by
Damien F. Mackey
“May we stand within the fire
Of your Sacred Heart, and raise
To our God in joyful choir
All creation’s song of praise”.
James P. McAuley
Professor James P. McAuley, the author of this great hymn
to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, biblically symbolised in this stanza by king
Nebuchednezzar’s Fiery Furnace
(Daniel 3:8-38), was my teacher of English around 1970, when I was doing a
Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Tasmania.
I recall that professor McAuley was an extremely rigorous
teacher, invariably returning one’s essays covered with his red inked,
highly-critical comments.
His mystical hymn
(Jesus, in Your Heart We Find, Gather Australia, 464)
reads in full:
Jesus, in your heart we find
Love of the Father and mankind.
These two loves to us impart –
Divine love in a human heart.
May we stand within the fire
Of your Sacred Heart, and raise
To our God in joyful choir
All creation’s song of praise.
In our hearts from roots of pride
Deadly growths of evil flower;
But from Jesus’ wounded side
Streams the sacramental power.
To the depths within your heart
Draw us with divine desire,
Hide us, heal us, and impart
Your own love’s transforming fire.
The fiercely anti-Communist James McAuley, who was born in
Sydney (Australia) in 1917 (my father William was born in Tasmania that very same
year), moved to Hobart (Tasmania) in 1960, where his large family stayed for a
time with our large family, in Lenah Valley.
This fact never gets mentioned in any of the biographies of
the professor that I have read. However, I certainly recall the cramped
accommodation endured at the time, and some of the incidents associated with it
all.
The McAuley family became prominent musically (even
including drums in the choir) in our local parish church, appropriately Sacred
Heart, in New Town.
Here is one brief biography of “James McAuley (1917 - 1976)”:
James McAuley was
born in Lakemba, in the western suburbs of Sydney, in 1917, the son of grazier
and real estate speculator, Patrick McAuley, and his wife Mary (née Judge). He
spent most of his childhood at Homebush, where the family moved after his
father’s retirement, and attended Homebush Public School. Displaying early
literary and musical talents, McAuley was sent to the selective public school
Fort Street Boys High School, where he became school captain and won prizes for
his writing; a number of his earliest poems appeared in the school magazine,
The Fortian. In 1935 he matriculated to the University of Sydney, where he
studied English and philosophy. At university he continued to hone his poetic
craft, contributing poems to the student magazine Hermes, where he also became
one of the editors. After graduating with a B.A. (Hons) in 1938, he went on to
complete an M.A., writing a thesis on the influence of symbolism in English,
French and German literature. From the late 1930s he supported himself in
various tutoring and teaching positions, and in 1942 took up a teacher’s
scholarship, completed a Diploma of Education and was appointed to Newcastle
Boys Junior High School. In June 1942 he married a fellow teacher, Norma
Elizabeth Abernethy.
In January 1943,
McAuley was called up for national service in the Militia, and quickly
transferred to the Australian Imperial Force. In January 1944 he was
commissioned in the Melbourne-based Army Directorate of Civil Affairs, where he
renewed his association with another Fort Street graduate, Harold Stewart.
While working at the Army Directorate in 1944, McAuley and Stewart concocted
the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax, intending to expose what they saw as a lack of meaning
in modernist literature and art. The target of the hoax was Max Harris, the
Adelaide-based editor of Angry Penguins magazine and champion of literary
modernism. When Harris took the bait and published the poems of ‘Ern Malley,’
Stewart and McAuley were (eventually) revealed as the actual authors, and
admitted having concocted a fictitious identity for ‘Ern’ and using partly
random composition methods to produce the poems. While the hoax did cause significant
embarrassment to Harris—and has been seen by some as inhibiting the development
of literary modernism in Australia—the poems of ‘Ern Malley’ have remained in
print and continue to be a subject of significant critical debate: a
consequence Stewart and McAuley surely did not intend. In 1946, McAuley
published his first collection of poetry (in his own name), Under Aldebaran.
