Love to the loveless shown

That they might lovely be.

These words are from the first stanza of the moving hymn My Song is Love Unknown written in 1664 by the English Anglican priest Samuel Crossman (1623-1683). It is interesting that at about the same time that Crossman poured out his devotion to our Lord’s love for humankind and for each one personally, St Margaret Mary Alocoque (1647-1690), a nun of the Visitation convent in Paray-le-Monial, received the revelations from our Divine Lord about spreading devotion to his Sacred Heart. She was encouraged in this regard by her spiritual director St Claude de la Colombière (1641-1682), a member of the Society of Jesus.

The Jesuits widely promoted this devotion as a way to counteract not only the rigorist teaching of Jansenism, but also the indifference and coldness towards God, the decline in practice of genuine religious faith and religion itself, as a result of Enlightenment, which, despite various benefits, also issued in the spirit of the atheistic rationalism that contributed to a false sense of human freedom.

In keeping with the Jesuit tradition, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins preached a sermon at St Francis Xavier’s Church in Liverpool on Sunday, 26 June 1881, presenting God’s tenderness of love shown in the symbol of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Living in the atmosphere of the post-industrial revolution with the “dark Satanic mills,” lamented by William Blake, in his sermon he spoke of St Gertrude’s mystical experience of Christ’s love being a consuming fire burning away her sins and uniting her unlikeness to himself. This saint’s little known experience, being in the 13^th century, to which Hopkins drew attention, predated the revelations made to St Margaret Mary Alocoque. St Gertrude featured also some years earlier in Hopkins’ poetry, when he called her “Christ’s lily” in The Wreck of the Deutschland. In this great poem he makes a lovely play on the word “Host,” alluding both to Eucharistic Wafer that is at the same time a welcoming host offering repose, relief and rest for the ever questing human heart for a home (as St Augustine realised – cf. Confessions, I.1): “fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.”

Devotion to Christ-Jesus’ Sacred Heart consists in an intimacy of authentic loving relationship to the wellspring of the gracious outpouring of divine mercy. It truly entails a relatedness of being in heart to heart colloquy. This Cor ad cor loquitur, as expressed in Blessed John Henry Newman’s motto, is because of the initiative taken by God, who first loves us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), who from the depth of his being draws us  to himself. This finds expression in Jesus’ encouraging words in the passage of the Gospel for the Feast of the Sacred Heart: “Come to me … I am meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:28,29). We may likewise recall the words of George Herbert lovely poem Love bade me welcome…

Devotion to the Sacred Heart, however, is not merely a matter of individualistic piety. At the canonization of St Claude de la Colombière in 1992, St John Paul II emphasised that this, like every genuine Christian devotion, opens us to the urgent task of proclaiming and living God’s love for the world: “For evangelization today, the Heart of Christ must be recognized as the heart of the Church... It is He who sends us out on mission. The heart-to-heart with Jesus broadens the human heart on a global scale.”

Pope Francis has repeatedly pointed out the insidious danger of the ugly sin and horrible disease of apathy of many in our times. This indifference to God who is love paralyses us and prevents walking in generous faith, working in love for the welfare of others, especially the poor.

Image at the top:

The Sacred Heart of Jesus

Painted by Rafael Salas (1873)

commissioned by Gabriel Garcia Moreno,

President of Ecuador,

through whom his country

was the first nation in the world

consecrated to the Sacred Heart.

The Mystery of the Word made Eucharist 

Today, perhaps more than in any other time in history, when supermarkets abound with a surfeit of a vast variety of products, the temptation of consumerism leaves us experiencing an emptiness, a craving for more. This sense of emptiness may arise from feeling frustrated at being unable to change the condition of countless people in the world. It may also be because of having neglected to reach out to the needs of one’s immediate neighbour, or even to find out whether he or she needs some help. There is, moreover, a sense of emptiness that no amount of material commodities or comforts can fill. This stems from a hunger etched deep in our hearts: that yearning for God for whom, as St Augustine said, we are created. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” Jesus pointed out to the Tempter who sought to allure him to misuse his power over material things, “but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4; cf. Deut 8:3).

