For The Nine Days Following The Feast Of The Sacred Heart

First Day - The Emblems Of The Heart Of Jesus

Preparation. - Our Saviour showed His Heart surrounded by emblems to Bl. Margaret Mary. In the first place, some of them represent the mysteries of His suffering, and secondly, the other manifest the prodigies of His love. Let us often, at least in spirit, contemplate the picture of the Sacred Heart, and beseech Jesus to enable us to compassionate in His sufferings, and to endow us with patience amid the trials of this life. "Leaving you an example, that you may follow His footsteps" (1 Pet. 2. 21-24).

I. The Emblems Of Suffering.

Christ's Heart is represented as wounded. The wound recalls to us the Redeemer's painful death and the benefits it brought us. Jesus had scarcely expired, when a soldier, brandished his spear, pierced His side with it. "This sacred wound," says St. Augustine, "was the gate of life for us all." The water that flowed therefrom is the symbol of baptism, by which we are born to grace and become children of the Church. The blood that came out of it is a figure of the Eucharist, the food and strength of our souls.

How these emblems, recalling to us the Saviour's benefits, are well calculated to remind us of the sufferings by which they were procured for us!

And the thorns around the Sacred Heart call to our mind the horrible crown which was driven into the Redeemer's head. It was taken off, says Origen, only after His death. God had said to Adam: "Cursed is the earth in thy work ... Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee" (Gen. 3. 17, 18). A terrible curse, proclaiming the tribulations deserved for our sins! Let us not despond, however, for Jesus, the new Adam, experienced their bitterness in the interior pains during His whole life, figured by the thorns surrounding His Sacred Heart.

And is not the cross, surmounting this loving Heart, the symbol of the suffering which predominated in the Redeemer's life? How great His anguish during thirty-three years on account of His foreknowledge of our ingratitude and the sufferings awaiting Him! If our pains, like the Saviour's, are of daily occurrence, how do we bear them? Do we not often bitterly and impatiently complain about them? This serves only to increase them and deprive them of all merit, whilst resignation would sweeten them and render them useful to us, for it would obtain for us the unction of grace, which enables us to carry our cross with ease; and moreover, it would preserve us from purgatory, and procure us a distinguished place among the elect.

O my divine Redeemer, teach me to mortify my sensitiveness and all the little passions that hinder me from being perfectly resigned. Inspire me with the resolution, first, to unite my sufferings with Thine, and to offer them to God every time that my patience is tried; and secondly, to keep silence then, and to invoke Thy help that I may stifle within me every inclination to murmur and complain.

II. The Emblem Of Love.

The flames escaping from our Saviour's Heart represent to us His immense and incomprehensible love for His Father, which is the supernatural hearth of every other love. But how vehement it is in Jesus! The charity of the angels, of the Seraphim, of the Blessed Virgin herself, cannot even give us an idea of it. In creatures charity is only like mere sparks of fire, whilst in Christ it is like an immense furnace.

But Christ's love has not merely God as its object, but it extends also to all souls, the living images of God. Hence the flames spreading around the Sacred Heart symbolize the Saviour's ardent charity for us. As fire consumes whatever is submitted to its action, so also the love of Jesus for us overcame all difficulties to effect our salvation. He shrank from no sacrifice. Neither insults, nor torments, nor a most cruel death deterred Him in the great work of our Redemption.

And to how great a love of suffering does not His devotedness to us lead Him! This is it which is recalled to us by the cross devoured by the flames of His charity. Jesus loved suffering, because He loved our souls. "I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptized," He says, "and how am I  straitened until it be accomplished" (Luke 12. 50). Such is the exclamation of a heart yearning for the cross! Hence His whole life was a continual torment, an interior torment, undergone for our sake.

O Jesus, who will describe Thy boundless charity? Who will enable us to imitate it, unless Thou help us? Grant me a spark of that fire glowing in Thy Heart for Thy heavenly Father and the souls redeemed by Thy blood. But to dispose me to participate in this love, give me the courage to sacrifice to Thee all my inclinations. Wherefore I consecrate to Thee, first, my mind, that it may be filled with Thy maxims and with contempt for earthly goods; secondly, my heart, that it may have here below no attachment but to Thee; and thirdly, my will, whose only desire and sole occupation shall be to obey Thee and to render Thee service in the person of my neighbor, even notwithstanding my antipathies and repugnances.