ADDRESS TO COMMUNITY ON DEVOTION TO THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS -- Nov 12, 2006.   Fr. Richard Tomasek, S.J.

Introduction
     My dear friends and brothers in Christ, this summer the faculty chose Devotion to the Sacred Heart as the theme of spiritual formation at the NAC this year.  Most of the popes of the 19th and 20th centuries have regarded devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the most important of all devotions because it is devotion to God’s Love which comes to us in Christ, most dramatically shown when He allowed His Heart to be pierced in death so that we might be born from his side in the water and the blood, just as Eve was born of Adam as he slept.  Devotion to the Sacred Heart summarizes all of God’s saving mysteries.  The Heart of Jesus is a triple symbol:  it represents the Eternal Love of the Trinity which burns deep in the God-Man, Jesus; it represents the human love of Jesus, infused and  transformed by divine charity; and finally it represents the affections and feelings of Jesus’ heart.  But the most awesome thing is that the Heart of Jesus is not only a symbol, it is a reality.  It is beating right now, a muscle pumping blood through His risen body, and pumping divine life into our spiritual veins and those of the whole mystical body.  It is flushed with love and other feelings right now as He looks at each one of us, and as He intercedes and offers Himself to the Father right now for the salvation of the whole human race.

     In this short address to you, I cannot lay out the history and foundations and values of devotion to the Sacred Heart.  This I have tried to do by the articles and encyclical, Haurietis Aquas, which you were given in recent weeks.  Also, soon there will be a Reserve Shelf in the Library with books which you can read to develop you knowledge.  Above all, I encourage each of you to ask Our Lord personally and specifically to reveal His love and His Sacred Heart to you so that, as St. Paul says in his 3rd chapter of Ephesians, “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and that rooted and grounded in love, you may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (3:17-19).

Diagram: King And Center of All Hearts
     You have in your hands a simple diagram which represents the centerpiece of my presentation.  Let us take a few moments to look at it.  It is, of course, the adorable Heart of Jesus, with some of the iconography that He revealed in the 17th century to  St. Margaret Mary.   His heart is crowned with the thorns of our sin, unbelief and ingratitude.  Like the burning bush Moses saw, it is aflame with divine charity, a charity whose cost is represented by the cross.  This is the fire that Jesus came to cast on the earth, the baptism of death he longed to undergo so that we might live (Lk 12:49-50), and which first transformed human hearts at Pentecost. 

     You can see the wound made by the soldier’s spear, the wound that represents Jesus total gift of himself for us, to the last drop of water and blood.  This slain heart of the Lamb is the center of devotion to His love and His heart. 
It is this wounded heart pouring forth mercy and divine life into our own hearts that we contemplate and adore, to which we are consecrated, to which we make reparation, and finally which have received the mission to proclaim to the world.  

     The seven words on the heart represent the seven facets of Jesus’ love and identity.  He is the Son of God come into the world for our salvation (Heb 10:5-14), the Spouse of his Church and of each of our souls (Eph:21-32), and the Father of our new life and the new creation in grace (Heb 2:10-13, Lk 15).  As our Spouse and Father, Jesus’ Heart is that of the Soldier who engaged our mortal enemy in combat throughout his life (Mt 4:1-11) and especially in his passion and crucifixion, dying in battle for us and now raised up to be our king and commander in spiritual warfare (Rev 20:11-16).  He is our true Friend (Jo 15:14-17), the humble Servant of God and each of us (Jo 13:1-17).  And finally, summing up all these facets of his heart, he is the Priest-Victim who offers himself on the altar of his cross and heart for the salvation of the world.  He came into the world to be not only to have mercy on us but also to divinize us—to become in us through grace what He is in Himself by nature.   

     Around his Heart you will find scriptures which describe the seven ways in which he loves the Father and mankind, and ways in which we too are called to imitate as our hearts are transformed by Him into unique embodiments of his own heart.  On the diagram you also see the three evangelical counsels which Jesus’ Heart embodies in all of his seven facets.  For instance, as the Soldier/Warrior dedicated to rescuing and saving God’s Bride, He was obedient to the Father’s mission like Moses and David, celibate like the priests and warriors in the Old Testament when they engaged in God’s worship and holy war, and poor like the patriarchs, the prophets, the exiles and the “little ones” (anawim) of Yahweh.

