Today is the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, and it's been one blessed thing after another. Absolutely, sincerely, and truly. However, it's been a productive day. I managed to get done a set of annulment papers that has been hanging fire on my desk for a good long time, as well as saying Mass, processing the daily mail (ordinary internal audit coming in July or August), and having a special holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament, all by one o'clock. At one o'clock, I came off the altar to find Father Crotty of the Fathers of Mercy waiting for me. I had promised him lunch, and had forgotten that I had. So I got lunch twice - which I wouldn't mind so much about if I wasn't really trying to lose weight. Father had a number of needs, including the need to check his e-mail for which he used my computer. No problem, he is a traveling missionary, who has a healing ministry that is very effective and successful.
I took him out for Mexican food and ordered myself a vegetarian quesadilla since, even though it's a solemnity, I like to try to keep Fridays meatless. We talked a lot of shop, which I am not going to go through here; suffice it to say, we exchanged information on the spiritual state of our various ministries, and I got to hear a little bit about how "interesting" -- in the sense of the old Chinese curse -- life in other places in the Holy Catholic Church in America can be. There's always a certain amount of spiritual warfare going on, of course, and working as he does in a milieu of charismatic gifts and open blessings, he runs into that kind of thing probably more than most priests.
I'm trying get the Angelic Warfare Confraternity moving, although it seems to have a power to do this by itself. I need to think about promoting it more specifically in my own parish.
Anyway, before I knew it, it was time for Vespers. I finished my correspondence, but not in time to get out to the post office before it closed, as I have to send some letters out by Priority Mail. First thing tomorrow, I guess.
But I'm avoiding talking about Jesus. Growing up, I always associated the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart with the Jesuit order, and a certain style of devotion rather too sentimental for my personal taste. I am happy to say that I have rediscovered the scriptural roots of the devotion, with much spiritual profit. Particularly as a priest and Pastor, the Sacred Heart is a model to me for understanding my own priesthood. I think I've always doubted my own capacity to love, as I tend to be rather unsentimental, and led by my head rather than my heart. On the other hand, sentiment and passion are really not at the heart of what love is, according to the Scripture. The Latin word for heart, "cor" is the basis of our word "core"; the notion of the heart, biblically, has much more to do with raw, steely spiritual commitment of one's whole person to another than it does warm sentiment. Think of marriage as it is a day-to-day reality, after the wedding dress is put away, the photos are dusty in the album and the garbage needs taking out. Think of Jesus' love. Indeed on the day Christ loved us most powerfully, the day of his Passion, I doubt he was feeling warm fuzzy thoughts. We sinners were busy putting nails into his hands and feet, after all. But he refused not to love; he refused to be refused. And that's the model for me as a pastor, I think - based on the Pastor Bonus himself.
And Jesus himself taught me that.
In the year I was ordained priest, I had an opportunity to go on pilgrimage as spiritual director to group visiting a certain place in the Balkans, where Our Blessed Lady was supposed to be appearing. I don't have to mention the name in print, and won't, because it was, and still is not, officially approved by Holy Church. And that doesn't matter for the purposes of my story. I had promised her blessed Lady that if she kept me safe for ordination, I would go on pilgrimage in her honor at a place of her choosing. It had to be a place of her choosing, because I hadn't any money to go on my own. At any rate, when the notice for this pilgrimage went up on the priory board, I ran to the Prior, and then said, "Father Prior, I'd like to go on this pilgrimage; they are looking for a priest, and although I'm not a priest yet, next week I will be." I didn't make that one (somebody else had beaten me to it); but there was another one that needed to be filled and I went on that.
It was a very irritating pilgrimage. I warned my pilgrims about the spiritual dangers of going to a place to see "signs and wonders" without a heart that was really aimed at contrition and conversion; then was chagrined to find signs and wonders happening all around us. To make a very long story short, and to come to the point in an uncharacteristically abbreviated fashion, the pilgrimage culminated with me leading our group up the side of the local mountain, where there was a war memorial in the shape of huge carved stone cross. We made the Stations of the Cross as we went.
