We have a heart problem.
Pope Francis named it plainly in Dilexit Nos, his 2024 apostolic exhortation on the Sacred Heart of Jesus: the imbalances of our world are symptoms of a deeper crisis rooted in the human heart. A heart without a story has no purpose, no direction, no sense that what it does today connects to something larger than today.
Cut to Shine - In the Hands of the Master Cutter traces God's answer to that crisis through the thirty-three invocations of the Litany of the Sacred Heart - one for each year Christ walked the earth, one for each facet of a diamond.
A diamond does not create its own brilliance. It forms in the dark, under pressure, in hiddenness. And it reveals its full beauty only when a master cutter who understands its structure knows exactly where to place the chisel. Each cut opens a new facet. Each facet allows more light to enter - and more light to shine out.
This book takes one invocation from the Litany and treats it as a facet the Master Cutter is shaping in the human heart. Two questions guide every chapter: what does this invocation reveal about the Heart of Christ, and what does it ask of mine? Each answer moves in three directions - into personal life, into the home, and into work - because the Sacred Heart was never meant to stay private.
The thirty-three facets are organized into five clusters, each preceded by a Glory Story: an Old Testament witness whose life foreshadowed these same cuts long before they had a name for them. Rahab lowering a crimson cord from a window in a city about to fall. Joseph stripped of his coat and thrown into a pit - formed in hiddenness into exactly what the moment required. Hosea buying back his unfaithful wife from an auction block. Samson pulling down the pillars. Esther walking unsummoned into the throne room. Gideon's three hundred men breaking their clay jars so the fire inside could get out.
These are not simply inspiring stories. They are a pattern - the same play God has been running since Genesis 3:15, using the most unlikely vessels at the most unexpected moments to accomplish what no human strategy could produce.
The book opens with four foundation chapters establishing the historical signal - from Leo XIII's 1899 consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart, through the elevation of the feast to a Solemnity in 1969, through Pope Francis's Dilexit Nos in 2024, to the election of Pope Leo XIV in 2025. The signal has been building for 350 years. This book is an invitation to notice it.
The book closes with two chapters on what the cutting actually produces - and three prayers of consecration, for your own heart, your home, and your work. Not decoration. Declaration.
Cut to Shine is not a book about becoming more devout. It is a book about learning to notice what the Master Cutter has always been doing - and saying yes to the process.
Deacon Jim Mullin was ordained a permanent deacon in 2020 and serves at Nativity Parish in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. He founded The Dew-Lit Way, a weekly ministry of spiritual reflection, and teaches marriage preparation drawing on the Theology of the Body. He has been married to Dana for over 48 years. This book grew from a parish night on the Sacred Heart, a notation in his diaconate notes, and the slow discovery that the Hebrew language has no word for coincidence.