Somewhere along the way, in a disastrous development, Catholics let go of the idea that images matter. Contemporary theology is exclusively rationalistic; contemporary opinion is that thinking gets you closer to God; what you see has no effect. Nothing could be less true.
Beauty matters and images convey meaning, for good or ill.
The rainbow has a meaning. It's a sign of God's covenant with the descendants of Noah, which of course, we are. That covenant, the bow in the sky, is fulfilled in Christ. You can read all about it in this piece by Peter Kwasniewski. He says,
Noah’s Ark is a Scriptural image of the vessel of God’s salvation. Being in the Ark is being in Christ, in His Body, the Church. The raging flood of sin and vice drowns and destroys those who are caught up in it, but those who pass through the waters of baptism—of the death and resurrection of Christ—have their sins washed away and receive the grace of divine sonship. As the human race was preserved for temporal life in Noah and his family, so is it saved for eternal life in the Church.
Since the 17th century, June as been the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I wrote about the devotion with David Clayton in our book, The Little Oratory: This path to love, rooted in the Gospel, was given to us by God as a remedy for the errors of Jansenism, errors of rejection of the human nature of Our Lord, errors of rationalistic legalism and separation from God, under which we still suffer today. I quoted Fr. John Hardon SJ on the topic:
As formerly Divine Goodness wished to exhibit to the human race, as it came from the Ark of Noe, a sign of the renewed covenant between them . . . so in our own troubled times, while that heresy held sway which is known as Jansenism, the most insidious of all heresies, enemy of the love of God and of filial affection for Him — for this heresy preached that God was not so much to be loved by us as a Father as to be feared as an unrelenting Judge — the most kind Jesus manifested to the nations His Sacred Heart.
His article is well worth reading in full: The Sacred Heart and the Eucharist.
Peter Kwasniewski continues:
He is the Lord of creation and the King of the saints, the unity from which all diversity flows, and to which all must return in order to be natural, right, good, and blessed. This too is what the month of June, traditionally dedicated to the Sacred Heart—since the year 1673, I have seen it said—is meant to remind us of: He loved us first, and by His love, by what He did for us and gives to us, we learn whom to love and how to love. Apart from him there is only demonic unnaturalness, perversity, malice, and misery. [Read the whole thing!]
We still need this devotion, perhaps now more than ever, and we still need the beautiful images that draw us to His Heart and thus to His love. Above all, Jesus loves us and came to redeem us from sin and death. Don't be afraid to embrace His Sacred Heart and show it to the world. This (and other beautiful renditions) is the image we need now:
The way we love those who have fallen into sin is not by means of any political capitulation to ideology in the name of "dialogue" (and don't be taken in by the rhetoric: the LGBT movement is ideology, utterly political, a movement of power, not love). It is by loving our neighbor and, "like one beggar telling another where to find bread,"* offering him Jesus.
*N.T. Wright
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