Where is Jesus and His Heart now?
     As men of flesh we cannot help asking of this living human heart of Jesus, where is IT?  Where is this Risen Jesus and His throbbing Sacred Heart, with respect to me?  The answer is three-fold.  First, I am IN His Heart and have always been.  In all the mysteries and experiences of Jesus’ earthly life, He was thinking of me, doing it for me, opening the path to life for me.   When we pray over the Gospels and the mysteries of Christ, let us see ourselves as the object of all His intentions, desires, words and actions.  St. Paul could confidently say: “The Son of God loved me and gave himself up for me (Gal 2:20).

     Second, Jesus is WITH ME.  Just as He was with his apostles and contemporaries as a separate person, interacting with them and receiving their interactions with Him, so Jesus is with each of us now.  Both in our prayer and in our daily life, He walks with each of us and we with Him.  
      
     Third, Jesus is IN ME.  His Heart is in my heart.  As His Holy Spirit is the Soul of my soul, Jesus’ Heart is now the Heart of my heart.  Just as the Father’s Heart and Love are in the Heart of Jesus, so Jesus’ Heart is in me.  Here He is pouring out Divine life and love into my heart and into my life and actions and mission, like the river that runs through Paradise, feeding the trees that bear fruit continually (Rev 22:1-2).  This is the reason He worked the Incarnation and the Redemption:  to live in us and transform us into God.

     Jeremiah prophesied that God would make a new covenant with Israel, saying, “I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts.” (31:31)  Ezekiel prophesied: “I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from you your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts” (36:26-27).  Of course,  it is principally in Baptism and the Eucharist, that each of us have received this new Heart of God into our heart.  In the course of the Church’s devotion to the Heart of Christ, a number of Saints report that they experienced an “exchange of hearts” with Christ, saints like St. Catherine of Siena, St. Peter Canisius and  St. Margaret Mary.  They describe it differently as one would expect, but in most of them Jesus takes their stony, cold, little  hearts and warms them in the furnace of  His own Heart and then replaces this fiery heart in their breasts or He puts his own Heart in their breasts.   Most of us will not have these mystical experiences, but all of us can expect the reality of it—that, as St. Paul tells us in so many ways:  “the love of God is poured out in our hearts” and “I live no longer I but Christ lives in me.” 

     I propose particularly this Indwelling of the Trinity and the Heart of Christ as a new image for your prayer and for the way you think about yourself and your interior life.  Sometimes we can feel so far from the Lord; this image will help us remember that Jesus is, as St. Augustine said, closer to me than I am to myself.  Most of the time we feel too weak to love and to give.  Remembering in faith that His Heart is in me, I can ask Him to be what He wants to be:  my complement and my supplement, making up for all I lack.  Then I draw from the deep well of His and the Father’s Heart, and my own heart expands and overflows, becoming  capable of loving God and neighbor, cooperating with His Will, practicing all the virtues and bearing fruit that will last in a new civilization of love. 

     Yes, each of us are called to be ec-centric, to be outside (ex or ec in Latin) myself, to have another center than my own ego.  That center is Christ and His heart.  From His heart, from His perspective and affections, we can see and serve the Father and others as the Heart of Jesus does.  “Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh….whoever is in Christ is a new creation (II Cor 5:16).

The Lord’s loving complaints
     The greatest suffering of lovers is that the gift of their love is either not received or it is not requited.  In loving us, God has in a sense made us His equals and made Himself vulnerable to our treatment of Him.  We are now His child, His bride, His friend, even His helper and consoler.  We can hurt Him, and we do. And He humbles himself by baring His wounded heart as He complains and pleads for our love.  We hear God’s heart often in the words of the prophets, for example in Hosea (c. 2 and 11) and Isaiah: “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done?  Why, when I looked for grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes” (Is 5:4). 

     The same sorrow breaks forth from the Heart of Jesus as he laments over Jerusalem:  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you refused” (Lk 13:34).  Even the Risen Jesus gently reproaches his beloved ones in the seven churches of Asia Minor.  He thanks the Christians at Ephesus for their doctrinal fidelity, patience under trial and hard work, but then says:  “Yet I hold this against you:  you have lost the love you had at first” (2:4).  And to those at Laodicea:  “You are neither hot nor cold...but lukewarm…Those whom I love, I reprove and chastise…..Behold, I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him and he with me” (3:15-20). 

