God’s Delight as Comfort and Challenge: Pope Francis on the Heart of Jesus

The title of Pope Francis’s encyclical Dilexit Nos (2024) can be translated “He loved us,” but we would do better to translate it more literally as “God delighted in us.” I will talk about God’s delight, our delight (if we are able to muster it), and how Jesus’s Sacred Heart relates to these. What follows has three parts.

First, I show how, in Dilexit Nos and other writings, Francis diagnoses our time as one in which heartlessness reigns. Second, I explain how Francis sees this heartlessness as a crisis of delight, and how he proposes training in delight by Jesus Christ as an antidote. Third, I focus on how such training in delight might play out in everyday contemplative practices; here I interweave Francis, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and the artist Corita Kent—Mary, Jesus’s mother, will make a key appearance, too.

Today, Jesus’s heart addresses a crisis of delight, comforting us by renewing our capacity for delight and challenging us to undergo training by Jesus’s delight—his profound attention in love to everyone, everything, every day—so we may feel and live delight, even in a world that makes it so hard to do so.

Jesus’s Heart, When Heartlessness Reigns

Francis commends devotion to Jesus’s Sacred Heart during a time marked by distinctive problems. It is an “age of superficiality,” when people “rush . . . frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and end . . . up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives” (Dilexit Nos §2). People today have relinquished any hope in the depth dimension of life.

As evidence, Francis refers to artificial intelligence algorithms (DN §§14, 20). We tend to place great stock in algorithms; they show remarkable abilities to predict and, on the basis of this, to conduct human behavior. But they miss matters of the heart. Algorithms cannot capture, for instance, our childhood memories, which, Francis suggests, we store and call up in our heart. Francis recalls his childhood memories of learning to cook pies with his mother and grandmother, playing soccer with a rag ball, and filling a shoebox with worms (§20). Francis contrasts these pithy, personal vignettes with the amnesiac character of a culture increasingly dependent upon artificial intelligence. True intelligence comes from the heart.

Late in Dilexit Nos, Francis insists that this encyclical should be read in conjunction with his other writings (§217). Early in his papacy, in Evangelii Gaudium (2013), Francis named “the great danger in today’s world” as “the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience” (§2). He spends much of the rest of that document detailing the ways that a heartless economy and heartless cultures devour people’s lives and inhibit preaching of gospel joy. Laudato Si’ tells how the worldwide energy system, whose heart is intensive use of fossil fuels (§23), habituates people into lacking the heartfelt tenderness necessary to see God’s creation properly and to behave accordingly (see §91).

In Fratelli Tutti (2020), Francis recounts how, for decades following World War II, there was a hunger for and activity toward regional and global integration (§10). More recently, global culture is,

Showing signs of a certain regression. Ancient conflicts thought long buried are breaking out anew, while instances of a myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism are on the rise. In some countries, a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies is creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests” (FT §11).

Heartlessness reigns, with dire consequences for our common home.

In this situation, Francis advocates devotion to Jesus’s heart. This devotion, which Francis insists is never merely private but always communal, ecclesial, and social, will be key to dispelling the “dark clouds” that have gathered (FT §54). Devotion to the Sacred Heart may provide impetus and sustenance as Christians work with all people of good will to realize the “social miracle” of overcoming heartlessness. Francis urges starting from the heart to build unified and reconciled communities. He is confident that the Spirit will guide us, so long as we can learn from Jesus’s heart “‘ecstasy’, openness, gift and encounter” (DN §28). Francis sees devotion to the Sacred Heart not only as relevant in our day, but more nearly as essential to meeting—perhaps exceeding—the world’s great needs.

Training in Delight

So what does this have to do with delight? We could redescribe the cultural problems diagnosed by Francis as crises of delight. People who have lost hope fail to delight in the gift of life. People who live superficially and acrimoniously fail to delight in themselves and in each other. I often tell my students that what ails us most today is our failure to delight. Usually, I make this observation when I am teaching St. Hildegard of Bingen, whose indefatigable curiosity about the world expresses her delight: every observation about brilliant gemstones and blazing fires, every simile about God pulsing with green vigor like a sprouting plant in spring, every careful note about the articulation of the human body; it all shows Hildegard’s delight in God’s creation. We tend to lack that.

