Solemnity of Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

 Lectionary: 172

Thus says the Lord GOD:
I myself will look after and tend my sheep.
As a shepherd tends his flock
when he finds himself among his scattered sheep,
so will I tend my sheep.

I think it was a stock brokerage firm, dedicated to making money off someone else's hard work, that first used the slogan, "...one investor at a time." They offered a warm, cozy assurance that you personally are dear to them. 

I used to have an old Catholic book of traditional prayers -- printed when traditional was the only kind -- which offered a Litany of the Sacred Heart. The Litany echoed that one at a time sentiment as the supplicant snuggled closer to the Heart of Jesus. 

Pope Saint John Paul II was not the first pope to urge Catholics to cultivate a personal relationship with Jesus but I remember the singular way he promoted that devotion:

"Conversion means accepting, by a personal decision, the saving sovereignty of Christ and becoming his disciple.”

When the secular world atomizes society into separate monads, that is individuals who should navigate the world alone, fending only for themselves without regard to the needs or desires of others -- the Church invites us one by one to return to the fold of our Good Shepherd. We enter through the narrow gate of his Sacred Heart. 

No one should prefer to be lost and unnoticed amid an indiscriminate herd of churched people, as if God can be satisfied with a reasonable percentage of good enough persons and let pass into eternal life that element which doesn't measure up. God's love is more searching and more persistent than that. It is the Hound of Heaven which sniffs out every lost soul, nudging and nosing them into wholeness. 

Many Christians, suffering abuse in their original homes, remembering a violence which seemed to hunt for them one by one, invading their privacy, sometimes physically violating their sexuality. Understandably, they dread personal attention. If they must be saved, let it be done without personal attention. I'd rather not be seen! 

But the Lord sees in our darkness. 

I say, “Surely darkness shall hide me,

and night shall be my light”—

Darkness is not dark for you,

and night shines as the day.

Darkness and light are but one. Psalm 139

   

The Sacred Heart teaches us to surrender in prayer like the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins: 

DEUS, EGO AMO TE

O God, I love thee, I love thee---
Not out of hope of heaven for me
Nor fearing not to love and be
In the everlasting burning.
Thou, thou, my Jesus, after me
Didst reach thine arms out dying,
For my sake sufferedst nails and lance,
Mocked and marred countenance,
Sorrows passing number,
Sweat, and care and cumber,
Yea, and death, and this for me.
And thou couldst see me sinning:
Then I, why should I not love thee,
Jesu, so much in love with me ?
Not for heaven's sake; not to be
Out of hell by loving thee;
Not for any gains I see;
But just the way that thou didst me
I do love and will love thee:
What must I love thee, Lord, for then?
For being my King and God. Amen.