June 19th / Corpus Christi // June 24th / Sacred Heart
This Sunday the Church celebrates the Feast of The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), and on the 24th the Church will celebrate the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Heart-language is powerful language. Simple phrases convey and capture meaning beyond verbal expression: a contrite heart, brave-hearted, with a heavy heart, heart- to-heart, a stony heart, a broken heart, cold-hearted, a divided heart, light-hearted, with one heart and mind, wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve, hard-hearted, a passionate heart.
I don’t know why I came at a young age to be fascinated by the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It probably has something to do with my high school days at St. Louis U. High, where the engaging – and somewhat bloody – Sacred Heart image was ubiquitous. Over the years, that familiar image, that devotion, has seeped more deeply into my own heart, shaping my devotional life and spirituality.
It is not easy to precisely capture what the Sacred Heart image conveys. It does so “silently,” without words, not unlike the method through which my parents conveyed to their children their convictions about right and wrong, their experience of God, and their Catholic vision of life. But it does communicate. In the presence of the Sacred Heart, we know that we have a God who understands, who feels, who forgives, who speaks the words that we deeply long to hear, who loves with that kind of love that is all-encompassing and still relentlessly personal and unconditional.
It is that Jesus, that God, that I often address in prayer, assessing the quality of my own heart, and recognizing how “mixed” it can be, and yet wanting to offer it to a God who, I continue to trust, will know exactly how to respond. Perhaps we can all beg for ourselves those same graces.
-Fr. Frank Reale, SJ
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