9781644135945

The Time After Pentecost
love], we may make a worthy reparation for our sins” (Collect). We have a twofold duty to the
Sacred Heart of Jesus: the duty of loving surrender and the duty of atonement.
The duty of love. Love requires a return of love. To the love of Christ, which we venerate under
the symbol of His Sacred Heart, we reply with a loving self-surrender, which implies an ardent
longing that He be known, loved, and honored; it implies deep grief at the sight of sin and a
joyful delight in the promotion of His interests and in the triumph of His love, His Church, and
His grace. This love constrains us to come to Him with full confidence, to pour forth our hearts
before Him, to bewail our coldness, our faults, and our imperfections, to present to Him in a
childlike spirit our toils, our troubles, and our trials, and to commit all things into His hands. It
goes even one step further and makes us living images of Jesus, both inwardly and outwardly.
Such a love drives us to embrace a life of penance and self-denial. We reduce our needs and
conquer our senses. We limit ourselves even in permissible delights. We detach ourselves inwardly
and even outwardly, as far as our calling allows, from worldly things. We conform our
will in perfect harmony to His good pleasure. We live, now no longer by our own spirit, but
by a conscious dependence on His spirit and under the influence of His grace. Happy is the
soul that is so deeply wounded by the love of Christ that it loses all taste for anything that is
not Christ or does not lead to Christ. Happy is the soul which is so penetrated by His love that
it rules all its affections, words, and works, so that the soul no longer knows or seeks anything
except Him. Blessed is the soul that is so absorbed in Him that it renounces all other love and
thinks of Him alone and is completely possessed by Him. “And I live, now not I; but Christ
liveth in me” (Gal 2:20).
The duty of atonement for our own sins and for those of others. He who lives by the spirit
of Christ naturally feels the injuries which are done to Christ. The same love which makes the
interests of Christ our interests, causes us to be sad when we see Christ persecuted and despised.
We take all His injuries as our own, and they cause us pain because of our great love for Him.
The more we see Him despised and treated with coldness and indifference, the more we are
constrained to express our own love for Him. In like manner we strive to exert special care to
prevent faults and unfaithfulness in ourselves and to avoid anything that could give Him pain.
Therefore we undertake fresh penances and renunciations in order to give Him an authentic
proof of our love. In the same measure we adore Him, worship Him, praise Him in His glory,
and beg of Him mercy and grace. We strive to perform our works more perfectly, to accept with
perfect resignation from His hand all the trials and temptations that come to us in life. All these
things we do out of love for Christ, who has loved us with an eternal love.
“Poor Jesus,” St. Alphonsus Liguori would say, “Poor Jesus! Who is concerned about you or
your interests?” How He longs to be loved by us! We contemplate the crucifix, and yet we
remain unmoved. We read the cruel story of His suffering and death, and yet we remain cold
and indifferent. We kneel to pray, but we can scarcely hold out for fifteen minutes. We see others
falling into sin, and yet we are not disturbed at knowing that Jesus is being injured, so long as
our own soul is not placed in danger. Strange signs of love indeed! Jesus seems to occupy a very
unimportant corner of our heart.
Even on the feast of the Sacred Heart we go our own way and seek our own will. All our
energies are bent on satisfying our own desires, on making all things easy and pleasant for
ourselves. We are ever in search of physical satisfaction and comfort, and we want our spiritual
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