Did I mention that that was the seventh anniversary of the beginning of the apparitions? We had 25,000 pilgrims in a tiny Slavic village. There were literally traffic jams at the crossroads of the town with pilgrims moving in national bodies from one place to another. The mountain was no different. There was a party of Polish pilgrims ahead of us led by a Franciscan friar, who insisted on preaching (with warm devotion, and at great length - I am assuming the former and am certain of the latter) at each one of the Stations. The Stations of the Cross are not something you can really "play through" as in miniature golf, so we American pilgrims waited patiently at each station for Father to finish before we could make our own meditation there ourselves.
At the top of the mountain, there was time for peace and private prayer. I committed a few civil felonies while I was waiting (as in hearing confessions away from the parish church - this was still the time of Communist Yugoslavia) and then settled down to say my Rosary. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon, and we would have sunlight until approximately 9 o'clock at night at that season and latitude. There were broken clouds here and there, but the sun was bright, shining gold in the clear blue sky. Then a cloud passed over the sun, and things changed.
After the cloud passed, the sun was different. It was no longer gold, but kind of dark rosy pink color; it was surrounded by a halo of white-blue light, and shot out purple and rose rays into the sky around it. There was an irregular band of something across its breadth, it was no longer round, and it was pulsing. I saw it and realized it was familiar to me in some way, something that I was used to seeing but not just there. And I wasn't the only one seeing it. A Filipino lady in another group cried out with joy and wonder, "El Sacrado Corazón!" And all of a sudden I realized exactly what I was looking at. The badge of the Sacred Heart - the pulsing human heart crowned with thorns that Jesus showed St. Margaret Mary in the Convent of the Visitation in Paris, the pierced , crowned, flaming Heart that every Catholic has seen a million times on statues of Jesus displaying his Heart,- that was what was pulsing in the sky overlooking the mountain and the town below it. It seemed strange in another sense; I had never imagined the Sacred Heart beating before.
I'd like to say that I was overcome with warm sentiment and emotion, but I wasn't. The feeling was actually more like terror. What was happening was beyond human power, but I didn't want to be deceived. I remember kneeling and praying in a confused fashion something like: " Jesus, if this is from you, I praise and bless you for your glory; and if it's from the Evil One, forgive me for kneeling and I reject it utterly." After a few minutes I realized I was looking into the sun directly without any protection for my eyes, without pain, and apparently without effect to my retinas. I looked over to the carved cross. No bright points on my retina, no sunspots! I had heard people saying that like things had happened to them, but it had never happened to me before. After about 15 minutes of this of this watching the Heart of Christ pulsing in the heavens, shining in glory, another cloud passed over the sun, and when it passed, the sun was back in its golden normalcy, in a clear blue sky.
I am celebrating my 20th year of priesthood this year, and I have seldom talked about this, deeming it a private blessing and revelation, which it is. My personal experience of God is certainly less reliable and probative than the witness of Holy Church. But perhaps I have been remiss in not proclaiming sufficiently the great deeds of God in my own life. In retrospect, the experience for me (I have no idea what the place of the vision in anyone else's life would be) was an answer to the specific prayer that I had been making on becoming ordained as a priest: that Jesus should teach me how to have a pastor's heart. And the point he made that afternoon, apart from many other graces I could name, is that a pastor's heart must be like the Sacred Heart itself- that it must shine like the sun unfailingly upon the hearts of the people Jesus has sent his priest to serve. That has been a very useful teaching for me again and again in my ministry. To seek to be untiringly bright, cheerful, warm, to illuminate souls with that power of Christ's heart, to refuse to be refused - this is to be a pastor after the shape of Jesus' own Heart. There's more I could say, but this is already too long.
Jesus has a peculiar sense of humor, which, the longer I know him, the more I recognize it when it pops up; I find myself invariably and simultaneously instructed and humbled. This feast is become very important for me; what began as a "mere Jesuit devotion" in part of my life has become my own private Sinai, my personal Signadou - the mysterious sign from God St. Dominic saw in the sky at Fanjeaux that confirmed him in his mission to found the Dominican order. Christ is risen, he is truly risen, and the deathless Lord has shown his love-pierced Heart to Peter, to the apostles, and, -last of all -to me, his most unworthy servant. So today is blessed for me, every year.
Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.
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