David Richo, Ph.D., was ordained a Catholic priest in 1966 and now works as a psychotherapist, writer, and workshop leader. He is has been an Associate of the Society of the Sacred Heart since 2016 in the San Francisco, CA group. He is the author of The Sacred Heart of the World which the San Francisco Associates of the Society of the Sacred Heart read for a year- and they loved it!
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to include universal compassion
His website is davericho.com.
BIO:
Known for drawing on Buddhism, poetry, and Jungian perspectives in his work, Richo is the author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving and The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find in Embracing Them. He has also written When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships, Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side, The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know, and Being True to Life: Poetic Paths to Personal Growth.
Richo lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco.
Finding the Sacred Heart
By David Richo, Associate, San Francisco, CA
My devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus began in the seminary in the 1960s and I don't know how or why. I just knew there was something drawing me in that could not be denied. Later in life, I came to know that there was more to my devotion than honoring a picture. I knew it held a very deep meaning, one that would take a lifetime to plumb. That was when, by synchronicity, I found Teilhard de Chardin. He spoke of a devotedness more than a devotion. He recognized the Heart of Jesus as nothing less than the heart of the entire universe. I will never forget how joyous I felt at the bigness of that revelation, which took me way beyond the frame of that familiar picture from childhood.
Now I knew why the image of Jesus’ Heart had meaning to me so long before. I was touched by how it had waited to reveal itself. I came to understand that the Sacred Heart was not the physical heart muscle of Jesus of Nazareth but the cosmic Heart of the risen Christ. I came to see the Sacred Heart as the heartfulness of God. This was not a God “out there” but the depth of love and goodness in and beyond every one of us. I made a vow in 2006 to spread this news I was so fortunate to have found. That was when I wrote my book, The Sacred Heart of the World (Paulist Press). A few years later, I found the Associates of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco, California. At mass on the day I joined, immediately after Communion, I suddenly realized that I had not chosen the Sacred Heart as my path to God. It was a gift to me, a grace from beyond human choice, like all revelations. Now I know that Christ’s Heart is my heart and the hearts of all of us earthlings in a universe whose center is his Heart, no circumference at all.
[The Heart] I discern in your breast is simply a furnace of fire; and the more I fix my gaze on its ardency the more it seems to me that all around it the contours of your body melt away and become enlarged beyond all measure, till the only features I can distinguish in you are those of the face of a world which has burst into flame.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, The Mass on the World
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