After the war,
McAuley became a lecturer at the Australian School of Pacific Administration,
first in Canberra then Sydney, a position he retained until 1959. While at the
School he became deeply interested in the then Australian administered
Territory of Papua and New Guinea, and was profoundly influenced by the Roman
Catholic missionary archbishop Alain Marie Guynot de Boismenu (1870–1953). In
1952, McAuley converted to Catholicism, which would henceforth have a defining
influence on his intellectual life. Immersing himself in Cold War politics, he
became associated with the radical Catholic ideologue B.A. Santamaria, and was instrumental
in the anti-Communist agitation that split the Labor movement and resulted in
formation of the Democratic Labor Party in the mid-1950s. In 1955, he joined
the Australian branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a conservative,
anti-Communist organisation, funded in part by the CIA, and became editor of
its journal, Quadrant. McAuley’s reputation as a poet was furthered with the
publication of his second collection, A Vision of Ceremony, in 1956, and his
credentials as a conservative public intellectual were bolstered by the
publication of a collection of critical essays, The End of Modernity: Essays on
Literature, Art and Culture (1959).
In 1960 McAuley
and his family moved to Hobart, where he took up a position at the University
of Tasmania, and the following year he was appointed to the chair of English at
the University. Despite his academic duties he continued to write and publish
poetry, including his epic poem Captain Quiros (1964), and the collection
Surprises of the Sun (1969), which included a poem sequence ‘On the Western
Line,’ based on McAuley’s childhood experiences in the Western suburbs of
Sydney. During the 1960s he also published a number of critical works,
including a monograph on the work of Christopher Brennan (1963), a general
introduction to poetics, A Primer of English Versification (1966), and a
book-length study of Australian poetry entitled The Personal Element in
Australian Poetry (1970). He did not abandon his interest in politics,
publishing and organising in support of Australian involvement in the Vietnam
War.
In 1970, McAuley
was diagnosed with bowel cancer. After recovering from the illness, he devoted
increased time and energy to ensuring his literary legacy. His Collected Poems
appeared in 1971, and was a joint winner of the Grace Leven Prize in that year.
In 1975, he published a second collection of his essays, The Grammar of the
Real: Selected Prose, 1959–1974, and a collection of his critical work on
Australian poetry, A Map of Australian Verse: The Twentieth Century. Two
collections of his later poetry appeared in 1976: Time Given: Poems 1970–1976,
and Music Late at Night: Poems 1970–1973. Early in 1976, McAuley was diagnosed
with liver cancer; he died on 15 October that year, in Hobart. His posthumous
publications included the poetry collection, ‘A World of its Own’ (1977), a
collection of his writing edited by his long-time friend Leonie Kramer (James
McAuley: Poetry, Essays and Personal Commentary, UQP, 1988), and a revised
volume of his Collected Poems (1994).
A significant and
often controversial figure in the Australian post-War literary landscape,
McAuley’s achievement as a poet has in recent years often been overshadowed by
debates over his role as a right-wing intellectual. While unquestionably seen as
a major Australian poet in his own time, it is a lasting irony that critical
interest in McAuley’s work since his death has been largely eclipsed by the
interest in his short-lived creation ‘Ern Malley.’
[End of quote]
It is rumoured that McAuley, when told that he would need
to have part of his colon removed, and ever the grammarian, quipped: “Better a
semi-colon than a full stop!”
The
Fiery Heart of Jesus
Catholics, particularly, like to see in king
Nebuchednezzar’s Fiery Furnace, in
which the three youths sang their hymns of praise to God the Creator, a symbol
of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For, those who choose to live mystically within
the fiery Heart of Jesus are not harmed, but, instead, are filled with
inexpressible joy and an exuberant praise of God.
There is a saying that we must either burn within the Heart
of Jesus, or we burn outside of It. The latter is a most harmful and unpleasant
burning. And it can be fully realised in Hell.
Stephen Beale has written an article (2018) for the purpose
of “Explaining the
strange symbolism of the Sacred Heart”:
What do the flames, light, arrows, and crown of thorns mean?
The
Sacred Heart is among the most familiar and moving of Catholic devotional
images. But its symbolism can also be strange. As we mark the Feast of the
Sacred Heart early this month, here is a look at the explanation behind some of
the features of the Sacred Heart.
The flames. The Sacred Heart most obviously brings to mind the Passion of Christ on the
cross. There is the crown of thorns, the cross, usually atop the heart, and the
wound from the spear that pierced His side. But why is the Sacred Heart always
shown as if it’s on fire? That certainly did not happen at the crucifixion.
There
are three reasons behind this. First, we have to remember that Christ’s
self-offering on the cross was the one-time perfect consummation of all the
sacrifices of the Old Testament. This necessarily includes burnt offerings,
which were the highest form of sacrifices in ancient Israel, according to The Jewish Encyclopedia. An early form of such
sacrifices was what Abraham set out to do with Isaac, hence the wood he had his
son collect beforehand.
