Msgr. Frank Lane, administrator at Columbus Sacred Heart and St. John the Baptist churches, gave the following presentation at the Sacred Heart Congress on Saturday, Nov. 4 at Westerville St. Paul the Apostle Church.
In the 17th century, 19 years before the appearance of the Sacred Heart to Margaret Mary Alacoque in Paray-le Monial in the chapel of the Visitation Sisters, Blaise Pascal, a renowned mathematician (invented Calculus) and scientist (proved the possibility of the existence of a vacuum), made the famous statement, “The heart has reasons of its own.”
In his great conversion testimony, he says. “Fire, fire, fire, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob – not the God of the scientists or the philosophers but the God, Jesus Christ, my God, God’s Word.!” The great revelation of the Sacred Heart to Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1672 exposed the “Fire” of Pascal’s conversion as an encounter with the God, Jesus Christ.
The obscurity of the hypostatic Union, the meaning of the incarnation, could never again be reduced to an intellectual exploration, a theological proposition. After the events in the Visitation Chapel of Paray-le-Monial, the reality of the incarnate Lord could now only be understood by the human heart as the presence of the fire of God’s love.
The 17th century was inundated with theological controversies about grace, about what it meant for God to love humanity. “Grace” as a theological term simply means love. The controversies between the Dominicans, the Jesuits and the Jansenists were simply about “how does God love us and how does he save us.”
Try as they did, the intellectual bantering of the three protagonists could not solve the great question. They could not solve the question because only God and God alone knew the answer. It was His secret, and he chose to share that secret with Margaret Mary Alacoque and Claude Colombiere.
He did not share it with the theologians but with the hearts of those who knew the secret of divine revelation, who knew that secret as love, sacrifice and surrender. The heart of God spoke to the open and willing human hearts that could know and understand this Word of truth in their inner life of faith. – in their humility, their obedience to the Church, their openness and love for others.
This does not mean that the devotion to the Sacred Heart rejects in any way the great theological traditions of the Church, it simply explains those traditions and makes them available to the interiority of people everywhere and at all times. It is oriented toward conversion. Conversion goes deeper than the intellect, it takes root in the human heart. As Pascal reminds us, it is Fire!
Sacred Scripture has always acknowledged that within the world and within the human person there is a presence that always remains mysterious and yet powerful and active within the creatures of God’s handiwork. Scripture chose to call it “the Heart” – a center of power and of mystery. In the book of Jonah, the Lord speaks of the inaccessibility of the depth of the great seas. He calls that the “heart of the seas.” The Hebrew word is “Leb” meaning the center of being, the source of life flowing through the beings of the earth. (from this comes the German word ”leben,” i.e. life) The great prophet Jeremiah acknowledges this mystery when he says, “Nothing is more tortuous than the human heart. Who can understand it?” St Paul reminds us that “In the time of judgment, the Lord will expose the hidden counsels of the heart.”
Christianity has always known that the secret of the depth and source of faith lies deep in the mystery of the divine. On the cross, the heart of the Lord was pierced and from there flowed blood and water, the source of the sacramental life of the Church and thus the source of eternal life. Eight hundred years ago, St. Gertrude the Great grappled with the mystery of the “Heart of the Lord.” In Book II of the Herald of Divine Love she described her vision of the heart of Christ.
St. Bonaventure in the 13th century in his Vitis Mystica says regarding the piercing of the Lord’s heart on the cross, “Flowing from the secret abyss of our Lord’s heart as from a fountain, this stream gave sacraments of the Church the power to confer the life of grace.” Mechtilde of Helfta, Gertrude’s teacher and guide, said Jesus appeared to her and commanded her to love him ardently, to honor his Sacred Heart in the Blessed Sacrament as much as possible.
But it seems the time was not yet ripe for this understanding to take permanent root in the life of the Church. As in many of the great mysteries of the faith, the Church needs time to ponder and assimilate these truths. The turbulent later days of the 17th century seem to have been the time the Lord chose for this truth of the nature of his son to become more widely known and to manifest itself in the liturgical and devotional life of the Church.
