Tags
God is love, heart, love one another, Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, sacred heart of Jesus, symbol, The Sophia Center for Spirituality
Today is the feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. We all know that hearts appear everywhere when Valentine’s Day comes around. Images of real hearts, however, are more complex and sometimes not so pretty, depending on the presence of blood and the vessels that appear in the picture. We see blood as “messy” or “gory” and we forget sometimes how essential blood is to our life and how we can only live if our heart continues to beat.
On this feast we celebrate the heart as a symbol of what the heart does, of course, not how it is constructed. Presently, in some spiritual circles, there is a description of the heart as “the organ of spiritual perception,” essential to our growth in love. Although the writer of the First Letter of John did not use that denotation, he did understand deeply the significance of the definition. Here is some of the evidence from today’s lectionary:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God…In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his Son into the world so that we might have life through him…Beloved, if God so loved us, we must also love one another…God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in them. (1 JN 4: 7-16)
Take a moment of quiet and listen for your heartbeat. If you can’t hear or feel it, find the pressure point in your neck and just sense the love that is keeping you alive. Thank God for the life that is love, for the Love that is God. Remain in that knowledge, that grace, with each beat of your heart.
Speaking of antonyms (as I was doing yesterday), I have no choice but to choose love as the theme for today. Psalm 119 announces it when it declares: Blessed are they whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord!” (vs.1-2), waking up those who have slept through the first reading from the second letter of John. In a clarion call that John sees as only a reminder of what God’s law proclaims, he says: “I ask you, not as if I were writing a new commandment but the one we have had from the beginning: let us love one another.” 
When I was in elementary school at Our Lady Help of Christians parish, it was the custom on our tests (and probably other written work) to place a small cross at the top of the page and underneath to print JMJ (Jesus, Mary, Joseph). I don’t remember being instructed each time to do what was most likely supposed to become a habit of dedicating our work to the Holy Family but I suspect for many of us it was either a desperate prayer for help or a desire to be seen as pious. Later on, as we grew into the upper grades and got more sophisticated, the letters changed to AMDG (Ad majorem Dei gloriam = for the greater glory of God). Knowing the meaning in English was easier than remembering the Latin words, at least until we got to high school. It wasn’t until much later that I learned how famous that phrase was.
Late yesterday just after I had arrived at the party marking the 85th birthday of my friend, Florence, the skies opened and gave a torrential drink of water to the parched earth. Just before I left an hour later to return to the retreat I was hosting at home, the rain stopped. Sometimes things just happen that way. Had I been home without a group of people wrapping up an afternoon of deep reflection, I would have loved to go outside and let myself be washed by the cooling water falling from the sky, as I symbolically felt the sensation of having all things being made new. I opted instead for the reasonable option of staying dry.
I was always envious of people who could quote Scripture with chapter and verse. I had my favorite passages – most of them short, like “God is Love” – but was usually only vaguely aware of where to find them in the Bible. The exception was Romans 12:12 (most likely because of the double 12) that reminded me to “base your happiness on your hope in Christ.”
It’s funny how first thoughts upon arising from sleep sometimes fit into the message for the day. That’s one way I know how the concept of inspiration can be defined. Here’s my example. I woke up this morning one minute before my alarm was to sound. (That in itself is always a welcome surprise!) As I rolled out of bed I thought that my first line in today’s message would be: “Short stories this morning, friends; I’m on kitchen duty this weekend and people will be waiting for breakfast!” (We have a weekend workshop here at the Spiritual Center and it’s my turn to prepare the meals for the participants.)
