This month of June is always dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and tomorrow is this special feast day. I have enjoyed a special devotion to Our Lord's Most Sacred Heart for some time and meditated on various aspects of Jesus' Most Merciful Heart. Recently, Jesus helped me to put together several different interactions between His Heart and mine into a five-step prayer of increased intimacy with Him that I wish to share.
The five steps are as follows:
1st: Lean
2nd: Listen
3rd: Look
4th: Let yourself be Loved
5th: Lean
The first step is to lean into His Most Sacred Heart.
Imagine you are sitting with Jesus who is sitting behind you with His arms wrapped around you. You are in a place of perfect repose. You are safe and the back of your head is resting on His Sacred heart. He has wrapped you in His cloak, as you sit under an almond tree. Your breathing is slow and measured. You are perfectly at rest in His peace which surpasses all understanding. You are completely safe and secure in His loving arms, hearing His gentle voice repeatedly telling you, “I am here my beloved, and I love you with a never-ending love. I shall never leave you orphaned. I am with you always until the end of days.”
You continue to breathe deeply and receive His Divine Infinite
Love & Mercy. You continue to hear
his breathing, and listen to His gentle voice which
assures you that He never leaves your side. He invites you to take a handful of sand that is on the
ground surrounding you both. You cup the sand into your hand, and
while releasing it you say to Jesus, “Here I am Lord, I come to do your
Will.” Like the sands of the hourglass,
you watch the granules of sand leave your hands and land where they may on the
ground. You pick up another handful and
repeat the same words, “Here I am Lord, I come to do your Will.” Afterwards, you listen to Jesus whisper in
your ear, “I am here my beloved, and I love you with a never-ending love.
I shall never leave you orphaned. I am with you always until the end of days.”
You receive these words of love into your heart, and then
grant Him your surrender. “Here I am Lord, I come to do your Will.” You feel the tension and anxiety leaving your
body, from the top of your head, to the tips of your toes. You experience the tension melting away as
you melt into His arms and trust more fully in His Love and divine plans for
you. You continue this ebb and flow of
love safe in Jesus’ arms, in total and complete surrender to your Beloved King,
who desires all that is good for you, who died for you, and wants to heal you
and make all things new.
Repeat and enter into this mystery of love.
St.John resting on the Breast of Jesus [image taken from
https://www.markmallett.com/blog/in-the-footsteps-of-st-john/]
The second step is to listen to His heartbeats. This requires you to turn around from leaning against His chest with your back to Him in order to lean into His breast as the beloved Apostle John did at the Last Supper. As you recline against His Sacred Heart, you hear His heartbeats which beat in perfect rhythm. His heartbeats are calm and peaceful. His heart seems to communicate harmonies of love for your broken heart, disappointments, failures, challenges and sorrows. While reposing upon Jesus' breast, Jesus hears the rhythm of your heart as well- your desires, dreams, hopes and plans. He invites you to take turns in listening to one another's heartbeats, in a spirit of sharing together and being known, loved, and understood.
As He places you into the calm cadence of His inner heart, you then become open in allowing Jesus to lean in and listen to the inner sanctuary of your own heartbeats. In this vulnerability, He listens to your heart and as Divine Physician ensures all pathways to it are open. For those areas that are wounded and result in rapid heartbeats due to anxiety, fear, or need to control he calms you and assures you that He is with you and present. If your heartbeat is slow due to depression, sloth or hopelessness, His Sacred Heart becomes an interior pacemaker to increase the flow of love, mercy and healing which He wishes to share with you. With each heartbeat He invites us to allow Him to arrange our lives and for His Divine plans to unfold in their perfect timing. Not too fast and not too slow. This rhythm in the cave of our hearts allows a symphony of love. It is a surrendering into His plans by permitting your heartbeats to enter into the tempo of His Sacred Heart in trusting abandonment to His Divine Will.
Imagine yourself with no masks on under His gaze. He delights in you and wants to interact with you face to face. St. Teresa of Avila strongly advised her sisters in the Way of Perfection to represent Jesus close to you as a friend at your side. “I tried as hard as I could to keep Jesus Christ, our God and our Lord, present within me, and that was my way of prayer…I’m not asking you to do anything more than look at Him....He is always looking at you; can you not turn the eyes of your soul to look at Him?”
His gaze is where we find healing in our identities and become increasingly transformed into Him. It is in His Gaze that the desires of His Sacred Heart are revealed and that we learn who He is, who we are, and how to love. As Ven. Fulton Sheen said, "We become like that which we gaze upon. Looking into a sunset, the face takes on a golden glow. Looking at the Eucharistic Lord for an hour transforms the heart in a mysterious way as the face of Moses was transformed after his companionship with God on the mountain."
The fourth step is to let yourself be loved. Under His Gaze we are drawn into the magnetic love of His Sacred Heart. He wants you to receive the fullness of His Love for you and not to reject it out of feelings and lies of unworthiness, doubt, and weakness. He knows all this and yet He wants to tell you that you are loved with a unique and tender love emanating from His Sacred Heart just for you. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, ocd writes to her prioress Mother Germaine just before her death that Jesus just desired that she allow herself to be loved by Him in order that He could build her up in His grace and merciful love for His glory. She tells her, "The fidelity that the Master asks of you is to remain in communion with Love, flow into, be rooted in this Love who wants to mark your soul with the seal of His power and grandeur." She assures her that even when she feels "oppression and lassitude, you will please Him even more if you faithfully believe that He is still working , that He is loving you just the same and even more: Because His love is free and that is how He wants to be magnified in you..." Surrender yourself to the desires of His Sacred Heart which pulsates with a radical love for you and every one of God's children. Cast away any doubt that He is indifferent or lacks an infinite love for you. This is impossible. He is Love itself and this is why He came.
His Sacred Heart is the narrow gate. Let us say 'yes' to Jesus' overtures that we approach His Sacred Heart in childlike trust so that we can share our wounds and experience a full metanoia of heart. Let us enter within the chambers of His Love to share an exchange of love, heart to heart. This process of turning our bodies in this five step process to encounter His Heart on increasingly deeper levels will lead to what appears in Scripture as epistrepho - a turning from sin and then a turning towards God in our daily living. Let us approach Him with praise and thanksgiving and in this loving intimacy receive his merciful love, forgiveness, kindness and compassion. We are safe in the eternal Heart of our Beloved Jesus. St.Paul reminds is that, “God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ... raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:4-6)
So let us approach His Most Sacred Heart with confidence and together with Him:
♥Lean.
♥Listen.
♥Look.
♥Let yourself be Loved.
♥Lean again.