     Of course, not only is Christ’s Heart wounded by our lack of love.  It is wounded by our refusal to accept His love.  It is the only life-line that will draw us out of the flood waters of our sin and despair, the only saving medicine for our mortal infection—and we refuse to be helped.  There is in us not only a stony refusal to love Him, but there is a stubborn self-sufficiency that refuses to admit our need and accept the only help there is for us.  Our Lord weeps because He sees us dying and it doesn’t have to be like this:  he has already died for the disease of our pride and our lovelessness.  We have only to receive this gift but we refuse.

     In His apparitions to St. Margaret Mary, Jesus complains of this ingratitude and indifference He receives from us, especially His closest and consecrated ones.   “Behold this Heart which has loved men so much, and has loaded them with every favor, and for this boundless love has had not merely no return of gratitude, but, on the contrary, forgetfulness, neglect and abuse, and that, at times, at the hands of those who were bound by the debt and duty of a special love” (quoted by Pope Pius XI in Miserentissimus Redemptor).  Speaking of our ingratitude for His exhausting and consuming Himself to save us, Our Lord said at another time: “and this I felt more acutely than all I suffered in My Passion, in so much that if only they had rendered me some return of love, I would have considered all I did for them as but little, and would do, if it were possible, more for them” (ibid).   
      
     We have to admit that even today, even each of us causes Jesus to suffer.  By my sins, of course.  But can’t we say that we cause Him to suffer even more when we refuse to accept His sacrifice and mercy so lovingly offered us?

     One of the consolations our Lord asks from us is “reparation.”  Pius XI says that reparation is the new element of devotion to the Sacred Heart given us through His apparitions to St. Margaret Mary.  What is reparation and how can we offer it to the Lord?  It is both complex and simple.  Simply put, reparation is offering healing to the wounds our sin, pride and ingratitude have inflicted upon the Heart of Jesus and upon the members of His Body the Church.     Our present prayer and sacrifices can transcend space and time to comfort Jesus in his own historical life, the mystics tell us.  While Peter, John and James fall asleep on Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, each of us can stay awake with Him.  We can stand at the foot of the cross, speak to Him, receive, comfort Him.

     Our prayer and sacrifices also “fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of His Body, the Church” as St. Paul tells us in Colossians 1:24.  We comfort the Risen Christ by “offering our own bodies as a living sacrifice of praise” (Rom 12:1-2), by taking up our own cross along with Jesus, being other Simons of Cyrene.   As Jesus our Priest, unlike the priests of the old covenant, offers Himself as the atoning Victim of sacrifice, so we offer reparation to Him and to His Body by humbly and loving offering our whole selves to God for His saving purposes.  Here reparation becomes almost identical with adoration, consecration and mission, the three other principle aspects of devotion to the Lord’s Heart.  In his letter “On Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Encyclical “Haurietis Aquas,” Pope Benedict XVI quoted his predecessor, John Paul II, who wrote:  “The true reparation asked by the Heart of the Savior will come when the civilization of the Heart of Christ can be built upon the ruins heaped up by hatred and violence.”
     
Practicing this Devotion to the Sacred Heart
     Let me now enumerate some of the ways we can practice devotion to the Heart of Jesus here at the North American College.