Though it may be true that countless people live hedonistically, moving from pleasure to pleasure and comfort to comfort, or at least trying to, such ways of life strike me less as votes of confidence that pleasure may be had, and more as gestures of desperation that it may not. Worldwide epidemics of loneliness, anxiety, and violence confirm my sense. People hope for less and less. They settle. It is not so much out of malice that people exclude and harm each other and themselves, that they comport themselves so callously toward animals, plants, and other forms of living and non-living creation. It is out of a learned incapacity for true happiness. We expect artifice—hence our enthrallment with artificial intelligence. No happiness could actually be real.

Anyone who does any kind of exercise knows that untrained muscles will become deconditioned (or, for those who speak human, weak). Today’s deconditioned happiness results from lack of training in delight.

St. Benedict conceived of the monastery as a school for the Lord’s service (Prologue to the Rule). For him, the monastery was a training ground: one trains in obedience so that one may carry out the Lord’s will. Something similar goes for the co-founder of the tradition from which I hail and to which Francis belongs, St. Ignatius Loyola (on Ignatius, see DN §§24, 144, 145). His Spiritual Exercises comprise a training program for hearing Christ’s call and receiving strength to bring Christ’s love to the world. These are two important examples of Christian training, and of course there are many others.

I propose that Francis recommends devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a training program in delight. Something like this is not new for Francis. In my favorite portion of Laudato Si’, chapter six, “Ecological Education and Spirituality,” Francis details a multifaceted educational program aimed at forming people in a new lifestyle marked by “selfless ecological commitment” (LS §211) and serene presence to each reality (§222). Such education must happen in many institutions (schools, families, the media, churches, and so on; §213); and across the levels of human experience: interpersonally, as the “little way of love” led by St. Thérèse (§230); civically and politically through lived commitment to the common good (§231); and ecclesially through prayer, liturgy, the sacraments, and sabbath rest (§§233–37). Francis counsels a life of sobriety and humility, which is “a way of living life to the full” (§223). By this he means a life converted away from endless hankering for the next best thing:

Those who enjoy more and live better each moment are those who have given up dipping here and there, always on the look-out for what they do not have. They experience what it means to appreciate each person and each thing, learning familiarity with the simplest things and how to enjoy them. So they are able to shed unsatisfied needs, reducing their obsessiveness and weariness (LS §223).

Francis advocates above all else “an attitude of the heart . . . wh ich approaches life with serene attentiveness, which is capable of being fully present to someone without thinking of what comes next, which accepts each moment as a gift from God to be lived to the full” (§226). Francis easily could have called this attitude of the heart “delight.” This is the attitude that Jesus lived and taught: “He was completely present to everyone and to everything, and in this way, he showed us the way to overcome that unhealthy anxiety which makes us superficial, aggressive, and compulsive consumers” (§226). Anyone who ventures to follow Jesus should be educated in delight.

Dilexit Nos strikes similar tones, but in a distinctive way. Francis invokes an Aristotelian term to suggest how human life should be ordered: “All our actions need to be put under the ‘political rule’ of the heart” (DN §13). The heart should be, Francis is saying, the power of the human soul that rules all others. Francis continues,

In this way, our aggressiveness and obsessive desires will find rest in the greater good that the heart proposes and in the power of the heart to resist evil. The mind and the will are put at the service of the greater good by sensing and savoring truths, rather than seeking to master them as the sciences tend to do. The will desires the greater good that the heart recognizes, while the imagination and emotions are themselves guided by the beating of the heart (§13).

For a properly trained soul, the heart will reign. Much later in the encyclical, as he ties Christian mission to the Sacred Heart devotion, Francis adds some detail to this idea of the political rule of the heart. The kind of heart Francis has in mind would be that of people in love with Jesus, “enthralled by Christ,” who are “bound to share this love that has changed their lives. . . . They want others to perceive the goodness and beauty of the Beloved through their efforts, however inadequate they may be. Is that not the case with any lover?” (§209).

Though there may be many avenues toward training in delight, the heart of Jesus is, Francis suggests, the prime training ground. The Sacred Heart is a symbol, which we may take as a more or less effective signifier and a more or less empty one at that. But Francis seems to share the conviction of fellow Jesuit Karl Rahner (see references to him in DN §§15 n.10 and 16 n.11) that the Sacred Heart is a real-symbol: it is a representation of Christ’s love that allows Christ’s love to truly be present here on earth. Francis reminds his readers that Jesus loved each of us with a human heart, “with genuine human emotions and feelings, like ourselves, albeit fully transformed by his divine love” (DN §60). The symbol of the Sacred Heart should remind us not to separate God’s love from human existence. Jesus Christ’s love is not some ethereal or empyreal thing, unreachable by human hands, emotions, lives. Instead, Jesus’s love is, as Francis calls it (following the Gospel and Letters of John), “tangible” (§60). It is real.

