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.