Solemnity of the Sacred Heart

Scripture Readings: Hos 11:1-4 8-9, Eph 3:8-19, Jn 19:31-37

“Courage, take heart.” Norman Rockwell, one of America’s best-known artists, had a gift for painting familiar, often nostalgic views of everyday life. One of his paintings shows a disheveled school girl sitting on a bench outside the principal’s office. She is sporting a big black eye and an even bigger grin. It’s obvious she has been in a fist fight, and the grin indicates that she has more than held her own, perhaps even trouncing the male class bully. It’s all there: torn clothes, scuffed shoes, mussed up hair, blood clinging to her knees, but most of all that sweeping grin across her face. She had courage, she fought and won! The bruises don’t matter. The marks of her wounds are purple ribbons of honor. Her bodily pain fades before her inner satisfaction and happiness.

That’s a good image for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He faced his ordeal with courage and rose victorious! Perhaps dried blood and mud were still clinging to his brutally wounded body. The marks of the nails that torn through his hands and feet were there for all to see. The place where a lance pierced his side and penetrated his heart was wide and deep. But he more than held his own. His wounds are badges of honor. He fought and won. When he rose, there was a radiance in his eyes and a smile on his lips, (maybe even a grin).

St. Paul compares life to being in a fight. Before he was martyred he wrote, “I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith. Now a crown of righteousness awaits me.” Jesus comes to give us his heart, his courage. That’s what the word courage means, from two Latin words, cor & age, meaning to take heart. Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” And to the woman suffering from a hemorrhage for twelve years, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” And to the disciples in a stormed tossed boat, “Take heart, it is I; have no fear.” And to Paul in prison, “Take courage, you must bear witness also at Rome.” In the gift of the Eucharist Jesus does even more. He says, “Take my heart so that your heart may be rooted and grounded in my love.”

Of themselves, the disciples of Jesus were fainthearted. St. Peter cringed with fear and fled at the mere voice of a maid who identified him during the trial of Jesus. Later, he received courage from Christ. He suffered and died for Christ by being crucified upside down.

The canvas on which our own stories are being painted is incomplete. For us the fight is still on, the bully is upon us, be it the devil, human opposition, or our own temptations. Whatever threatens us, we can take heart from Jesus who loves us, like a tender, caressing parent lifting a child up to his or her cheek.

Yes, the naked, bleeding, crucified Christ suffers with us. Let us take heart from his love. When we have fought the good fight, he will wipe away all tears from our eyes. Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things pass away. Instead, there will be a sweeping grin on our faces.

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart

Scripture Readings: Ezek. 34:11-16; Rm. 5:5b-ll; Lk 15:3-7

When Basil Hume was still abbot of Ampleforth, he wrote of his anguish at having to tell his community that someone was leaving. He had to explain that his heart just went out of it, was no longer motivating what he was living. This monk was merely going through the motions and becoming less and less alive. And indeed, the heart makes all the difference. If someone puts his heart into even a mundane task, it is lifted up to a new level. We see the person. There is the full congruence between the inner and outer action. We call that simplicity, oneness, singleness, purity of heart. The person can say, It is who I am.

Several years ago, I participated in a meeting of Christian and Buddhist monks at one of their sites in California. I was going to preside at our mass, but some Buddhists would be in attendance. I was wondering and worrying about what sort of a blessing I could give them if they approached at communion. The Buddhist novice I was speaking with said, Don’t worry. If it comes from the heart it will be accepted. That simple statement has remained with me as a real test of where what I am doing or saying is coming from. When something is said or done from the heart, it creates a sacred space. What I do can only be offered and there is no certainty that it will be accepted. The acceptance completes the offer but cannot be manipulated or coerced. The narratives of our lives are interwoven with episodes of love offered from our hearts: met with acceptance or with indifference and rejection. We quickly learn to recoil into guarded zones to withdraw from the vulnerability that can often accompany our attempts to be who we are.