So is Jesus’s delight. The delight that Jesus took in the people he encountered, in the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, the bread and fish that he ate, the wine that he drank, the oil with which he was anointed, the mud with which he healed, the tears that bathed his toes, the embraces he shared with friends, the grateful exclamations of repentant sinners forgiven that he heard—this was and is real. Jesus provides a model for delight in this world, and not an empty model, not just a model, no mere symbol. For those who allow his heart to convert theirs, he grants the gift of delight, even if they are accustomed to living in delight’s absence.

Christ’s Delight as Comfort, Challenge, and Art

The Sacred Heart offers comfort and a challenge. The comfort is that delight is not only possible, but it is real. The challenge for the one who comes to inhabit this reality is to convince others of this reality—not primarily through intellectual or moral argument, but rather through lived communication of love. One could easily surmise that in a world programmed to expect artifice, a real-symbol of God’s love will be a tough sell. The mission of lovers of Christ, however, is to entice others into real delight.

Francis enlists St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s help, and it would be worth considering what he takes from Bernard, who dedicated himself to preaching the delightfulness of Christ’s love. Francis writes,

Bernard believed that our affections, enslaved by pleasures, may nonetheless be transformed and set free, not by blind obedience to a commandment but rather in response to the delectable love of Christ. Evil is overcome by good, conquered by the flowering of love. “Your affection for the Lord Jesus should be both sweet and intimate, to oppose the sweet enticements of the sensual life. Sweetness conquers sweetness, as one nail drives out another” (DN §177).

I am particularly interested in this last comment, Bernard’s spin on an old Latin adage. None of us may exactly share Bernard’s suspicion toward sense-pleasure, but all of us probably share some measure of it. Whoever we are, though, we could certainly think also of plenty of examples of this-worldly sweetness that we do, if fleetingly, find delightful. For Bernard, the exorbitant sweetness of Christ’s love can drive any artificial sweetness—artificial sweeteners?—out of our lives, putting in their place true sweetness. We could add something more positive, while hanging on to Bernard’s important insight: the ways that we take false delight in the things of this life, the very false delight that keeps us clambering after the next thing, can be healed by Christ’s love, symbolized so amply in the Sacred Heart. The comfort and challenge of God’s delight is that it can heal ours, driving out one sweetness with another, if only we let it.

But how do we do this? I have mentioned, at Francis’s prompting, medieval saints and their teachings on delight. Is delight a function of nostalgia, of turning back the clock? No, says Francis in Laudato Si’:

Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur (LS §114).

We need to slow down. I imagine that this is true for the vast majority of people in our time; even retirees, for example, seem constantly cast hither and yon by different demands and activities of life. And we need to look at reality differently. These directives resonate with a medieval spirituality such as St. Bernard’s, but are also strikingly contemporary.

A consistent refrain in Francis’s writing and preaching is that people should avoid overstimulation, because “overstimulation makes it difficult to find ourselves integrated and happy” (LS §147). No sensation, no thought, no prayer, no conversation, no art, no music, no movie, nothing is pleasurable (let alone delightful) if it is constantly interrupted by something else. It is no wonder, then, that people cannot find delight in anything these days, because our present world seems built on constant interruptions: competing pressures for attention, perfectly symbolized by the push notifications on electronic devices. For many of us, busy-ness is the goal, the badge of courage that we can brag about to colleagues and friends, and that we can use as an excuse for our carelessness toward those with whom we live and encounter every day. We need a different goal: doing fewer things, so that our presence with what we do may be blessed by God’s presence. By doing fewer things, we will do more; by shutting out contending stimulations, we may find ourselves more deeply stimulated, to the point that we will find that delight is real.

Contemplation is an age-old yet ever-new way to counter overstimulation. Let us look to an artist for contemplative inspiration. Corita Kent was a sometime Catholic sister most famous for her pop-art-style prints. (I co-taught a semester course about her art and teaching in Fall 2023, so I am still thinking about her). She was also famous for her creative pedagogy, where she would have her students do unusual activities as preparations to make art. For example, she challenged her students to “become a microscope,” to go out into public equipped with a viewfinder (an empty slide holder), a sketchbook, and a drawing implement, to look slowly at the world, piece by piece, detail by detail, and methodically to draw what they saw. She would require them to look, over and over, to draw, over and over, developing disciplines of focus and attentiveness. She deemed these disciplines essential for art-making, but also for life.

