets -- infinite sets that differ in order, kind and magnitude, as if baby infinities could somehow be held and embraced by mother infinities.

Magnificat: The Lord Doth Magnify My Soul

When the continuum problem is put into purely human terms, the paradox becomes a very real problem of perceiving and assigning social values. Can we really judge a human's value based on the category or "set" it belongs to?

How can one say that the life of one human being is infinitely valuable, while the life that belongs to another category or set of human beings is somehow "expendable"? Is the life of a poor carpenter's son worth less then the life of a King? Are they not both part of the very same set -- the set of all human life? Why distinguish between the small set of one's own family and the much greater set that is the family of the human race?

Why not treat all strangers as friends?

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Maya and Mary

In her puzzling and paradoxical nature, the Blessed Virgin Mary is very similar to the Hindu goddess Maya, the goddess of Illusion who veils the reality of the Hindu god Brahman. The following article on Maya, taken from Wikipedia, certainly gives one food for thought:

"In Advaita Vedanta philosophy, Maya is the limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. Maya is held to be an illusion, a veiling of the true unitary Self -- the Cosmic Spirit also known as Brahman . . . .

"Many philosophies and religions seek to 'pierce the veil' of Maya in order to glimpse the transcendent truth from which the illusion of a physical reality springs, drawing from the idea that first came to life in the Hindu stream of Vedanta.

"Maya is . . . the appearance of phenomena. Since Brahman is the only truth, Maya is true but not the truth, the difference being that the truth is the truth forever while what [appears to be] true is only true for now."

In other words, Maya is the world of sensory perception, the world as it appears to our minds and our senses rather than the world as it actually is. As a goddess of appearances she might be called false, or deceptive, but in fact she is being absolutely honest and true. The error lies in our own minds and our own perceptions -- we have not seen her rightly.