Sacred Heart - Year B
The heart is at the centre of the human body. You lose an eye, a hand, an ear, it is problematic but you can still live for many years. On the other hand, if your heart stops, your life stop very quickly too. This evening, I would like to speak about the immensity of Creation first of all, then as a second point to finish by talking about the biggest immensity of our Creator.
1. The Immensity of Creation
Beginning with a little anatomy. The heart of the embryo appears as soon as the 3rd week, it is the first organ to exist. The heart plays the role of a pump. It is truly an engine which sucks and pushes around blood in the human body. 4 to 5 litres of blood are supplied throughout the body. Our blood vessels, placed end to end, measure 100, 000 km, that is two and a half times around the earth.
These blood vessels are filled by the beating of the heart in less than a minute. What a machine! And it is really strong. Imagine if we were to place a tunnel of straws all along the church, and we breathed into it, trying to push a liquid from one end to another. It would be tiring after a time. And your heart does this on a network of 100, 000 km, without complaining, since before your birth, without one day of holiday. Fabulous !
A whales heart beats 9 times a minute, that of a shrew : 600 times. That of a human, 60
to 100 times, at rest. In a lifetime, that makes 2 billion heartbeats, difficult to imagine. Take confetti. If you had 2 billion pieces of confetti, you could carpet an average sized church and still have plenty left to start another church.
You see, God gives life to your heart which beats without us asking it to. At night, nobody thinks of the need to recharge their heart like we recharge our telephone so that it works well the following day. Since our birth (and even before) it works on its own. This is also fabulous. And to open your spirit, God gives the same movement of heart to your neighbour. Imagine the quantity of confetti if we wanted to count the number of heartbeats of everyone in our city, country, or even the planet. Add to this the heartbeats of all the animals. Even insects have a kind of heart, the membrane. And each heartbeat, each piece of confetti, He knows it. Even more than that, He is interested in it. The immensity of God. Thinking of this earlier today, I had to go for a coffee, it made my head spin so much.
2. The greatest immensity of the Creator
I go from creation to arrive at the Creator, who had thought of all that. Today we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The expression "Heart of Jesus" should not be restrictive. This is not the seat of His emotions, of His love.
The heart of Jesus is relative to the mystery of Christ Himself, that is to say the totality of His being compared to his intimate and essential centre. Imagine ; all I have just said being concentrated therein. Yet it is nothing compared to the Son of God, wisdom incarnated. Infinite love, principle of salvation and sanctification for all humanity. The "Heart of Christ" is identified with Christ himself, the Incarnate Word and Redeemer.
It is impossible to speak of Gods love because it is difficult to speak of something which is infinite. We can quantify the pieces of confetti to carpet a church, but we cannot quantify the love of God with pieces of confetti.
When God loves, he engages himself. When God created us, he committed to love us. Some people doubt the love of God because they cannot see Him. Prehistoric man did not see the planet Uranus. Yet, it really existed. The proof that God loves us, it is that he came for us even though we were sinners. (Rm 3.23) The pierced heart of Jesus, that stopped beating, it is the heart that allowed my own to beat. So there we are, our parish should be this beating heart, this place where God transmits His love.
Our community of parishes should be the district pump. The beating heart, it is that of Christ. We are the arteries, the channels, so our reason of existence is to diffuse this love.
If we draw a map of our parishes territory and where each parishioner lives, we make a mark, we can join the dots to make a network.
Around the mark where we live, there are a number of people who wait to be supplied with the same source of true love. Does this network cover the entire area? Are we concerned if there are un-supplied zones ? If I had a dry hand, it would concern me. And if it is the hand of the body of Christ ? It is our job, the arteries, to make the join with the veins. Just as, Christ, as the heart, pulls it all to Him and diffuses his infinite love in the totality of His body.
We have have this certainty of being supplied by the love which runs from the sacred heart, we are very lucky!