• In my private prayer, imagine and realize in faith that it is Jesus who prays to the Father in, with and through me.  I am not alone or praying by my own power.  My own dryness, distraction or disappointment can be part of the fuel of humble self-offering I can throw upon the Fire of His prayer.  Acknowledging my weakness and my need to Him moves His heart, for is He not here precisely for the poor in spirit, for those who acknowledge their need of Him?
• In Gospel-based contemplations, we would do well to keep observing, imagining and asking Jesus:  “What were you feeling and experiencing, Lord?  What was going on in your Heart in that event?  What is going on in your Heart now as you wish to invite me to encounter you here?  Pope John Paul II wrote in a letter of June 22, 1990, on the Feast of the Sacred Heart:  “To give to veneration of the Sacred Heart the place due to it in the Church, it is necessary to take up again the exhortation of St. Paul: ‘Have within you the sentiments which were in Christ Jesus (Phil 2:5).  All the gospel accounts should be reread from this perspective:  each verse, meditated with love, will reveal an aspect of the mystery hidden for centuries and now revealed to our eyes (Col 1:26).  The only Son of God, in becoming incarnate, takes a human Heart.  Through the years he passed in the midst of men, “gentle and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29), he revealed the riches of his interior life by each gesture, his looks, his words, his silences….yes, the human heart is inflamed by contact with the Heart of Christ” (in Angelus Meditations on the Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, p 105).
• At Mass, see how the Heart of Jesus is animating the priest, the members of the assembly and their offerings and prayers, the Word proclaimed.  See how the  Eucharistic Prayer and the communicating of His Body and Blood all flow from His Pierced Side.  See how our Eucharist is a prolongation in time and space of the Liturgy of the Lamb going on at this moment in Heaven.  His Heart is our Alpha and our Omega, the source and goal of the worship of heaven and earth.
• In the Divine Office, see how the One Heart of Jesus is lifted up in worship and praise to the Father through my own heart and through all the hearts and lips of His Bride here and throughout the earth.  May I make a suggestion here that we try to preserve the unity of our own hearts and voices by praying the psalms and canticles in such a way that no one stands out from the rest by speaking too fast or too loud.   Just as in a choir, the unity and beauty is broken if the singers are not listening to each other and moving together, so we will allow the One Heart of Christ to initiate and unite our Morning and Evening Prayer when we pray slowly and moderately with hearts full of praise.   As in all prayer, both private and liturgical, I must listen as well as speak, indeed listen while I speak.
• Make a Morning Offering of all my prayers, works, joys and sufferings of each day, and teach others to do the same.  The Apostleship of Prayer was begun in 1844 when Jesuit seminarians were anxious to drop their long studies and head for the missions in America and Africa.  Their superior, Fr. Gautrelet, convinced them that they could take part in the Church’s missions right here at home, doing God’s will for them in their studies and priestly formation.  They could be apostles of prayer just as the cloistered contemplatives of the Church move the hearts of missionaries and the faithful by their prayer. One remembers that joyful discovery St. Therese of Lisieux made:  “I knew that the Church had a heart and that such a heart appeared to be aflame with love.  I knew that one love drove the members of the Church to action…the apostles..the martyrs…O Jesus, at last I have found my calling: my call is love....(Div. Off. IV, 1451).  When you are a pastor of a parish, encourage your people to join this Apostleship of Prayer, to say the Morning Offering and join their lives to the great work of evangelization and service the Heart of Christ is doing in His members throughout the world.
• Enthrone the Sacred Heart in your room and your home, and teach your parishioners to do the same.  In this way, we are reminded that the Heart of Jesus is with us and in us as we live for God, whether as priests or as married people with families. 
• Recite frequently the Litany of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
• Make a habit of short prayers and invocations to the Sacred Heart such as: “Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like Yours,”  and “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in You.”
• Examine your “default image” of God.   Do you see Him as loving you, wanting to be close to you, to share all of your life?  Or is He distant, disapproving, rejecting, expecting perfection from you before He loves you?  Remember that the modern devotion to the Sacred Heart begun in the 17th century apparitions to St. Margaret Mary had as part of their purpose the overcoming of a stern Jansenistic distrust of God’s goodness and mercy. Not only is my human heart restless until it rests in Jesus.  Hans Urs von Balthasar says the reverse is also true: “Your Heart is restless until it rests in me” (Heart of the Lord, 219).  Jesus thirsts for me even more than I thirst for Him.  Francis Thompson’s poem, “Hound of Heaven”, movingly describes how “this tremendous Lover” pursues us untiringly as we flee from Him.
• Ask yourself how God is calling you, like Jesus, to have the heart of a son, the heart of a spouse, the heart of a father, the heart of a soldier, the heart of a friend, the heart of a servant, and the heart of a priest?   What are the obstacles in you to growing in these characteristics of the Heart of Jesus?
• Use every opportunity for fraternal charity, friendship and bonding—all the informal ones we have in living together, and the more formal ones we have such as corridor faith sharing and Jesus Caritas fraternal support groups.   Even Jesus felt the need and desire for a deepening relationship with his disciples and friends.  We cannot go to God alone, but only with the help and inspiration of each other.   Seeing the deep affectivity of the Heart of Christ reminds us that we too are called to be men with a heart, men with feelings, spouses to His Church.
• Acquaint oneself with the history and meaning of this devotion through reading.  Check the references to the Sacred Heart in the Catholic Catechism: ##1432, 112, 368, 478, 766, 932, 1067, 1225, 1439, 1589, 2669.  Timothy O’Donnell’s Heart of the Redeemer is the best contemporary book on the devotion (cf. pp 281-2 for his suggestions on practicing the devotion).  Check the books on the Sacred Heart Reserve shelf in our Library.
• Finally, in Our Lord’s own words:  “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”