06/12/2026
Fr. Pat's Homily (and his art!) for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus:
How can we begin to try and describe something that is eternal, which has no true parameters? How do you begin to put words on it? How do you begin to try and imagine it?
The love of God was always hard to conceive, because our only experience of love is our own ability to love one another, which oftentimes meets with limits, runs up against walls. How do you begin to contain such a notion?
The heart drawn in lots of ways... Well, not until they started doing autopsies did they know what it looked like, and then they started to draw it, or rather, what it looked like without the tubes coming out of it. Before that it was very much the symbol we see on Valentines Day – the red heart, as we call it – which in one sense has served to limit our understanding of the word and of the concept.
I remember trying to do banners when I was in the major seminary. It was one of the projects I was given in a Theology and Art course: to take Bernard Cooke’s “Word and Sacrament” and express it in seven banners for the Diaconate Ordination. I was trying to express service, one helping another. I was drawing the patterns on the floor in the hallway and the rector came by and said, What’s that? I had drawn an outline of a heart on the one who was reaching down to lift up the other. The rector said, Get rid of that. That’s romantic garbage. (He always had an opinion. It wasn’t always good, but he always had an opinion.)
So I modified it. I didn’t take it out because I think he was wrong. We don’t have anything else to begin to express the concept, and to do an outline where there is room in that heart made sense – where there is room for other.
The idea is that we can open our hearts to another, to make room for them, just as God has opened God’s heart and made room for all he has created, loving them into existence, gathering them all into his life, and trying to express that which is eternal in tangible terms.
The Book of Deuternomy… At that point in time they’re still caught between judgment and mercy. It’s not that God is able to force our hearts when we have closed them down, because God made them free. Then the punishment that we so often ascribe to God is of our own making, which we have created by closing. So Deuteronomy only begins to talk about this love that God has.
The First Letter of John has a little more body to it, I guess, but it’s more of that circular Johannine language, where you’re talking about something but you can’t quite pull it into focus, you can just generally talk about it. God is love. God is this absolute and we have yet to understand this absolute. But Christ came so that we could begin to, in his flesh, that he might express the depth of that love, to take us with him even to death, so that we might rise again.
All of this is hard to contain within an image of a heart burning with a crown of thorns wrapped around it.
Jesus invites us to surrender to this love. He uses the images of the yoke. The yoke that they put over the backs of oxen and horses to pull things behind them was designed for two things. One, it would redistribute the weight of the load over the strongest part of their bodies and it would do this so that they could carry more weight without injuring themselves. But the other purpose of the yoke was so that someone could steer them. (OK, hook up your plow to the oxen and let them go — is that how that works? Or do you have to steer it so that you get furrows that are all aligned?)
The yoke of Jesus is his love for us. Accept that love. Accept it for all that it can do, all that it can contain, all that it can produce in you and through you. Surrender to that love, for that is the way love works, when we surrender to it. It still exists whether we surrender to it or not, but when we surrender to it, we enter in.
The idea behind the Sacred Heart was always to enter into that Heart, to enter into that love, to surrender to the power of that love at work in our lives, to allow it to change us by inclusion.
We live in a world of separation. We seek to set up walls, We seek to set up our own individual separation. To surrender to the inclusion of the Heart of Jesus Christ is the aim of the Bishops of the United States, that, by consecrating the United States to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we might have an opportunity as a nation to grow again. By surrendering to a love that is greater than our own, to a life that is greater than our own, one that has compassion for all people, one that can actually work for justice and bring peace. Only in the Heart of Christ where there is room for all, the Heart of God, can this ability come to fruition.
And so today we pray for our nation as we pray for our world. We pray that the love of God revealed in Christ Jesus, without limit, without boundary, can overtake our world, that it surrender to that perfect love, that we might be all that is needed.
(Below is the banner Fr. Pat mentioned, with his explanation here: In 1981, I was short on Theology credits, so Fr. Larry Terrien offered me an independent study of Theology and Art. I was to read selected sections of Bernard Cooke's "Word and Sacrament" in order to create a set of banners for Diaconate Ordination, and I was to read up on the Trinity and produce an artwork to express what I had learned. The banners were more or less produced (six panels - the three you see and three connecting banners, not shown). The first banner was the beginning of Sacrament, found in service to neighbor. The yellow band is light dominating over the dark brown band which is the darkness of self-centeredness.)
