Beloved Heart

On the feast of Saint John the Evangelist, Dec. 27, 1673, Saint Margaret Mary was praying in front of the tabernacle, a practice she had begun as a young child when she endured poverty and illness.

The saint related her first encounter with the Sacred Heart in her personal recollections, writing that “Our Lord made me rest for several hours on his sacred breast…”

“After that I saw this divine Heart as on a throne of flames, more brilliant than the sun and transparent as crystal,” she continued. “It had its adorable wound and was encircled with a crown of thorns, which signified the pricks our sins caused Him.

“It was surmounted by a cross which signified that, from the first moment of His Incarnation, that is, from the time this Sacred Heart was formed, the cross was planted in It; that It was filled, from the very first moment, with all the bitterness, humiliations, poverty, sorrow, and contempt His sacred humanity would have to suffer during the whole course of His life and during His holy Passion.”

St. Margaret Mary said Our Lord told her that He chose to manifest His heart because He ardently desired for men and women to love Him and to save them from damnation. The devotion, she continued, was the “last resort of his love.”

“[He] wished to favour men in these last centuries with his loving redemption,” St. Margaret Mary wrote, “in order to withdraw them from the empire of Satan, which He intended to destroy, and in order to put us under the sweet liberty of the empire of His love.” 

350 years later--“Instead of the reign of the Sacred Heart, a culture of death and a denial of Divine Love holds sway in society, and our Lord’s own prophecy seems to be coming true: Authentic love in the hearts of many is growing cold (Mt 24:12),” he wrote. “In short, we seem to be light-years away from fulfilling the ardent desires of the Heart of Jesus.”

But hope is not lost, he wrote. The Heart of Jesus has been a “refiner’s fire” for countless saints. Popes have fully embraced the devotion, and even the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the Sacred Heart of Jesus “the chief sign and symbol of that ... love with which the divine Redeemer continually loves the eternal Father and all human beings.” Zeale.co

I have always been devoted to the Sacred Heart, but I never realized its connection to St. John the Belived, my late wife's patron saint!