The Sacred Heart
How does the human brain wrap itself around the eternal and infinite love of God for His creation? How can can we even begin to comprehend the depth of love in Christ’s wounded heart as he pours Himself out for us sinners at Calvary?
The truth is, we can’t. The saints and the mystics may catch glimpses, but we humans see all things divine, as Saint Paul said, through a glass darkly (cf. 1 Corinthians 13).
Fortunately, those saints and mystics have given us a wonderful point of focus for the “wonders of His love” – the Sacred Heart. The old Catholic Encyclopedia has an exhaustive article on the meaning of the devotion. The crux (if you will pardon the pun) is something like this:
[W]orship … although directed to the material Heart … does not stop there: it also includes love, that love which is its principal object, but which it reaches only in and through the Heart of flesh, the sign and symbol of this love. …
Hence, in the devotion, there are two elements: a sensible element, the Heart of flesh, and a spiritual element, that which this Heart of flesh recalls and represents.
In other words: humans, being physical creatures, can most easily understand and focus on physical things in our quest to understand the spiritual. Devotion to the physical “fleshy” Heart of Jesus inexorably leads us to true contemplation of the Sacred Heart, the source of His overflowing love.
Since God is love (1 John 4:8), devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus must ultimately bring us to closer devotion of the totality of God. As Jesus is both true man and true God, so must His Sacred Heart must encompass both the cardiac muscle in His chest and the totality of His divine love.
There’s something else here, though. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a wounded heart, a broken heart, a heart that comprehends all of our emotional hurt and transforms it on Calvary to a sacrifice pleasing to God the Father.
Come, let us adore Christ’s Sacred Heart, wounded for love of us.
(Invitatory Antiphon, Office of Readings for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart)
We are healed in that love.
Today on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, it would be a good time to remind ourselves of the infinite love He bears for His poor creatures, perhaps by use of one of the traditional prayers or something like it.
O Sacred Heart of Jesus, pour out Your benedictions upon Your Holy Church, upon Your priests, and upon all Your children. Sustain the just, convert the sinners, assist the dying, deliver the souls in purgatory, and extend over all hearts the sweet empire of Your love. Amen.
It should be obvious that the devotion to the Sacred Heart is similar to the devotion to the Divine Mercy, which I have discussed several times previously.
They are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, we have this picture here on the left hanging in our dining room, which combines the two into a single, powerful image.
Many parishes, including the one we now attend, have the image of Divine Mercy hanging above a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
For the Divine love of the Sacred Heart is the Divine Mercy:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life (John 3:16).