The clarity of the feast comes from Jesus himself in his revelations to Margaret Mary. He spoke to Margaret Mary of his heart as an exchange of love between himself and his people. We might ask ourselves what this might mean. What does it mean to love?
Our modern culture has obfuscated the definition of love to such an extent that it often carries very little real meaning. However, deep in the Scripture and deep in the experience of those who have followed and drawn close to the Lord, there is a meaning and there is wonder in the word “love.”
We can search the Scripture and find therein the foundation of all love. The revelation of God as Trinity from Genesis to John opens itself to us as a mystery but a mystery that tells us the love of Father, Son and Spirit is so strong that it binds three into One, the One God, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier are a Divine Being bound together in a relationship so powerful that the three are one, whole, complete and on fire.
Genesis then tells us that we are created in the Image of this one God. It therefore tells us in more contemporary philosophical language, we, in some way, participate in his Being, his activity, we too are created to be relational, created for a great and burning love that unites us to those we love and who love us. Even post-modern philosophy has belatedly discovered that no person is whole without loving another. For those of us who are priests, this means loving the other through others in a very distinct and unique way.
So then, what does it mean to love another, the other, to love God? Here is where the power and the mystery of the Sacred Heart speaks to us most profoundly and most deeply.
To Jesus mounted on the great symbol of the depth and the power of love, the cross, it means to give everything that I have for the love of others. For him it meant emptying himself of all that he was and all that he had for your sake and for mine. Falling silent on the cross, the Word even seemed to have lost his Father. Let us listen to the dying Christ in words given us by the 6th century poet Romanos Melodos. “I descended as low as being cast its shadow, I looked into the abyss and cried, “Father where are you?” But I heard only the everlasting, ungovernable storm … And when I looked from the immeasurable world to the eye of God, it was an empty socket, without foundation, that stared back at men, and eternity rested on the chaos, gnawing at it, ruminating.”
Because of Christ, we will never experience that terrible silence, that awful sense of abandonment as deeply as did Jesus on the cross. We may well suffer, but we will always know that chaos has been overcome and the abyss rendered impotent against the power of the Resurrection. For us, love will always mean that the well-being of the other is more important to me than my own, as our well-being was more important to the Heart of the Lord than his own.
For us as believers, this takes on a very specific meaning. The Heart of Jesus asks us for our hearts for him but also for those whom he loves. Our human relationships become an expression of that love, especially when it becomes difficult, when we feel interior suffering and sadness, disappointment, senses of failure and inadequacy.
In each of these trials, the wounded Heart of the Lord speaks to us from the Cross – “Love them as I have loved you.” Suffer for them knowing that the mystery of resurrection and redemption often lies buried in the depth of our pain as it did for me on Calvary. Those whom the Heart of the Lord has loved unto its own vast emptying, they are worth of our pain – their well-being is more important than our happiness.
How do we as mere humans live at this depth where joy and pain encounter each other in our journey of salvation? How do we accept this strange mixture of sacrifice and joy? Only in the mystery of the gift of Jesus to his people do we find strength and courage.
In many ways – the grace of sacraments we have received, the discovery that we are loved more than we can ever love, the constant union of ourselves with the suffering but risen Lord – this we can experience in the Blessed Sacrament – the Eucharist, the Heart of Jesus among us and within us. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity says of the Eucharist, “Isn’t that a piece of heaven?”
We are united with the Jesus through whom we were created and by whom we are saved. That union, once free from the shadows of time and human consciousness, is our eternal life. We are almost there each time we approach the altar, each time we consume the host and drink the cup, each time we share that gift of “fire” with those the Lord has given us to love.
On this very special day when we celebrate the Sacred Heart of the Lord, we can together be the strength, the courage and the hope that others need and seek. We may travel our paths alone through life, but that loneliness is assuaged when we encounter each other in the source of human love and companionship, when we encounter each other in the Heart of Jesus.