Sacred Heart

Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus;

Today is the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus: the Feast of Divine Love made manifest in time. In preparation for the Feast I've been using the following meditation by the great mystic and monk Thomas Merton which you may like to pray with...

Blessings to all +

O Great God, Father of all things, whose infinite light is darkness to me, whose immensity is to me as the void, You have called me forth out of yourself because You love me in yourself, and I am a transient expression of Your inexhaustible and eternal reality. I could not know You, I would be lost in this darkness, I would fall away from you into this void, if you did not hold me to yourself in the heart of Your only begotten Son.

Father, I love You whom I do not know, and I embrace You whom I do not see, and I abandon myself to You whom I have offended, because You love in me Your only begotten Son. You see Him in me, You embrace Him in me, because He has willed to identify Himself completely with me by that love which brought Him to death, for me, on the Cross.

I come to You like Jacob in the garments of Esau, that is in the merits and the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ. And You, Father, who have willed to be as though blind in the darkness of this great mystery which is the revelation of Your love, pass Your hands over my head and bless me as Your only Son. You have willed to see me only in Him, but in willing this You have willed to see me more really as I am. For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self You have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted for myself. And I no longer want this false self. But now Father, I come to You in Your own Son’s self, for it His Sacred Heart that has taken possession of me and destroyed my sins and it is He who presents me to You. And where? In the sanctuary of His own Heart, which is your palace and the temple where the saints adore You in Heaven.

Amen.

From Thoughts in Solitude

Thomas Merton