Our readings seem to be written in large and bold letters to get our attention. But they seem extreme and exaggerated, unreal and disproportionate responses to fairly prosaic experiences. Why get all excited about one lost sheep and put the other ninety-nine in jeopardy by abandoning them in the desert? Why have this big feast and invite the whole neighborhood when you really ought to just reprimand this little troublemaker? It seems easy to just write all this off as a bit of fantasy. It is hard to take it seriously as a revelation of who God is. It is so disproportionate to our sense of responsibility, justice, and even sanity. We recoil from entering into a world governed by the infinite demands of the heart. We prefer something more reasonable. We are more comfortable with a judging and rewarding and punishing God (who is supporting our world constructions and systems). We are content with a God who is sometimes a benevolent patron, dropping blessings and good things into our laps like a celestial Santa Claus. The whole scene of Christ’s dying for us can be safely interpreted as a morbid exchange in the past which has now cleared the stage for us to get a free pass into the theater of life. God proved his love for those able to accept what He is offering. His love is manifested and communicated precisely where we are unable to imagine anything loveable, acceptable, or worthwhile in our selves. This is who God is. I myself will look after and tend my sheep. I myself will pasture my sheep. I myself will give them rest… the lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up. In revealing who His is, God reveals ourselves to ourselves. This is who I am. His heart and self are in his manifest love for us, manifested in the love incarnated in the life and flesh of his son. We can recoil from this gift and revelation, or we can have our own heart pierced by the reality of God’s love and His Spirit being poured into them. It is of the very nature of the Spirit to be poured, to overflow, to enflame. It is who the Spirit is. God does not pour His Spirit into bottles or vaults. Only the heart can contain it and be contained by it. His Spirit changes those who accept him into … Spirit.

It is just honest to admit that we are reluctant receivers and that this great reality has not yet enflamed our lives or turned our hearts to flesh. That we are loved with the very reality of God is unthinkable and unreasonable. We have no need of repentance. We will stick with the ninety-nine that we can count and count on. No need to go after one that is lost. Be satisfied with what you have. Ignore that echo in your heart that says you have lost what is most precious and have become lost yourself — even while shepherding the ninety-nine tame and respectable evidences of well-being.

God’s love has been made flesh and incarnate in our world. It is there to be found, even as it hunts us out in our preferences for deviation and isolation. Love doth make fools of us all. Even God. But it is who we are and worth leaving and even losing our own “selves” for the sake of our real self being saved by the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart

Scripture Readings: Deut 7:6-11; 1 Jn 4:7-16; Mt 11:25-30

The American artist, Norman Rockwell, had a gift for painting familiar, often nostalgic views of everyday life. One of his works shows a disheveled schoolgirl sitting on a bench outside the principal’s office. She is sporting a big black eye and an even bigger grin. It’s obvious she has been in a fight, and her smile indicates she has more than held her own against the foe. It is all there: torn clothes, scuffed shoes, mussed up hair, bruised arms and legs, but most of all that sweeping grin across her face. She had courage, she fought and won! The bruises don’t matter. The marks of her wounds are purple ribbons of honor. Her bodily pain fades away compared to her inner satisfaction and happiness.

That’s not a bad image for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He faced his ordeal with courage and was victorious! After the crucifixion dried blood and mud clung to his brutally wounded body. The marks of the nails that tore through his hands and feet were there for all to see. The place where a lance pierced his side and penetrated his heart was open and deep. But at the resurrection his wounds became badges of honor. He loved, he fought and he won. There was a radiance about him, a transfiguration, a victorious smile, maybe even a grin.

