{"id":14286,"date":"2025-06-11T14:30:46","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T18:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/notstrictlyspiritual.com\/?p=14286"},"modified":"2025-06-11T14:31:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T18:31:00","slug":"the-sacred-heart-and-the-path-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notstrictlyspiritual.com\/life-lines\/the-sacred-heart-and-the-path-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Sacred Heart and the path of love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"h425153-p1\" class=\"permalinkable\">Growing up in the 1960s and \u201970s, our home was adorned with a large portrait of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The same one hung in my grandmother\u2019s home. Back in the day it was ubiquitous in Catholic homes, and as a kid it seemed as though Jesus\u2019 eyes followed you wherever you went. Once I moved away, however, the Sacred Heart image and devotion was left in my rearview mirror, along with most of my childhood belongings. That is, until recently.<\/p>\n<p id=\"h425153-p2\" class=\"permalinkable\">A little more than a year ago, the Sacred Heart started pushing its way back into my consciousness. I wasn\u2019t seeking it; I didn\u2019t really understand why it was suddenly front and center. All I knew was that the Sacred Heart would no longer be ignored. I found myself saying novenas, saving images I found online, and repeating the prayer, \u201cSacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you.\u201d I even drove up to O\u2019Connor\u2019s Church Goods in Latham to pick up a few of the plastic covered Sacred Heart badges that my mom and grandfather always had in their wallets. I\u2019ve got one tucked in my wallet now.<\/p>\n<p id=\"h425153-p4\" class=\"permalinkable\">Soon after, I was digging through some files at home and pulled out a card with my mother\u2019s handwriting on it. Since she\u2019s been gone for more than 38 years, that\u2019s a pretty moving thing for me. It was her Apostleship of Prayer card, with an image of the Sacred Heart on both sides. The card sits on my desk now, next to a small crucifix, a daily reminder of both my mother and the Sacred Heart that binds us to each other across time and space.<\/p>\n<p id=\"h425153-p5\" class=\"permalinkable\">To be honest, after last year\u2019s brief-but-intense period of prayer and interest in the Sacred Heart, it faded into the background a bit, only to re-emerge last month with even stronger force. Obviously, this is not something I am supposed to move to the background. Over and over, the Sacred Heart was front and center everywhere I turned \u2014 in a book on spiritual poverty I had been asked to \u201cblurb,\u201d at a workshop someone suggested I attend, in the spiritual reading I picked up for retreat planning. Even as my interest and spiritual curiosity increased, however, I felt something holding me back.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_14290\" style=\"width: 256px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-14290\" class=\"wp-image-14290 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/notstrictlyspiritual.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/sacred-heart-portrait-246x300.png\" alt=\"Old-fashioned Sacred Heart portrait\" width=\"246\" height=\"300\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-14290\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The portrait we had at home.<\/p><\/div>\n<p class=\"permalinkable\">The old-style devotions to the Sacred Heart often felt cloying or quaint to me, something that didn\u2019t seem to have a place in the prayer practices that feel most powerful for me now. But then I happened upon the medieval Nuns of Helfta during a retreat day at Dominican Retreat and Conference Center and came face-to-face and heart-to-heart with the deep mystical tradition that gave rise to this devotion.<\/p>\n<p id=\"h425153-p7\" class=\"permalinkable\">Pope Francis, in his last encyclical, referenced the Nuns of Helfta and focused on the heart of Jesus as it pertains to our contemporary world. \u201cLet us turn, then, to the heart of Christ, that core of his being, which is a blazing furnace of divine and human love and the most sublime fulfillment to which humanity can aspire,\u201d he wrote in \u2018Dilexit Nos,\u2019 (He Loved Us). \u201cThere, in that heart, we truly come at last to know ourselves and learn how to love.\u201d<\/p>\n<p id=\"h425153-p8\" class=\"permalinkable\">As always, it all comes back to love, whether we are praying to the Sacred Heart of Jesus specifically, reading the words of saint and mystics, reflecting on the Gospels, or receiving the Eucharist \u2014 Jesus broken and given for each one of us out of sheer love.<\/p>\n<p id=\"h425153-p9\" class=\"permalinkable\">\u201cChrist\u2019s love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that ability to love has been definitively lost,\u201d Pope Francis wrote in 2024.<\/p>\n<p id=\"h425153-p10\" class=\"permalinkable\">In a world seemingly \u201clost\u201d to hate, division and violence, the Sacred Heart shows us the way forward on the path of love. It\u2019s not an easy path, as evidenced by the crown of thorns that surround the Sacred Heart, but it is a path where love always has the final word.<\/p>\n<p><em>This column originally appeared in the <a href=\"https:\/\/evangelist.org\/news\/2025\/jun\/11\/the-sacred-heart-of-jesus-and-the-path-of-love\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">June 11, 2025, issue<\/a> of The Evangelist.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Growing up in the 1960s and \u201970s, our home was adorned with a large portrait of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The same one hung in my grandmother\u2019s home. Back [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14289,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[101,252,375,816,290,815,72],"class_list":["post-14286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life-lines","tag-life-lines","tag-love","tag-mystics","tag-nuns-of-helfta","tag-pope-francis","tag-sacred-heart","tag-trust"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sacred Heart and the path of love &#8211; Not Strictly Spiritual<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/notstrictlyspiritual.com\/life-lines\/the-sacred-heart-and-the-path-of-love\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sacred Heart and the path of love &#8211; Not Strictly Spiritual\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Growing up in the 1960s and \u201970s, our home was adorned with a large portrait of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 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