A Month for a Heart Most Worthy of Love
Every year, as the Church departs Eastertide, Ascensiontide, and the Octave of Pentecost, she is invariably, and ever so briskly, carried by the great procession of vernal festivals into the Month of the Sacred Heart. But why does the Church dedicate a feast day, and even a whole month, to honor, in particular, the Sacred Heart of Jesus? It seems and is very sensible to celebrate the great achievements of our glorious Savior: His incarnation, His crucifixion, His resurrection from the dead, and His triumphant ascension. But why did Our Lord ask St. Margaret Mary to dedicate a feast day to, of all things, one of his bodily organs?
Anatomically, the heart is the principle of life in a man. Without the heart, a man cannot pump that oxygen-rich blood which makes the continued functioning of his body possible. The Heart of Jesus, keeping alive the humanity of our beloved Savior, enabled Him to win for us eternal life. It is the same heart which pumped the Precious Blood that, being offered on the altar of the cross, bought us our salvation. Moreover, as the Apostle of the Sacred Heart, Father Gallifet, has noted, “the heart is the origin and the seat of all the affections and especially that of love.” The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the seat of Jesus’s love, the most wonderful of God’s gifts. Anyone who disbelieves this has only to look at the miraculous experiences of the saints. The heart is that organ which, pierced by an angel, inflamed the affections of an ecstatic St. Theresa of Avila. It was that organ which, enlarged within the chest of St. Philip Neri, physically displayed the great extent of love borne within that holy man. The Heart of Jesus now sits enthroned in the breast of our great King at the right hand of God the Father in all his majesty.
In short, the Heart of Jesus is the source of the affection, the love, that motivated Christ’s sacrifice for us; it made possible the shedding of the blood of the Lamb that was the price of our salvation; and it is the heavenly engine that still, today, houses the great tenderness our loving Savior bears towards all men. And if the heart truly is the principle of life in a man, then the Heart of Jesus is truly the principle of life in every Christian. The Heart of Jesus, then, is everything to the Catholic.
If, then, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the very principle and center of the Christian life, what are the attributes of this most divine of heavenly objects? St. Alphonsus Liguori ascribes three qualities to this most amiable of hearts, three qualities that could not but render it the worthiest object of our love: its generosity, its faithfulness, and its gratitude.
A loving heart is a generous heart. Whoever are those people in our lives that demand our affection the most, we see that they have been the most generous to us. What mother rocking you and singing lullabies during your infancy, what father taking you upon his knee to impart wisdom, what devoted spouse bearing patiently with all your faults was not also supremely generous with everything they had? They sacrificed their time, their effort, their dreams, their desires, their very bodies all for your good, all so that you might enjoy life’s most sublime treasure: to be loved.
And who could not see that the love contained within the Heart of Jesus is generous beyond all imagining! Before you ever were, the love of Jesus’s heart chose to bring you into existence knowing the insults and indignities you would heap upon Him by your sins. Unlike us, often foreswearing generosity to a brother upon observing the most trivial of perceived slights, Jesus decided, instead of withholding further favors on account of our sins, to pile them up, one after the other. He came down from heaven, leaving behind the splendor of His divinity, to become lowly like us, to show us how to live happily and how to walk in virtue. And when we rejected His salutary teachings and gave Him up to revilement, rather than drawing back, His heart poured forth an even greater love upon us, compounding His previous generosity, magnifying it and intensifying it. He mounted the wood of the cross and became for us the tree of life. Even when we despised His generous, loving Heart to the point of puncturing it with an executioner’s lance, rather that raining down fire from heaven, it rained down upon us water and Blood, Baptism and the Eucharist, for our sanctification.
What witness to such unspeakable generosity could not love a Heart so tender? Yet the love of Christ’s Sacred Heart does not content itself only with an inexhaustible store of generosity, but also with an infinite patience, an unwavering faithfulness. The Heart of Jesus remains faithful to us even when, by the measure of justice, we should be abandoned to suffer the rightful consequences of our sins. Like a parent who, enduring the disrespectful rebellion of their adolescent child, sits dutifully by, waiting for the destructive storm to pass from their son’s breast, so too does this blessed Heart bear with our iniquities. But not only does this Heart allow us to come back when we’ve offended it, it actually pursues us, runs after us, hunts us down with an all-consuming ardor that would shame the obsessive infatuation of even the most delusional, hopeless romantic. The Sacred Heart of Jesus remains true in its pursuit of our cold, ungrateful hearts until the very moment we give up our spirit to judgement. What other lover, having been treated so cruelly, so maliciously, would subject itself to such repeated rejection, such degrading humiliation? Only the faithful Heart of Jesus carries such love inside it.
But perhaps the most remarkable attribute of this divine Heart, the greatest excess beyond the dictates of just requital, is the gratitude shown to those who display even the most perfunctory, constrained tokens of recompense for its love. Whenever one of us receives a sign of love or generosity, we rush to return the favor to free ourselves from the obligation of repayment. But when the wonderful Heart of Jesus perceives that modicum of attention required from us, that miniscule, pathetic acknowledgement of its presence, it compensates that soul with uncountable blessings in eternity even besides the joys of an earthly life lived in friendship with God. How absurd it seems for a God, who lacks nothing, to show gratitude to a wretched creature, and a creature, at that, who offers nearly constant betrayal and heartbreak and only very rarely shows any signs of affection! Yet this is the love of the Sacred Heart, a radical, incomprehensible love unlike what we could ever hope to receive from anyone but Jesus.
St. Alphonsus Liguori, reflecting upon his duties as a bishop, remarked that “the only object and care of preachers towards their hearers ought to be to recommend to them constantly, and to inflame their hearts with the love of Jesus Christ.” And what more could inflame the hearts of Christians with love for Christ than to think on the great love Christ bears towards them? This is the purpose of Sacred Heart Month: to commemorate the love Jesus has for us. What greater object of celebration could even be imagined? When we meditate on the profoundly tender, selfless, generous, faithful, and even grateful love borne by the Sacred Heart, we cannot help but grow in our love for Jesus. So, during this month’s memorial of the love of Jesus, let us ask ourselves, along with St. Alphonsus, “What heart among all hearts can be found more worthy of love than the Heart of Jesus?”
