This month of June, which is always dedicated to the Sacred Heart, (the solemnity falls on June 27 this year) also marks the 350th anniversary of the final apparition of the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in her French convent.
Pope Leo XIV has delegated Cardinal Francois Bustillo to preside at a special celebration marking the event in Paray-le-Monial.
I have often written and spoken about the Heart of Jesus because my parents inculcated in me a deep devotion to the sacred humanity of Christ.
As a family, we went to Mass on First Fridays, renewed our family consecration to the Sacred Heart each month, and a picture of our Lord with His fiery Heart hung above the television in our living room.
Even before I really understood who Jesus was, I intuited two truths about the Lord by looking at this picture.
I knew that the smiling man in the picture loved me in some absolute way and that He lived somewhere in our house, even though I could not see Him.
His love for us
Catholicism is the only religion that depicts God with His Heart blazing with love for humanity, a supernatural charity manifested through the Passion, with the Precious Blood, the crown of thorns, and the Cross as powerful signs of both suffering and victory.
In the Sacred Heart, we see the Lord coming in pursuit of us, to win our hearts and souls to His love and salvation.
There is no cold or distant God here who simply demands obeisance and subservience.
Rather, this fiery Divine Heart is at the center of the universe and the Church, a living fountain of mercy radiating life and light to those open to receive such celestial gifts!
How much the Lord wants us to come to Him with our love, sins, hopes, worries, victories, beliefs, doubts, and defeats to approach Him as we are, to let His love permeate, transform, inebriate, and save us.
He wants us to set aside our worldly and idle pursuits to spend time with Him, before the Blessed Sacrament, in Scriptural meditation, speaking in our own words or simply enveloped in the sacred silence of His radiant presence.
In this way, we come to realize that our Catholic faith is first and foremost about who we become in Christ before it is about what we do.
Fulfilling a need
What keeps so many Catholics away from Mass, away from Adoration, and away from prayer?
Admittedly, we need much faith to affirm that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass.
We need much faith to believe that the Lord hears us when we pray. God rarely speaks to a person directly; a cloud of mystery and silence surrounds our effort to pray and to apprehend the presence of the Lord. God is very quiet most of the time.
Yet, when we are faithful to Mass, Adoration, and prayer, Christ draws us into a peace, a stillness, and an awareness of His presence which we cannot fully express or even understand.
This spiritual practice requires a lifetime of discipline, commitment, and a posture of listening, a perseverance that runs so counter to our culture of instantaneous results, immediate communication, and clear reward of effort.
The seeming obscurity of God makes devotion to the Sacred Heart even more important.
Since God in His Essence is invisible, transcendent, and mysterious, how consoling to know that we can approach the Lord through the glorified humanity of His Son!
Because He became a man, Jesus can understand our thoughts, emotions, and struggles.
We find in Him the sacred door to the Father, His wounds become founts of mercy, His Heart a furnace of love where we can be consumed in the fire of the Holy Spirit.
The Sacred Heart consumes our sins, fears, sorrows, and despair.
St. Teresa of Avila, who advanced remarkably in the life of mystical contemplation, still adhered all her life to vocal prayer and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
These spiritual practices grounded her in the reality of God’s presence and His particular love for her.
In this Jubilee Year of Hope, I encourage everyone in the diocese to renew their devotion and love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Consecrate your family and home to Him. Go to Mass and Confession on First Fridays. Honor an image of the Sacred Heart in your house. Ponder the Heart of the Lord often, which is blazing with love for you. Be that mediator of mercy to those around you through charity and sacrifice.
Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!