St. Paul compares life to being in a fight: “I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith. Now a crown of righteousness awaits me” (2 Tim 4:7).Courage comes from two Latin words, cor – age, meaning to take heart, to act bravely. Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take heart, your sins are forgiven.” And to the woman suffering from a hemorrhage for twelve years, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” And to the disciples in a stormed tossed boat he said, “Take heart, it is I; have no fear.” And to Paul in prison, “Take courage, you must bear witness also at Rome.“

The first time St. Paul’s life was threatened, he was afraid. He hid in a basket and was secretly let down over the walls of Damascus during the night so that he could flee unharmed. Years later he courageously suffered persecution by the strength of Christ’s love for him. He was scourged and beaten with rods, shipwrecked, almost stoned to death, often without food, and he frequently suffered cold, sleepless nights. Yet, after all that he could say, “Our light, momentary afflictions are preparing us for an eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor 4:17).

The canvas on which our stories are being painted is incomplete. We are still in the fight against the devil, our own temptations, and human opposition to what is true, good and beautiful. But let us draw courage from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Dom Columban Bissy, who was abbot of Melleray, our monastery in France, entered Bricquebec in 1937. When the Nazis invaded France they occupied his monastery and he was taken prisoner of war. Adding insult to injury, the Nazis defiantly put their swastika flag of Hitler right in front of a statue of the Sacred Heart. Four years later the Allies landed on the beaches of France and began driving the Germans back. As they advanced toward the monastery of Bricquebec the Germans had to retreat from the Abbey in haste. They took down their flag and fled. It happened on the feast of the Sacred Heart.

Let us take courage from Jesus’ love for us, so that when we have fought the good fight there will be a sweeping grin on our own wounded but happy hearts.

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart

[Scripture Readings: Deut 7:6-11; I Jn 4:7-16; Mt 11: 25-30 ]

When Basil Hume was abbot of Ampleforth, he said one of the most difficult things he had to do was tell the community chapter that one of the monks had decided to leave. There was no point in forcing him to stay: “his heart had gone out of his life in the monastery.” Dom Ambrose Southey had to try to understand a similar problem when he observed how many monks and nuns left during the renewal period after the Council. He tried to make sense of this by using anthropological categories of incorporation into religious communities: compliance, identification, and interiorization. When the values of behavior and belonging were no longer exteriorly rewarded and affirmed, the person was faced with how well or poorly he had internalized the values and how deeply he had taken them to heart.

The task of internalization is really one of learning by heart. Not in the sense of a memorization which allows a mechanical operation free from attention. But a learning in which the heart is actively engaged in being taught and formed. The heart only becomes known and available in and through our words and actions. It reveals itself, comes to itself, in exposing itself in choices, decisions, discernments, and desires. It has a reality which is prior to its expressions and a reality which exceeds the partial and separate ways it manifests itself. The mystery of our own heart surprises us and can overwhelm us. It is a vast reservoir of relationships, impressions, impulses, and connections. It is the space or ground in which our own mystery is connected with the mystery of the Holy and the Sacred. Every heart is, in fact, a sacred heart. It is a fount of revelation and love desiring to be known and received. It is our capacity to receive revelation and the unexpected.

Our life is a history of what we have taken to heart. This is what has formed our self-understanding, our vision of what hope is possible in our world, what we can expect to be given or freely give. We have learned by heart. We have had good learning and we have had bad learning. Our good learning has made love and gift a real option in our lives. Our bad learning has taught us to defend and protect ourselves. It has often stopped us from learning anything new. It can become easier to invest ourselves in the world of the learned and clever, the world where the heart is no longer exposed, no longer is wounded or vulnerable. This is the world of abstraction and rationalization, the world of organization and planning. There is no need to examine if our behavior and belongings are congruent with our deepest beliefs, if our beliefs are even engaged or brought to bear on what we do. Our heart can become coarse, hard, sated, weighed down, insensitive.

