A heart exchange as spiritual sustenance
Lutgardis’s claim made an inward religious experience physical in its telling: she said that Jesus had exchanged hearts with her. The point was not simply that she loved him intensely. In Christian devotional language, the heart could stand for a person’s deepest desires and will, so giving one’s heart meant placing the self in relation to God.
What the exchange was meant to explain
The story cast spiritual endurance as something received, not produced by willpower alone. If Christ’s heart had taken the place of hers, Lutgardis could understand her stamina as sustained by a love and strength beyond her own. The exchange gave an unseen conviction a concrete image: an inner life reshaped around devotion.
That is the claim’s religious logic, not a description of an anatomical event. Its force lies in treating devotion as more than a feeling—something that could change what a person wanted and how much hardship she believed she could bear. The heart becomes both the symbol of the self and the imagined place where that self is transformed.
