Reflection for the Feast of the Sacred Heart

June 18, 2004

Today is the Feast of God’s love.

The reading from the Old Testament tells us that “God set his heart on us…” with the promise that “God will be faithful to the 1000th generation”—which we know is a biblical way of saying forever.

Then the New Testament delivers on this promise in the person of Jesus. The love that God had for us drove Jesus through the villages of Galilee and ultimately to his death in Jerusalem.

Walter Wink’s book The Human Being has given me new insight into this mission of Jesus. In the book Wink portrays one of Jesus’ tasks as helping people become more truly human. There is something profoundly sacred in becoming ever more fully human.

Walter Wink’s insights have been a challenge to me about being open to the potentiality inherent in being ever more truly human. I think we sometimes belittle our humanity when we say something like “After all, I am only human”. I do understand that at times that phrase and others like it are appropriate. But after thinking about our humanness in a different way, I wonder if it is not time to probe deeply the latent powers within us to be more fully human as an invitation to a greater capacity for love. This invitation reminds me of St. Iranaeus’ famous quotation: God’s glory is humanity fully alive.

In the Gospel today we see what happened to Jesus because he condemned all forms of domination—domination is simply not the way our humanity was meant to be used. We stand before the cross of Jesus and see how his love is poured out as we gaze at his pierced heart. And the pierced heart of Jesus leads us to the pierced heart of humanity.

Let us take a recent example. I am sure there isn’t a person at this liturgy who does not have those images from the Iraq prison deeply engraved in your mind and heart. For me, those photographs have become a touchstone that is radically clear about the degradation that human beings can perpetrate.

But we also know that there were other soldiers who saw this reality who could not live with what they knew—no matter the consequences. They understood deeply something about being more fully human.

As we stand before these two realities we need the prayer of Paul that was our second Reading today. He prays that we grasp fully the breadth, the length and the height and the depth of Christ’s love and that we experience this love that surpasses all knowledge—so we may attain the fullness of God. How we need this prayer in today’s world.

We need to have eyes to see what deeply in our heart we know that love demands. Sometimes it demands “tough love”—that is full of compassion, strength and deep love. And sometimes it demands just “being there” for someone, where no words are necessary. Our way of life calls us to the continuous discovery and manifestation of God's love, revealed in Jesus.

This is the vocation we claim and the whole of our lives is about living into it ever more deeply year after year. To do this involves both contemplation and action that for us is understood as a single movement. Sometimes our deepest experiences of God come in the middle of things, and sometimes our best insight about our mission and ministry is revealed in the depth of prayer. The Society of the Sacred Heart commits itself to discover at the heart of the suffering and hopes of humanity the transpierced heart of Christ.

We have all come here today to celebrate this great feast of God’s love. And some of us are here to celebrate fifty years of vowed life in the Society of the Sacred Heart. And for each of us this has surely been a journey of becoming more and more fully Religious of the Sacred Heart.

This week we have been remembering our journey that brought us to the noviceship at Kenwood in the early 50s having heard a whisper or perhaps some thunder and lightening from a God who somehow broke through to us with this invitation. And here we are fifty years later having spent more than 1050 years, collectively, in this mission of discovering and manifesting the love of the heart of Jesus. And if we add the 47 years of Mickey McKay, who was one of the original planners of this celebration, then our years of service mount!

So let us rejoice that God set his heart on us and that his promise remains to be faithful until the 1000th generation.