Of all the many things recorded in the Gospels about what our Lord said with divine authority, his words uttered at the Last Supper have multiple implications. They issue an instruction to remember to take and eat his Gift in the Bread and Wine. It is true, as Dom Gregory Dix pointed out, that there has never been a commandment that has been observed so faithfully as that which Jesus so graciously gave his disciples. Yet, the remembering of this Gift has to be enacted not only in properly celebrating it as a liturgical ritual. Moreover, this Gift’s inner depth of meaning is unable to be encompassed by rationalistic approaches, sometimes evident in theological debates that miss the point of it as “the Mystery of Faith.” The Eucharistic Gift of our Lord’s Real Presence is not some object that can be examined like all other things of the world of phenomena. For, as C.S. Lewis put it most sensibly:

The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take understand. Particularly, I hope I need not be tormented by the question ‘What is this?’ – this wafer, this sip of wine. That has a dreadful effect on me. It invites me to take ‘this’ out of its holy context and regard it as an object among objects, indeed as part of nature. It is like taking a red coal out of the fire to examine it: it becomes a dead coal. (Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer)

Mention of the ‘red coal’ recalls the words of one of the Fathers of the Church, Theodore of Mopsuetia, who interpreted Isaiah’s vision about receiving the burning coal taken by a seraph from the altar as an image of the transformation of the material elements of bread and wine by the Holy Spirit into the Eucharistic Sacrament that becomes spiritual and immortal nourishment purifying those who receive it reverently. Similarly this imagery is employed by another Father of the Church, John Chrysostom: “The burning coal is the Eucharist that sets us alight.” St Peter-Julian Eymard, the great apostle of the Eucharist, frequently cited this phrase and expressed his yearning to spread the fire of the Eucharist to the four corners of the earth.

The immensely rich significance of this Gift, which reveals the mysteries of the Kingdom of God to mere children (cf. Mt 11:25ff.) has to be truly carried out. To carry out in-deed “the many-splendoured thing” of our Risen Saviour-Lord’s Paschal Mystery – symbolically expressed in the Corpus Christi procession - requires us to give and share ourselves with all our brothers and sisters in the Lord through a life of table fellowship and hospitality.

True worship of the Eucharistic Mystery brings about the transformation of human persons – ‘deification’ as Fathers of the Church pointed out – a transformation of them into Communion, in which their finest worth is realized by being re-membered as part of the Body of Christ. St Augustine reminded the newly baptised that when they respond ‘Amen’ on receiving the Holy Sacrament they are truly affirming their identity. In another sermon he urges them to become their Mystery which is on the altar. The true and deepest worth of being human is expressed in worship “in spirit and truth,” as Jesus told the outcast woman of Samaria (Jn 4:24).Thus, alluding to a phrase from St Thomas Aquinas’ splendid hymn (Adoro Te devote) about God’s hidden but real presence in this Sacrament that points to and is a guarantee regarding sharing in the Glory of God, C.S. Lewis stated:

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat [‘truly hidden’] – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. (The Weight of Glory)

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Image above:

Adoration of the Mystic Lamb

By Hubert & Jan Van Eyck

Altarpiece (1432), St Bavo Cathedral, Ghent.

PENTECOST

All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer,

together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus… (Acts 1:14).

In celebrating the feast of Pentecost or Whitsun (as it is often called in England) the Christian Church realises the fulfilment the Paschal Mystery of Christ in accordance with what he promised in the Cenacle: “I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor, to be with you for ever, the Spirit of Truth… you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.” (Jn 14: 16f.; cf. Jn 14:25; 15:26; 16:13f.)

The activity of the Holy Spirit’s presence in the Christian community is finely set out in the sequence of the Mass of Pentecost, which is a hymn composed by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, during his six years exile in France by King John. Archbishop Langton, being a person open to the Spirit of God, is also known for his contribution to the system of basic human rights set out in the Magna Carta, drawn up in June 1215. Inspired and enlightened by the Holy Spirit’s guidance, Langton shows the Church’s deep commitment for social conditions, which is reflected in phrases of his hymn, which is considered as a great masterpiece of Latin poetry:

“Come father of the poor... Best Consoler... Rest in work...

  Bend what is rigid... Warm what is cold.”

Living at the same time as Archbishop Stephen Langton, St Francis of Assisi followed the traditional teaching that regarded and honoured Mary as closely associated with the Church. Like St Ambrose in the 4^th century, for instance, the Mother of Jesus is considered as the pattern or model of the Church, Francis composed a beautiful, litany-like series of greetings, among which he invokes her in a quite unique way:

“Virgin made Church

chosen by the most Holy Father in heaven

whom he consecrated with His most holy beloved Son

and with the Holy Spirit the Paraclete,

in whom there was and is

all fullness of grace and every good.”

 Image above:

Pentecost – Pamplona Cathedral, Spain