When Corita was teaching in this way, she was called Sister Mary Corita, and she belonged to the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Her slow-looking exercises were modeled on Mary, as a 1963 print of hers shows. It is titled, “Luke 2.14, 51,” and its main visual element is two blue, stenciled words: “GO SLO,” placed immediately above a red heart, and flanked by yellow, rectangular spaces filled with large red and black rounded and curved forms. I imagine that the biblical reference in the title is slightly off, maybe mistranscribed or misremembered, because Corita seems to refer to both verses, Luke 2:19 and 51, where Mary is described by the evangelist as keeping things (namely, details from Jesus’s early life) and reflecting on them in her heart. The message is clear: one must imitate Mary, going slow enough in life to reflect in a heart-felt way on what is going on. This was Corita’s message to her students, young women surrounded by the frenetically paced Los Angeles of the 1960s; likewise, it was her consistent message to the whole world—a plea for peace, which may be why she included in her title Luke 2:14, the angels’ proclamation, at the scene of Jesus’s nativity, of peace to all people of good will.

Pope Francis references devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary both early and late in Dilexit Nos. He upholds Mary’s example as a person who pondered things in her heart, thus “unifying and harmonizing [her] personal history.” She exemplifies the importance of maintaining and using one’s memory, and of attending to life right now so that one can see it in a wider perspective (DN §16). Francis contends that Jesus learned from Mary his attentiveness to people’s problems and needs, their good intentions and actions (§42). For these reasons, devotion to Mary’s heart amplifies devotion to Jesus’s heart: she shows us that even in our littleness, Christ displays his glory (§176).

Francis can help us to recognize that Corita’s injunction to “go slow” is Jesuanic. Jesus loves people in the details, looking them in the eye, speaking the words they need to hear, praying concretely for the help they require from God, counting every hair on every head and every member of each community. Jesus, in effect, is a microscope. If we love his heart, we should find our own ways of doing the same.

I will be more concrete. When I sit down to dinner with my kids, often they will blaze through whatever we are eating as if there is no tomorrow. They do this probably because they are hungry—every day at school seems to be a long day—but also because they have become habituated to overstimulation: sensations that come fast and furious. In my worse moments, which I admit are more frequent, I express annoyance and bark at them to slow down. But every once in a while, I have a better moment. I remember to tell them gently to slow down, really to taste their food, and that they will enjoy it more. When we pair this with praying before the meal—we always do, but often in a rush—my wife and I reinforce to them that we should be grateful for the gifts God gives out of God’s love for us. We all can savor, in little ways, and hold things in our heart. Sure, we will need to scale up beyond the dinner table to reverse the swerve away from delight into heartlessness, the lack of discipline that leaves our delight muscles deconditioned. But the way is there, once we start stringing together moments when we “GO SLO.”

Conclusion

Dilexit Nos begins with an allusion to Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The verse Francis has in mind winningly declares hope that God wills salvation for those who love God—just lines earlier, Paul cries out, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31). Then, in the verse that Francis invokes, Paul writes, “In all things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us [ἀγαπήσαντος ἡμᾶς, dilexit nos]”—who delighted in us (Rom 8:37).

Paul makes his own allusion during this chapter of Romans: to Psalm 44. The Psalmist recalls great wonders God has done to protect Israel, but in the context of God currently leaving God’s people desolate, under their enemies’ control. Salvation may come, but right now, it looks unlikely. With this reference, Paul amplifies his proclamation that Jesus saves, however improbable that may seem.

God delighted in us, and God delights in us today, even in a world addicted to artificial delights and to overstimulation, which makes delight ever more unlikely. Make no mistake; delight is hard today—for me, and I suspect for you. Francis’s encyclical on Jesus’s Sacred Heart in our heartless age exhorts us to join Paul in his conviction: if God is for us, as Jesus’s Heart amply attests, no one can be against us. We can delight in this world, in praise of the one who made it. We can, as St. Thérèse would say, let “waves of infinite tenderness” (DN §196) flow over our world. That is our comfort, and our challenge.[1]

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