A Valentine’s Day Query: Dorcas’ Hearts?

Some startling details leapt out as I pondered the Magee Dorcas memorial window for last Friday’s post: What look like two flaming silver hearts “float” on or over her robe, each within its own glass piece. 

The two elements add to the anti-naturalism of the image and sense of symbolic messages to us. Could these unusual features adapt the flaming sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary, emblems of their loving humanity? Mary’s heart conveys this “immaculate” human’s love of God and her sorrows as mother of the crucified God-man; Jesus’ heart embodies his love for his divine father and for humankind. Consider this official image for the cult of the Sacred Heart, in which Jesus hands us his heart (without the Sacred Wounds that inspired its devotion in the Middle Ages) rather than reveals it in his chest, the more familiar version.

Batoni, Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1760

Since then, Sacred Hearts have been stylized infinitely in devotional objects, T-shirts and even tattoos.

There are other possibilities. The human heart has been the bodily symbol of love since classical antiquity. Legend has St. Valentine (d. 269 A.D.) sending the first paper valentines to Roman soldiers he secretly married to encourage fidelity. The flaming heart even appears on vintage Valentine’s Day cards.

Valentine, 1909

Furthermore, the compassionate Dorcas is identified elsewhere with the loving heart. Today, there’s a secular non-profit organization in Allen, Texas that supports the needy named “Dorcas Heart” with a calligraphic heart-logo without flames.

Context matters, I suggest. St. Stephen’s Dorcas window may adapt the Sacred Heart imagery for an everyday saint revered for her love for humankind--within a church, even one like St. Stephen’s that was a low Episcopal parish by the 20th century. Perhaps we witness the generosity of meaning rather than sacrilege.

Yet why two identical hearts on her robes? Is their unusual placement for clear visibility, given her pose? Wonderful window, with wonderful questions to contemplate on Valentine’s Day. . . 

— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator