It was to Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), a humble
Visitandine of the monastery at Paray-le Monial, that Christ chose to reveal
the desires of His Heart and to confide the task of imparting new life to the
devotion. There is nothing to indicated that this contemplative religious had
known the devotion prior to the revelations, or at least that she had paid any
attention to it.
In December 1673, during Christ’s first apparition to St. Mary
Margaret, he gave her this message, as she later recounted: “My Sacred Heart is
so intense in its love for men, and for you in particular, that not being able
to contain within it the flames of its ardent charity, they must be transmitted
through all means.”
Jesus showed Himself to Sr. Margaret Mary in a way that she
could understand – with a human heart aflame with love. He told her that He
would be present in a special way to those devoted to His Sacred Heart and that
His presence would lead to peace in families, the conversion of sinners,
blessings in abundance and perseverance when death was near.
To know God’s love in Jesus and to share it with others is the
central message of the gospels. There has been no change in this message for
two thousand years. Ways of explaining our faith may change, forms of prayer
may be altered, certain devotions may come in and out of style, but at the core
is the loving heart of Jesus, which remains constant and true.
The message of the Sacred Heart is one of God’s deep and
intimate love for us. Devotion to the Sacred Heart is an integral part of our
Catholic heritage because it helps us to live the basic Christian message of
faith and love.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart Today
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has suffered cardiac
arrest in recent decades. This decline of devotion is all the more striking
because of its pre-eminence in the first half of the 20th century, when so many
Catholic families had a picture of Jesus and his Sacred Heart displayed in
their homes, and when Thursday night holy hours and first Fridays proliferated
in parishes.
Like many forms of heart disease, such atrophy could have been
prevented through a healthy diet—in this case, Scripture and tradition. The
heart is a powerful metaphor in the Bible, what Karl Rahner, S.J., has called
a “primordial word.” It signifies the wellspring of life, the totality of
one’s being. The prophet Ezekiel, for instance, records God’s promise to change
Israel’s “heart of stone” into a “heart of flesh,” while John’s Gospel
gives the heart its most profound scriptural expression: Jesus’ heart is the
source of living water, of rest for the Beloved Disciple, of the church and its
sacraments, of doubting Thomas’s faith.
In today’s love-starving world, how we need to follow the
example of Jesus Christ in His unspeakable love for us. If there is one
adjective that describes the modern world, this world is a loveless world. This
world is a selfish world. This world is so preoccupied with space and time that
it gives almost no thought to eternity and the everlasting joys that await
those who have served God faithfully here on earth.
How do we serve God faithfully? We serve Him only as faithfully
as we serve Him lovingly, by giving ourselves to the needs of everyone whom God
puts into our lives. No one reaches heaven automatically. Heaven must be dearly
paid for. The price of reaching heaven is the practice of selfless love here on
earth.
That is what devotion to the Sacred Heart is all about. It is
the practice of selfless love toward selfish people. It is giving ourselves to
persons that do not give themselves to us. In all of our lives, God has placed
selfish persons who may be physically close to us, but spiritually are
strangers and even enemies. That is why God places unkind, unjust, even cruel
people into our lives. By loving them, we show something of the kind of love
that God expects of His followers.
This a a healthy Heart
beats 72 times a minute, for thousand three hundred twenty times an
hour, one hundred three thousand six hundred eighty times a day, almost 38
million times a year, over two point six billion in the course of a lifetime.
Fist size, the human heartbeats powerfully and durably. It must be sternly
enough to contract to send flesh blood to the entire body, elastic enough to
collect oxygen to blood… too much softness or hardness of heart and we can die.
Only a healthy heart: strong and soft can give and receive life and blood. May
the Sacred heart heal our coronary infirmities, AMEN.
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