In his Book of Hours, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes;
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart —
oh let them take me now.
Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God — spend them however you want.
It’s a stirring image of how, even when our lives are broken apart by sin, we can place those fragments in the Sacred Heart and be made whole. Rilke has gotten to the point where he realizes he cannot give God a perfect gift, so he will give what he can. His only desire is that God “spend” those pieces of his imperfect heart. His love is like a currency, a gift to be used on behalf of healing the world.
Every 1st Friday here at the Oratory, we celebrate Holy Mass for the Sacred Heart. This past Friday was the Solemnity, and of course there are graces attached those Masses so I encourage your participation. Sacred Heart is always falls at this time of year, directly after the Octave of Corpus Christi which celebrates the Eucharistic miracle, and always on Friday because it was on Good Friday that Our Lord’s heart was pierced with a spear and blood and water flowed from his right side. This event has long been held as a symbol of the mixing of wine and water in the chalice during Holy Mass. The chalice opens like a flower, or a calix, to receive the heart of Our Lord. His Sacred Heart is poured out through the Blessed Sacrament.
This is also why, during the Easter Season which directly commemorates the victory of Our Lord over sin and death, during the Solemn Mass on Sundays we sing the vidi aquam. The text is based on a vision of the prophet Ezekiel; “I saw water coming out of the right side of the Temple, alleluia; and all they to whom that water of yours came were saved.”
Ezekiel’s vision is connected to the Temple liturgy and the sacrifice of animals. The blood of those animals was collected at the base of the altar and washed out of the Temple precinct by pouring water along the canal built for that purpose. The blood and water emerged outside the Temple where it was collected and used by farmers for use in their fields. It was a prefigurement of a sacramental, a way of blessing their crops.
In Ezekiel’s vision, however, the water becomes a river which freshens and flows and deepens. Fruit trees spring up along its shore and abundant fish arrive. Eventually the water empties into the sea and purifies it, thus making sacred the entire world. The saving sacrifice at the center of the Temple bursts from confinement and redeems all things.
Christ is the Temple. The body from which flow the healing waters is his. At the heart of redemption, at the center, is the perfect sacrifice of the Cross. This is the source of love and the meaning of our existence.
The entire goal of Satan and the thrust of our sins is to make us gaze upon the sight of the crucified Christ with fear, to worry that love asks too much and demands more than we can give. Satan is a roaring lion, already defeated and caged away but insisting on making himself heard. The point is to get our hearts racing so as to make decisions that are regrettable and irrational, that turn us away from Our Lord on the Cross. In such a state, we become afraid of so many things – the corrosive passage of time, the certainty of death, and what waits for us at the end, anxiety about parenting decisions gone wrong and the future state of the world, embarrassing things we said or did, regrets, hesitation to continue our spiritual renunciations because it’s all in vain and we fall short anyway.
How does Our Lord find the strength to welcome in all God’s flawed creatures like us to his feast? How does his heart remain open in spite of the pain and betrayal? It is love. Love risks everything, even its own heart. In fact, it is the very wound of love from which our salvation flows. A Christ who remained unwounded would not be a Savior consonant with the inner Trinitarian heart of God. This is why Christ is forever the Lamb who looks as through he has been slain. The suffering has opened his heart to us, joining us entirely and remaining with us even in the most shadowed, desperate, doubtful conditions into which we may occasionally find ourselves. His heart is in the chalice, ever being born into us as if through a womb, always beating, ever new.
Von Balthasar asks, “You sense Time and yet have not sensed this Heart? You feel the stream of grace which rushes into you, warm and red, and yet have not felt how you are loved? He urges us to throw ourselves into the river streaming from the side of Christ. Rilke says to yearn for it, to be captured by it. It really doesn’t matter how deep the water or to where it flows. We trust in him, and we know that in making our hearts like unto his, in the syncronization of two as one, that is the entire sum of our salvation. The going out from the side of Christ is itself a return, for it is joining our love to his love, like a scarlet thread uniting us to the sacrifice at the source.
When the Host is lifted, when the chalice is raised during Holy Mass as a gesture of that sacrifice to our Heavenly Father, see in it Our Lord’s Sacred Heart, his passion deepening and widening with boundless love, and pray to our Father to look upon the Heart of his beloved Son. To it, unite your own heart, for he and we are one.
Pondus Meum Amor Meus 