Meditation for June 19, The Heart of Jesus

"Who is better able to speak to the heart, than the heart?" asks Father Nouet, a great spiritual writer of the seventeenth century. They say that the heart is first to live and last to die.

"You have shown us that, O Heart most strong and sweet. Your Heart was the first to live for us and the last to die; the first, wounded during Its life, the last wounded after Its death. At the very moment death sealed Your lips, love opened Your Heart, to testify to us the excess to which it carried You. The Jews would have liked You to die a thousand times to satisfy their hate; and You, on the contrary, desired to die a thousand times to satisfy Your love.

"O Divine Heart, Heart completely consecrated, abandoned, given up, devoted to the love of men, I wish no longer to have a heart except to give You a return of love; to give myself irrevocably to You. I wish to love You only in the measure of Your great Heart which loved me more than Its life.

"I tell You this in the Presence of the Divine Majesty, in the presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary who had a heart only to love the Heart of her Son.

"Heart of Jesus, I wish to be eternally Yours. Let it be so."

(The Man of Prayer-The Preface)

Not only do I wish to be Yours, O Heart of Jesus, but I beg of You the grace to dwell within You. The same Father Nouet says:

"There is no person so poor that he has no place to lodge. 'The birds even have their nest and the foxes their holes,' as Our Lord said. A Christian alone should not be without a dwelling, a wanderer and vagabond in the world; he must have a place of retreat where he can establish himself and lead a peaceful and ordered life.

"Wherever he may search, he will not find a better place than the Sacred Heart of Jesus which is the most magnificent of palaces.

"Access to It is easy, because It is always open. Are we not assured that He loves us, and that love lodges all those it loves, in the heart as in its own dwelling?

"But it is important that we establish ourselves there by a faithful correspondence to grace; we must know what we should do to please Him. We can learn it from the saints."

_________________
Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)