The month of Love

June is not only known as the month of the roses.  It is also kept in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church as the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart.

You may have been put off in the past by the poor quality of the pictures and statues of the Sacred Heart you may have seen in shops and piety stalls.  Many of them are crude and off-putting, but don't let things like that take away from the reality of what they represent.

June is enshrined in our hearts because it is all about the celebration of love.  Not in the commercial sense of course.  When have you seen a day celebrated in the commercial world which depicts  the heart of the man God broken for love of us?  Of course you haven't.  That wouldn't be a money- spinner.  But, nonetheless, it is true.

Jesus himself revealed to St. Margaret Mary the most astounding truth that he longs for our love;  he so wants a return for the love he has constantly poured out on us  that he came to beg us to make a response of love in return. He just asked for a small return, a sign, an acknowledgment that we are grateful, that we love him too.  It wasn't much to ask was it, yet he felt the lack of it even in the glory of Heaven. 

His heart was broken on Calvary,  pierced by a lance, if you remember.  When that great heart broke at last, it opened and left room for all of us,  sinners that we are, to creep close and to be warmed and comforted in that heart which is always ready to receive us. Haven't we all experienced that wonderful, warm, enveloping love at times, especially when we are in pain, or suffering loss or rejection.  Those are the times we notice his love, even though we feel lonely and afraid,, hurt and vulnerable.  He comes closer to us then, and reaches out his wounded hands to heal us. He invites us to rest awhile close to his heart while we lick our wounds as the expression goes.

Our Founder, who died on the 9th of June 1900, urged us with her dying breath, to "invoke the Sacred Heart."  We cannot ignore the last words of a dying person.  The testament of a saintly person is even more important.  So we do just that, in our prayer and, hopefully, with our lives.  We place our lives into the wounded hands of the one we call the Sacred Heart.  Since 1873 our Congregation has been consecrated to the Sacred Heart, and we renew this in our communities each year, in a way that is appropriate to us today.

Mother Magdalen didn't go in for what she called pious practices that seemed to point inwards.  She said that the love of the Sacred Heart was "a real, practical love for our Lord, and a realisation of his love for us." She also said that it must lead on to a spreading of that love around us stating:

"If you want to taste the love of Jesus, and to know the secrets of his heart, you must go by the gate of love for others."  

 Love and evangelisation go hand in hand. Otherwise it  is in danger of becoming mawkish or introspective. 

Remember that great French Romantic poet's words on this score:

"To have loved another is to have touched the face of God!"   Victor Hugo.

That is what the Sacred Heart also teaches us.

We wish everyone a very happy Feast of the Sacred Heart tomorrow and during the rest of this month, especially the members of Orders and Congregations dedicated to him under this title.  Our long-time friends and neighbours in Roehampton, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, have a very special day on this feast. May we all meet in the love and forgiveness of the great heart of Jesus tomorrow and always.