Jesus' Heartbeat of Love
I know that very few people read the blog anymore –but this was so beautiful I had to share it with someone –so I thought I’d throw it up as a post for the few chosen who happen upon this page. When I asked Prof. Freddosso a question about Thomas Aquinas a couple months ago, he happened to suggest during our short conversation that I look up this Encyclical on the Sacred Heart. Its by Pope Pius XII in 1956. What I found particularly powerful was his meditation on the Heartbeat of Jesus… and so I thought I’d share this short excerpt because of today’s Feast.
“We ought to meditate most lovingly on the beating of His Sacred Heart by which He seemed, as it were, to measure the time of His sojourn on earth until that final moment when, as the Evangelists testify, "crying out with a loud voice 'It is finished.', and bowing His Head, He yielded up the ghost." Then it was that His heart ceased to beat and His sensible love was interrupted until the time when, triumphing over death, He rose from the tomb.
But after His glorified body had been re-united to the soul of the divine Redeemer, conqueror of death, His most Sacred Heart never ceased, and never will cease, to beat with calm and imperturbable pulsations. Likewise, it will never cease to symbolize the threefold love with which He is bound to His heavenly Father and the entire human race, of which He has every claim to be the mystical Head.
...After our Lord had ascended into heaven with His body adorned with the splendors of eternal glory and took His place by the right hand of the Father, He did not cease to remain with His Spouse, the Church, by means of the burning love with which His Heart beats. For He bears in His hands, feet and side the glorious marks of the wounds which manifest the threefold victory won over the devil, sin, and death.
… Just as Christ loved the Church, so He still loves it most intensely with that threefold love of which We spoke, which moved Him as our Advocate "always living to make intercession for us" to win grace and mercy for us from His Father. The prayers which are drawn from that unfailing love, and are directed to the Father, never cease. As "in the days of His flesh," so now victorious in heaven, He makes His petition to His heavenly Father with equal efficacy, to Him "Who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish, but may have life everlasting," He shows His living Heart, wounded as it were, and throbbing with a love yet more intense than when it was wounded in death by the Roman soldier's lance: "(Thy Heart) has been wounded so that through the visible wound we may behold the invisible wound of love."
…It is beyond doubt, then, that His heavenly Father "Who spared not even His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all," when appealed to with such loving urgency by so powerful an Advocate, will, through Him, send down on all men an abundance of divine graces.”
Encyclical Promulgated on 15 May 1956
June is the month of the Sacred Heart -and Jesus again makes Himself vulnerable to us, offering His bleeding, wounded Heart as a remedy for our pain, our need for His Human and Divine Love -knowing full well we will probably abuse and hurt Him by our rejection or sin. Take a moment today to look at this Heart, to love this Heart -to climb inside and rest in this Heart -our shelter, our drink, our light and source of all. Fiat, Jesus, we trust in You. +
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