Sacred Heart of Jesus

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters CP

Sunday 21st June 2015

(Written on June 12, 2015)
This morning I had to go to St. James Hospital for an x- ray on my swollen ankle. I’m afraid I’m not like my friend, Fr. Julian in Botswana, who thanked God for his muscular dystrophy and called it ‘a special grace that made him change his pace’. I don’t like my slow pace just now nor do I like having to sit waiting so long. But I admired greatly the staff in the x-ray department who got through 100 x-rays so efficiently and then started at no.1 again!
I hadn’t brought a book so I studied all the people waiting and the posters on the wall. One poster said, “If you think you might be pregnant, please tell the Radiographer”. It was accompanied by a cartoon of a baby in the womb saying, “Please Mum, tell them I’m here!” This led me to recall that I was born on this Feast of the Sacred Heart which occurs on a different date each year. My mother told me the bells were ringing for evening devotions not long before I was born. And this in turn led me to think how my own heart has been beating all the years ever since, day and night without stop. Which is just extraordinary, isn’t it? And I never stop to marvel at it just because it seems so ordinary. But it’s far from ordinary. What car would run as smoothly as that for a hundred years or more? Not that I’m that yet!
And that led me to think how people used sometimes mistakenly call us the Sacred Heart Fathers because of the heart badge we wear. And sometimes they call us the passionate priests or brothers! But these are happy mistakes. We should be happy to be called passionate; passionate about our faith and hope, and our ministry of mercy and compassion. We call our heart badge a sign. It can be a sign of the love and compassion of God for all people. Or it can be a sign of the heart of Jesus. St. Margaret Mary died in 1690 and St. Paul of the Cross, our Founder, was born in 1694 and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was spreading everywhere in the years Paul was growing up. Professor Owen Chadwick of Cambridge University said: “No evidence shows a direct link between the Passionists’ heart upon the robe and the development of the cult of the Sacred Heart during those years but it is hard to think that no connection existed.”
But above all for Paul, this sign represents our own hearts, a sign that we carve the name of Jesus on our hearts; that we remember in our hearts that we are loved by God; that we find God in the depths of our own hearts and help others to do the same. St. Vincent Strambi said that, above all else, God raised up Paul of the Cross to teach people how to find God in their hearts. And finally this sign we wear is a sign that people, all people, can expect to be welcomed with compassion and with heart when they come to us. It’s a mighty call and a mighty ideal!

May God inspire many more to join us in this ministry of heart and hope!