Pro Ecclesia Sancta | Together in Christ Newsletter |
Love, notes St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, consists in a sharing of goods between lover and beloved. The greater the love, the greater the goods that are shared. Of course, the greatest good any lover can share is his own self. Therefore, the perfection of love lies in mutual self gift, resulting in union. In biblical language, this is expressed as the gift of one’s heart: “My son,” says the Lord, “give me your heart” (Prov. 23:26).
The introduction to this issue directs our attention to the pierced Heart of our Savior. On the Cross, God has opened, and offered, His Heart to each of us, and thus has invited us to participate in His life of divine love. He is only waiting for our response. Yet that response, to be worth anything, must be free. And therefore, it might never come at all. Oh, how great is the sorrow Jesus experiences over the rejection of His love! It was this sorrow motivated that touching complaint, “Behold this heart which has so loved men … and has been so little loved in return.”
Yet what if we want to respond to this invitation to love, to accept it: how are we to respond? “Love is repaid by love alone” says St. Therese. The only satisfactory way to respond to Christ giving His Heart to each of us to for each to offer his or her heart in return.
One concrete way of doing this is by consecration. Consecration is an act that sets something apart for God; it “makes it holy” by making it God’s. A Christian can consecrate anything in his possession to God’s service. Yet only when he consecrates himself does he really “match” Christ’s loving self-gift to each of us.
As a matter of fact, Christians are already consecrated to God in virtue of their baptism. Yet this consecration ought to be ratified, renewed, and more deeply realized at every stage of life, even every day. It is by means of consecration that we truly become devoted to the Heart of Our Lord, in the sense that our entire self is dedicated to performing His will. We become “set apart” for Jesus and His loving designs.
Individual consecration is an essential component to living the Sacred Heart Devotion. Yet “no man is an island” and no Christian worships God by himself, for Christ taught us to pray “our Father.” God has made man to live in society, and the most fundamental society to which he belongs—the building block of all society—is the family. To love and serve God as a family, to sanctify the family, means consecrating the family to God, and in particular to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through which God has offered Himself to us.
Consecration of the family can be performed by the head of the family together with the other adult members. Ideally, however, it is done with all the members of the family present and participating, in the presence of a priest, preferably in the context of the liturgy and after a period of preparation, in which the family educates itself about the meaning of consecration and how they are to live the devotion as a family. Consecration is often accompanied by the enthronement of an image of the Sacred Heart in the family home (Jesus promised St. Margaret Mary, “I will bless those places wherein the image of My Heart shall be exposed and honored”) as an outward sign of Christ’s kingship there.
Exteriorly, the act of family consecration is simple: the recitation of a prayer of consecration containing an appropriate formula of consecration suffices. Spiritually, however, those words have profound significance. Our Lord takes them very seriously! Thence forward, that family is “His” in a special way: His to care for and nourish, His to protect and bless. To such a family the words of the Gospel are especially applicable, that Jesus “loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1).
Consecration is no magic pill of course. A family consecrated to the Sacred Heart must live out that consecration in a manner worthy of a family belonging specially to Jesus Christ. Yet in doing so its members can count on an abundance of graces to help them do that from Him who came “that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10). Therefore, do not wait until your family is sufficiently holy or perfect or even just all in one piece before you think it is ready to be consecrated to the Sacred Heart. Rather, consecrate it to Him as soon as you can, and watch Jesus perform miracles to “make holy” your family and its members. After all, He Himself promised that to those devoted to His Heart, He “will give peace in their families and will unite families that are divided.”
