A PRAYER OF PRAISE FOR THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS

“Announce it, and let it be announced to the whole world, that I set neither limit nor measure to My gifts of grace for those who seek them in My Heart!” So spoke our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French nun who he called the Beloved Disciple of the Sacred Heart” and the Heiress “of all Its treasures”, in the 1670’s.

He chose St. Margaret Mary to spread devotion to His Sacred Heart. Jesus felt it necessary considering all the coldness and indifference he experienced from so many of us. To remedy this Jesus revealed to St. Margaret Mary 12 promises for those who would honor His Sacred Heart.

Over time, in addition to those promises this devotion was spread by a number of artistic renditions of our Lord’s Sacred Heart in quite a striking manner! itself. The image is displayed most famously on fire, encircled by thorns.

The fire shows Jesus’ blazing love for us, while the thorns show his despair over our unhappiness, our hard-heartedness, and ingratitude. Think of the following prayer of Praise for the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as a loving way to try to make up for that!

I praise You, sweetest Heart of Jesus, fountain of all goodness.

I praise You, most kind Heart of Jesus, for the boundless graces that have flowed and shall continue to flow from You into the souls of the just.

I praise You, most gentle Heart of Jesus, for the sweet love with which You have so often refreshed devout hearers through divine consolations.

I praise You, most loving Heart of Jesus, for the fullness of Your grace, the splendor of Your virtues, the generosity of Your Heart, and the purity of Your love.

I praise You, royal Heart of Jesus, for Your victory over death and sin, Your power over souls, and Your triumph over the living and the dead.

I praise You, Heart so poor and yet so rich, for having despised all earthly riches and for having renounced all earthly honors.

I praise You, most obedient Heart of Jesus, that hungered after the fulfillment of the divine Will and thirsted after the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls.

I praise Your most generous Heart of Jesus, that did not seek its own glory; most patient Heart, that willingly bore the greatest insults; most unselfish Heart that longed for and lovingly embraced the Cross.

Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, teach me to love You with my whole Heart, and grant that, according to the little strength I have, I may imitate Your wonderful virtues. Amen.

As Our Lord complained to Sister Margaret Mary in His desire for this devotion “Behold this Heart which has loved men so much that It spared no sacrifice, not even death and annihilation, in order to testify to them Its love. And in return I receive from the greater part of mankind only ingratitude, by reason of the contempt, irreverence, sacrilege and coldness which they show Me in this Sacrament of Love. This I feel more keenly than all I endured in My Passion. If they would answer love for love, I would look upon all I have done for them as little, and I would, if that were possible, do still more. But they meet My eagerness to do them good only with coldness and rebuffs.”

And yet His heart is indeed on fire with love for us! As He once expressed it in another private revelation to Sister Josefa Menendez, a Spanish nun in the 1920’s “My Heart is all love and it embraces all souls…If they once grasped this, they could divinize their life and all their activities by this close union with My Heart. How great is the value of a divinized day!”

If you find yourself drawn to some sinful temptation because you may think that “the heart wants what it wants”, as the saying goes, ask yourself: is that what the Sacred Heart of Jesus wants for me?

Think of the love Jesus wants to share with us on our heavenward journey as long as we join our hearts to His Sacred Heart as fully as possible in loving trust and obedience to His will for us. Keep in mind this line from Psalm 95: “If today you hear His voice, harden not your heart.”

Think also of this intriguing aspect of this devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: Jesus, as the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, as we read in John’s Gospel (1:14). But part of Christ's humanity is that He had a heart in HIs body, which functioned for Him as it does for us as a circulatory system for blood, in this case Jesus’ Precious Blood.

And in having a heart in a physical body Christ would naturally express feelings in common with those of us in fallen humanity that He came to save as the Word incarnate!

As we read in the Ignatius Study Bible covering the death of Lazarus and our Lord’s reaction to it in chapter 11 verse 35 of John’s Gospel on the line that Jesus Wept: these were, as they put it “Tears, not of despair, but of love and sympathy for Lazarus and his family. This small narrative detail points to an awesome theological mystery: Jesus, who became man in every respect except sin, experienced a full range of human emotions (CCC 478).”

As the late Father Harold A. Buetow wrote in his book of homilies God Still Speaks: Listen! Homily Reflections for Sundays and Holy Days, referring to the beliefs of a Greek audience, for whom in part St. John’s gospel was written, “Weeping was incredible for any eminent person, and most especially for a god. They believed in a god who had apatheia, a complete inability to feel any emotions. They reasoned that one who feels deep emotions –joy, grief, love- has allowed an outside influence to enter. That in turn means that someone or something, at least for that time, had power over him or her – in other words, that someone or something else is greater. These things simply couldn’t be true of a God; as one who cares.”

It is important to note here that a number of heresies have plagued the church since the first few decades after its founding by Jesus concerning who He was! In the first and second centuries, for example, Gnosticism sprung up like a bad weed with its followers claiming that Jesus only appeared to be a man because for them all matter was evil.

Likewise we read that first century Docetists claimed that our Lord was a phantasm, that Jesus only seemed to be human, but was in fact to them an immaterial spiritual being.

And of course who could forget that famous Arian heresy that plagued the church most specifically in the 4th century but has lingered in one form of another, perhaps even to this day.

This has been named after Aruis, a priest from Alexandria, Egypt who maintained that Jesus was not True God from True God as we say in the Nicene Creed but rather simply a created divine-like being rather than actually being divine.

Clearly the fact that Christ was fully God, the second person of the Trinity having both a human and a divine nature has been a stumbling block for so many in Fallen Humanity, too many of us, for that matter.

But Our Lord's passion, death, and resurrection has enabled each of we Catholics, when receiving Him in communion in a state of sanctifying grace in His real presence, to become especially, for those 15 or so minutes after communion, a sanctuary.

The question becomes then how good are we at receiving His graces then? Do we wish to unite our hearts to His Sacred Heart or do we want to give Christ lip service in just saying prayers rather than heart service in truly inviting Him to work through us for our good and His glory?

It's worth noting here that the more we see Jesus, particularly in those pictures where his heart is on fire, burning with love for us, the more we should desire to reciprocate that love in some way.

Unfortunately so many of us nowadays have stony hearts shut off from Jesus and from others many times as well both in and out of church!

There's no way Christ can help you gracefully cope with your day to day concerns, issues, and struggles if you don’t open the door to your heart and soul for Him when he comes knocking at it (Rev. 3:20).

Listen to your heart the right way, not in some silly, tawdry, or maybe not-so-tawdry pop-song way. Listen to your heart when Jesus in His Sacred Heart is reaching out to you for comfort, for obedience, for love, or when He wants to give you guidance.

Maybe you don't even see it but at least make a place in your heart for Him and thus that He may be gladdened in His Sacred Heart.

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