A Heart After the Sacred Heart

This Sunday I went to our local Traditional Latin Mass. I would not say I am a regular attender of it, but every so often I like to attend, especially when my schedule doesn’t allow me to attend my usual Mass time. This was one such weekend.

Locally, the only place to attend the TLM is at Sacred Heart. And as it just so happened, this weekend the bishops consecrated the whole country to the Sacred Heart. And wouldn’t you know it, the Mass today was for...the Sacred Heart.

Maybe God is telling me something.

Now before anyone gets carried away, I am not claiming a private revelation. I am not expecting an apparition in my coffee cup. But there are moments when the Lord has a way of putting the same thing in front of us often enough that eventually we are forced to pay attention. A church named Sacred Heart. A national consecration to the Sacred Heart. The feast of the Sacred Heart. At a certain point one begins to suspect that the subject deserves a little reflection.

The devotion to the Sacred Heart has never really gone out of style, though at times it has been misunderstood. Some see it as an old-fashioned devotion, the sort of thing one finds on prayer cards tucked away in a grandmother's missal. Yet the Sacred Heart is not a relic of a bygone age. It is a reminder of the central truth of Christianity: God loves us.

That statement is so familiar that it risks becoming meaningless. We hear it so often that we cease to marvel at it. Yet every crucifix hanging in every Catholic church proclaims the same reality. The Heart of Christ is not a poetic image. It is the Heart that loved enough to be pierced. The Heart that loved enough to suffer. The Heart that loves still.

And perhaps that is why the Sacred Heart matters so much today. We live in an age that speaks constantly about love while often seeming unsure what love actually is. Love becomes confused with desire. Love becomes confused with affirmation. Love becomes confused with whatever makes us feel good in a particular moment. The result is that many people spend their lives searching for love while running from the very sacrifices that make love possible.

The Sacred Heart reveals something different. It reveals a love that gives rather than takes. A love that remains faithful. A love that pours itself out completely for the beloved.

Which brings me, perhaps not coincidentally, to my book Blessed Are the Pure: Saintly Wisdom for the Month of June.

June is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and yet when most people hear the word "purity," they immediately think of rules. They think of restrictions. They think of what Christianity says "no" to. The saints understood the matter differently. Purity of heart is not primarily about what we avoid. It is about what we become.

When Our Lord says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," He is speaking of a heart transformed by grace. A heart capable of loving rightly. A heart no longer divided between God and lesser things. In other words, a heart that begins to resemble His own.

The saints featured in Blessed Are the Pure understood that purity is not an end in itself. It is preparation for love. The purpose of chastity is not merely avoiding sin. The purpose is to become free enough to love God and neighbor as we ought.

Perhaps that is what makes the Sacred Heart such an important devotion for our time. It reminds us not merely that Christ loves us, but what that love looks like. It gives us a model against which we can measure our own hearts.

As our nation has once again been consecrated to the Sacred Heart, the challenge before us is not simply to recite a prayer and move on. Consecration always demands conversion. If we wish Christ to reign in our country, He must first reign in our hearts.

And if we want hearts like His, we would do well to spend some time contemplating the Sacred Heart itself.

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