[Reposted]

SENTIMENTALITY is the over-use of the heart, and heartlessness is its under-use. We live in a world awash in a sentimentality that covers over heartlessness. It is a brilliant seduction, the heartlessness clothed in deceptive talk of love. Thus love is cheapened and misrepresented. Warmth is really coldness and hatred.

But those are human imperfections, in which we all participate. Today, the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (see resources here), is a day to meditate on the perfection of divine love, on the ineffable, mysterious and indulgent qualities of the immense love God has for man.

Behold this heart which has loved men so much that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, to testify to them its love…

These words were spoken to a pious nun in a vision in the 17th century, when Christ opened up this new source of grace in the souls of men, another manifestation of the profound change in the relationship between man and God that occurred with the Incarnation.

Hence it is before the Incarnation of the Word, however great the prodigies God performed in favor of his people, He was always feared more than loved by them; but finally God made Himself perceptible, so to speak, by becoming man, and this Man-God has done things that go beyond anything that we can imagine to induce men to love Him.

[Fr. John Croiset, The Devotion to the Sacred Heart; TAN Books, p. 71]

He can never be entirely eradicated from the human heart, even from the most unmoved human being. He speaks to us from within, as the great French clergyman, Cardinal Pie, explained in the 19th century:

You have been born and raised in an evil century. You have participated in a great many errors of your time. Moreover, the original fall has left a profound devastation in all of us; it has since gutted everything. However, in spite of the inclinations of corrupted nature, the allurements of the senses, and the prejudices of education, your heart has remained stronger than your mind. No matter what you do, below all these evil layers which have superimposed themselves one after another through acts of sin and lies, there remains at the core of your being a nucleus, a germ, a power for good that nothing has been able to destroy. In a word, there rests in your heart a faculty and a need to love: a faculty which can never completely translate itself into action, a need which can never find its hunger totally filled, as long as your love does not move towards its infinite end. I declare and promise that it is impossible for you to genuinely place the heart which beats in your breast in opposition to the Heart of Jesus without it immediately being carried toward His Heart by this movement of love which is the essential act of religion, and which, in itself, constitutes the accomplishment of all the divine law of the Old and New Testament: “Diliges: You will love.” This is why the Lord makes His tender invitation: “My son, give me thy heart” (Prov. 23:26), as though He were saying: Willingly I set aside all others. You will easily acknowledge, My son, that my spirit is above thine. Therefore, do not enter into a useless discussion with Me. For Me, I will always easily overcome your mind, if you want to give Me your heart completely: “Præbe, fili mi, cor tuum mihi: My son, give Me thy heart.”

When you have withdrawn from Jesus Christ, you have withdrawn from your own heart. The Psalmist declared it thus-“Cor meum dereliquit me: My heart has abandoned me.” Fugitives from this better portion of yourselves, come back, come back to your heart (Is. 66:8). Lord Jesus, You are the center and the magnet of hearts. Man will never place himself again under the inspirations of his own heart, without being carried back immediately to You.

The Catholic Faith is truly the religion of hearts, and the veneration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ is the substantial summary of all Catholicism. The One who dwells in inaccessible light in heaven, wanting to draw nearer to us, to proportion Himself to us, to bring Himself to our level, at our ability, has taken our nature, our flesh. He made Himself man, and being man, He had a heart. And we also, although brought out of nothingness and formed from mud, we have received and carry in ourselves a heart. Here is the Creator and the creature, heaven and earth, Heart to heart. All religion is summed up in this Heart-to-heart confrontation of God and man. Let us pray with the Church the invitatory of one of the most ancient offices of the Sacred Heart: “Deus ergo nos apponentem Cor suum, venite adoremus: God, in the Person of Jesus Christ, His Son, disposing His Heart to us, let us come and adore Him.” Cardinal Pie;  Homily for the Closing of a Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” VI, 609-614

The devotion to the Sacred Heart involves more than piety. It is an exercise in militancy, as Atila S. Guimarães and Marian T. Horvat explain in this article:

In today’s stress-filled, dollar-dominated and time-scarce society, we easily become overwhelmed by our daily affairs and tumultuous human relationships.

Paradoxically, Our Lord decided to give an eternal supreme and loving intimacy with Him not when all of society was ordered to His Law in the Middle Ages, but at a time in history when the heart of man, influenced by rationalism and the Cartesian world view, was becoming cold and distant.

In the mid-17th Century, Our Lord appeared to a simple 24-year-old nun of the Order of the Visitation of Our Lady at Paray-le-Monial. “Behold this Heart which has so much loved men,” He said, and through St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, He invited the whole world to return to this divine intimacy and friendship by means of devotion to His Sacred Heart.

It is a message of mercy and love. But it is much more. At this moment in history, it is interesting to look more closely at the invitations of the Sacred Heart to man. For in this message, there is a whole world-view of history, a reiteration of the social teachings of the Church, a call to Catholic Militancy, a rejection of Jansenism, an affirmation of the goodness of abundance and coherence of superfluity, and an invitation to become the Apostles of the Latter Times.

Warriors, filled with the inner strength of which St. Paul spoke, have placed the Sacred Heart on their shields. Beneath great strength, there is this sublime tenderness.

For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named,

That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened by his Spirit with might unto the inward man, That Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts; that being rooted and founded in charity, You may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth: To know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God. Now to him who is able to do all things more abundantly than we desire or understand, according to the power that worketh in us;

To him be glory in the church, and in Christ Jesus unto all generations, world without end. Amen.

[From the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians]

May we honor this throne of love forever.

O Heart of love, I put all my trust in You; for I fear all things from my own weakness, but I hope for all things from Your goodness.

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