The invitation Christ offers in the Gospel is to learn by heart what is in his own heart. It will mean relearning the values we have let become encrusted at intellectual levels and which fail to touch any spring of life within us. It will mean unlearning responses of defensiveness and self-justification that have withered our capacity for sensitivity, understanding, and compassion. Jesus offers his yoke of meekness and humility. This is how he understands and defines his own heart. In the Bible, humility is self-knowledge created by our awareness of God. Every creature is a “little one.” The meek and humble are those who know they stand before God as the ultimate and present source of life. They are those who have learned to put their total reliance, confidence, devotion, and submission in the active presence and will of God. Their hearts draw their trust, fidelity, commitment from the trust, fidelity, and commitment of God, made to them in the Covenant and made known in His sending His Son into our world. This world. Today's world. The yoke of the Law was always seen as a gift of God's care and direction for those he had freed from the slavery of submission to the powers and “realities” of this world. The yoke is Christ himself, slowly teaching us through the events of our life to form our hearts in his meekness, humility, and love. The love of God for us is not an idea, but the form and shape and meaning of our own experience.

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart

[Scripture Readings: Hosea 11:1-4, 8-9; Eph 3:8-19; Jn 19:31-37 ]

We welcome our members of the Cistercian Conversi who are on their annual retreat with us this weekend. This is a particularly good day to begin a retreat on monastic spirituality.

Today is the solemnity of the Sacred Heart. In the ranking of liturgical days, a solemnity is the highest; higher than feast days or memorials. That means the Church is telling us that honoring the Sacred Heart is of great importance. There is something here to be learned.

It is the heart of Jesus that is honored. The word “heart,” as it comes to us from the Hebrew tradition, refers to the very core of the self, that mysterious center of our being that is so strangely unclear and distant from ourselves.

We can make a beginning at understanding the heart of Jesus by understanding our own. When the very center of the self is deeply affected, as happens for instance to a young person when he or she falls deeply in love for the first time, one's whole way of thinking about the world, as well as one's whole way of feeling it, is profoundly and permanently altered. No part of us is exempt from such an experience. We are touched in depths we did not know we had but whose reality we cannot possibly doubt. That is why it has always been symbolized by a wound. The person we were before has, to some degree, ceased to exist and so has the world we used to live in.

Every person's heart conforms to the value of what it is pondering. That is why we use such expressions as “I had my heart set on it…”, and “My heart jumped for joy…” Thus, the heart has two aims: to unite with what it loves and to avoid a break. The success of those two aims depends on the unity and endurance of what we set our hearts on; it depends on the value of what we ponder … of what we love. In short, our hearts and the heart of Jesus are known by what affects them and how they respond to that affection.

Today we remember that the very core of Jesus, the heart of Jesus, is sacred. The sacred heart is a consecrated heart. It is set upon One Thing. All its eggs are in one basket; all its chips on one number. This is how it unites with what it loves; it is willing to endure the loss of anything else. One Thing affects it decisively. And its life is devoted to responding to it.

The very center of His Sacred Heart is deeply affected by the Father. There is nothing unclear or distant in His Heart. His whole way of thinking about the world, as well as His whole way of feeling it, is profoundly and permanently determined by the Father and His will. No part of Him is exempt from such an experience. He is touched in His depths by a Father Whom He cannot possibly doubt. That is why—as in today's gospel, His Heart has always been symbolized by a wound.

It is the aim of the monastic way of life to live in purity of heart; to make our hearts like that of Jesus Christ. He commanded us to live this way. To the cynical it may seem romantic to think we can aim at having the Heart of Christ. It does not seem that way to those who have lived any portion of their lives with their heart set on lesser things.

Such people know there is something important to be learned on this solemnity: Jesus described Himself as being “humble of heart.” He calls us to imitate Him in that. To that end we have Chapter 7 of our Holy Rule. It calls us to do and endure things we would never otherwise put up with. We put up with its demands for two reasons: we experience some measure of the love of the Father and love for the Father and we are convinced that to love anything else would be futile.

Chapter 7 shows us how to enjoy the bliss of one great fact and live toward the challenge that fact gives us. That fact is this: that we could never love as much as we have been loved.

