Sr. Jeanne d’Arc Kernion, OSB | June 16, 2023

With today’s feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we conclude a long list of solemnities that began with the most important one, the feast of Easter, and how suitable to have this feast now. Though there will be other solemnities in the months that follow, this feast of Christ’s love is our warm introduction to the long space of ordinary time.

The feast was named a solemnity by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical of 1899. This was close to the time that our parents were quite young, which is possibly the reason many of us grew up with that lovely picture of Christ, with his red cape, holding in his hand his heart with a crown of thorns around it, on the wall in our home.

It is a bit puzzling that it took so long for the feast to be so honored, for we hear about God’s love as far back as the Old Testament. There are innumerable references to it there. Today’s quote from Deuteronomy, “the Lord set his heart on you and chose you” is just one small example. The Psalms we pray each day hold so many referrals, the most noticeable one in Psalm136, as we repeat over and over in every stanza, “God is lasting love.”

This emphasis continues in the New Testament, where we learn about the greatest enactment of love, Christ dying for us on the cross. We are reminded in today’s gospel of this essence of God’s love for us when we hear the words: “We know love by this, that He laid down his life for us,”

True, the word “heart” is seldom mentioned. But we know that when we speak of love, we are talking about the heart. This reference to heart when talking about God’s love comes in the writings of the mystics, Saints Gertrude, Mechtilde, and Bridget, to name a few. Mechthilde and Gertrude became ardent devotees and promoters of Jesus’ Heart, the subject of many of their visions. Gertrude even had the privilege of seeing Our Lord’s Sacred Heart. The idea of hearing the Heartbeat of God was very important to many medieval saints who nurtured devotion to the Sacred Heart.

This continued in later centuries with Saint John Eudes, whose most striking teaching on Devotion to the Sacred Heart – as indeed of his whole teaching on the spiritual life – is that Christ is its centre at all times.

Perhaps the best known spokesperson for us of this devotion is Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, who was beatified in1864 and canonized in 1920. She developed prayers of devotion which are still familiar. From her devotion came the Consecration to the Sacred Heart, the First Friday devotions, the Sacred Heart scapulars. No doubt her canonization brought much of the devotion with which so many of us grew up.

If you are wondering, “Why so much history?” It is meant to remind us of how long this feast has been embedded in our belief that the love it celebrates is not only ages old, but is from the beginning of time. Always, God has loved us and held us in His heart.

So we rejoice in it in a special way today. As we do so, we remember that love should be returned, so we renew our love for our loving God. As we grow in that, we pray that it may be such that it can be said of us as Christ did of St. Gertrude, “In the heart of Gertrude you will find Me.” How wonderful – today’s feast bringing Christ more into our hearts! And our showering that love on all around us!