It
doesn’t happen every time I enter the church doors and genuflect. In fact, it doesn’t
usually happen while I’m kneeling in prayer. It happens after. After I’ve bowed
before the Altar. After I’ve quieted my spirit and shared a space of time with
Our Lord.
When
I slip back into my seat - that’s when it happens. I can feel my own heart
beating. My upper body moves slightly with each pulse. It’s a gentle stirring,
the direct result of a beating heart and a quieted body. My heartbeat.
And
it reminds me of a phrase I’ve heard many times since my conversion to the
Catholic Church. Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Their
heartbeat.
The
irony is that I embraced the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary before I grasped
the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
I’m
not sure why. After all, it was Jesus who led me here. He guided me to the
Eucharist and His Church. Perhaps this last devotion came late because I came
to the Church with a great love for Christ to begin with, while I knew nothing
of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Perhaps it was my self-diagnosed ignorance
that caused me to consider the Immaculate Heart of Mary first.
Lately,
though, as I sit in the quiet before Mass begins and I feel my own heart beating,
I sense something beyond myself.
Another
Heart. It pulses with a love so perfect that not even death could stop it
permanently. It flows with a mercy so great that not even my imperfections can
cause it to cease its life-giving fountain. It pours forth with an abundance of
grace so rich that I have all that I need to genuflect and leave through the
Church doors – and become Christ to the world.
It
was near the Feast of Divine Mercy Sunday that my spiritual director gave me a
book by Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Heart of
the World. The writing is beautiful, so beautiful that I was lost in its
rhythm, wooed by the literary masterpiece.
The
thesis comes square in the middle of the figurative language. I didn’t expect
it. It didn’t come in a jarring way. I didn’t come upon it abruptly. It was
more like an epiphany, like the first rays of morning light when you are
staring at the Morning Star. And you realize that the heavens are waking, and
the sun’s first light has claimed all light and made it its own.
Jesus
Christ’s love flows from His Sacred Heart. And everything is absorbed into that
pulsing Heart. Mary’s Immaculate Heart. And my heart, too.
The
Sacred Heart of Jesus is the talisman with which God has penetrated our world
and transformed it from within… the talisman God has used to break open the
bolted gate. That’s what Hans Urs Von Balthasar says. “God created a Heart for
himself and placed it at the center of the world” (44). This “hushed chamber
became a military highway on which the caravans of grace descend.”
Hans
Urs Von Balthasar describes this Grand Central Station as the epicenter by
which every living thing is sorted and distributed and receives its papers and
authorizations, mission, consolations, routes, provisions, and grace. This is
the “circulation of love” (56). Divinity and humanity at its most vulnerable.
Where love is offered, even before it is received.
This
Sacred Heart keeps pulsing. Waiting. Offering itself, beating for me
constantly, steadily, quietly. And It is beating for you. And your children.
And your parents. And your students. And your priest. And your neighbor. For
those you like. For those you don’t like very much. For those you don’t like at
all. Yes, there is love for that one, too.
It
is the Grand Central Station where the Divine One abides, and we abide in Him.
And
as I sit there in the quiet before the Mass, I let my beating heart submit to
that Heart. Soon, I will leave, renewed and recreated by the Precious Blood and
the Holy Eucharist – to go into the world as the vulnerable one. I will carry Him to them.
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