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart

[Scripture Readings: Ho. 11:1-4 8-9, Eph 3:8-19, Jn 19:31-37]

Courage, take heart. Norman Rockwell, one of America’s best known artists, had a gift for painting familiar, often nostalgic views of everyday life. One of his works shows a disheveled school girl sitting on a bench outside the principal’s office. She is sporting a big black eye and an even bigger grin. It is obvious she has been in a fist fight, and the grin indicates that she has more than held her own, perhaps even trouncing the male class bully. It is all there: torn clothes, scuffed shoes, mussed up hair, dirt clinging to her arms and legs, but most of all that sweeping grin across her face. She had courage, she fought and won! The bruises don’t matter. The marks of her wounds are purple ribbons of honor. Her bodily pain fades before her inner satisfaction and happiness.

That is a good image for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He faced his ordeal with courage and rose victorious! Perhaps dried blood and mud were still clinging to his brutally wounded body. The marks of the nails that torn through his hands and feet were there for all to see. The place where a lance pierced his side and penetrated his heart was wide and deep. But he more than held his own. His wounds are badges of honor. He fought and won. When he rose there was a radiance in his eyes and a smile on his lips, (maybe even a grin).

St. Paul compares life to being in a fight. Before he was martyred he wrote, “I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith. Now a crown of righteousness awaits me.” Jesus comes into our fight to give us his heart, his courage. That is what the word courage means. It comes from two Latin words, cor & age, meaning to take heart. Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.” And to the woman suffering from a hemorrhage for twelve years, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” And to the disciples in a stormed tossed boat, “Take heart, it is I; have no fear.” And to Paul in prison, “Take courage, you must bear witness also at Rome.” In the gift of the Eucharist Jesus does even more. He says, “Take my heart so that you may be rooted and grounded in my love.”

Of themselves, the disciples of Jesus were often fainthearted. At first St. Peter cringed with fear and fled at the mere voice of a maid who identified him during the trial of Jesus. Later, when Peter took heart from Christ’s own passion and love he was able to keep the promise he made at the Last Supper. He suffered and died for Christ by being crucified upside down. Peter’s awareness of the breath and length and height and depth of Christ’s love for him was the source of his courage to face suffering in a threatening world.

The first time St. Paul’s life was threatened, he also was afraid. He hid in a basket and was secretly let down over the walls of Damascus during the night so that he could flee unharmed. Years later he took heart and courageously suffered persecution because of Christ’s love for him. He was scourged or beaten with rods eight times, shipwrecked three times. Once he was stoned almost to death. He was often without food, and frequently suffered cold, sleepless nights. Yet, after all that he could say with joy, “Our light, momentary afflictions are preparing for us an eternal weight of glory. It was Christ’s love for him that gave him heart to fight the good fight.

The canvas on which our stories are being painted is incomplete. For us the fight is still on, the bully is upon us, be it the devil, human opposition, or our own temptations. Or it may be our struggle with physical pain from disease or accidents, war or famine, crime or persecution. Whatever threatens us, we can take heart from the heart of Jesus who suffers with us. For he loves us, like a tender, caressing parent who lifts a child up to his or her cheek.

I began with a story about a courageous school girl sporting a black eye and an even bigger grin on her face. I want to end with a true story about a nine year old boy named Darrell who was aware of God’s love for him. Darrell was in a hospital in Kenosha, Wisconsin. All you could see were his lips and one blistered cheek. The rest of his body was wrapped in layer upon layer of sterile gauze. The fire that had burned him so badly took the lives of four other family members. The magnitude of his suffering made every touch an agony so that his screams echoed far down the corridor. One day this boy overheard another patient say to the nurses, “How can God do this to an innocent child?” Darrell’s voice rang out, “Don’t say anything against God! When it hurts, God cries with me.”

Yes, the naked, bleeding, crucified Christ cries with us. Let us take heart from his love. When we have fought the good fight he will wipe away all tears from our eyes. Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things pass away. Instead, there will be a sweeping grin on our faces.