Second,
fire is always associated with the essence of divinity in the Old Testament.
Think back to the burning bush that spoke to Moses, the cloud of fire that
settled on Sinai, and the flames from above that consumed the sacrifice of
Elijah. This explanation fits with the gospel account of the crucifixion, in
which the piercing of Christ’s side revealed His heart at the same time that
the curtain of the temple was torn, unveiling the holy of holies where God was
present.
Finally,
the image of fire associated with heart represents Christ’s passionate love for
us. One 19th-century French devotional card has these words arched above the
Sacred Heart—Voilà ce Cœur qui a tant aimé les hommes, which roughly
translates to: “Here is the heart that loved men so much.” One traditional
exclamation is, “Sacred Heart of Jesus, burning with love of us, inflame our
hearts with love of Thee.” We see this actually happen in the gospels, where
the disciples on the road to Emmaus realized that their hearts had been
“burning” after their encounter with Jesus. ….
The rays of light. Look closer at the image of the Sacred Heart. There is something else
framing it besides the flames. They are rays of light. In John 8:12, Christ
declares that He is the “light of the world.” In Revelation 21:23, we are told
that in the new Jerusalem at the end of times there will be no light from the
sun or moon because the Lamb of God—that is, Jesus—will be its source of light.
Light, like fire, is a symbol of divinity. Think of the Transfiguration and the
blinding light that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. As the light of
the world, Christ is also the one who “enlightens” us, revealing God to us. The
Sacred Heart constitutes the climax of divine self-revelation, showing us the
depths of God’s love for us. ….
The arrows. The crown of thorns and the spear make sense. But sometimes the Sacred
Heart is also depicted with arrows. Again, that’s not something we find in the
gospels. One explanation is that the arrow represents sin. This is reportedly
what our Lord Himself said in a private revelation to St. Mary of St. Peter.
(See here for more.) The arrow could also draw upon an
ancient Roman metaphor for love, which, according to ancient myth, occurred
when the god Cupid shot an arrow through the hearts of lovers (as this author points out).
The crown of thorns. Unlike the arrows, the crown of thorns is reported in the gospels. But in
traditional images it encircles the Sacred Heart, whereas in Scripture the
crown was fixed to Jesus’ head. One traditional account offers this
interpretation, describing those who are devoted to it: “They saw the crown
transferred from His head to His heart; they felt that its sharp points had
always pierced there; they understood that the Passion was the crucifixion of a
heart” (The Heart of the Gospel: Traits of the Sacred Heart
by Francis Patrick Donnelly, published in 1911 by the Apostleship of Prayer).
In other words, wrapping the crown around the heart emphasizes the fact that
Christ felt His wounds to the depths of His heart.
Moreover,
after the resurrection, the crown of thorns becomes a crown of victory.
Donnelly hints at this as well: “From the weapons of His enemy, from cross and
crown and opened Heart, our conquering leader fashioned a trophy which was the
best testimony of His love.” In ancient gladiatorial contests, the victor was
crowned. In the Revelation 19:12, Christ wears “many crowns” and believers who
are victorious over sin and Satan will receive the “crown of life” (Revelation
2:10).
Finally,
according to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the seventeenth French nun who helped
start the devotion, the points of the thorns are the many individual sins of
people, pricking the heart of Jesus. As she put it in a letter, recounting the
personal vision she had received, “I saw this divine Heart as on a throne of
flames, more brilliant than the sun and transparent as crystal. It had Its
adorable wound and was encircled with a crown of thorns, which signified the
pricks our sins caused Him.”
The cross. Like the thorns, the cross is both rooted in the gospels but also displayed
in a way that does not follow them in every detail. There is almost an
inversion of the crucifixion. In the gospels, Christ hung on the cross, His
heart correspondingly dwarfed by its beams. But in images of the Sacred Heart,
it is now enlarged and the cross has shrunk. Moreover, rather than the heart
being nailed to the cross, the cross now seems ‘planted’ in the heart—as St.
Margaret Mary Alacoque put it—if to say to us that the entire reality of the
crucifixion derives its meaning from and—cannot be understood apart from—the
heart of Jesus. As Donnelly wrote, “The Heart [is] … forever supporting the
weight of a Cross.” Truly, it is the heart of Jesus that makes the cross
meaningful for us today.
