Christ’s Sacred Heart: Bringing order out of chaos

On June 17, the day after this year’s celebration of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, it will have been one hundred years since the laying of the cornerstone of Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, where I serve. Sacred Heart’s cornerstone bears an inscription from Jeremiah 3:15: “I will give you pastors according to my own heart.”

Bishop Joseph Schrembs of Cleveland, who was invited to speak on that august occasion, said that “the seminary, in training priests, would aid in rescuing the world from chaos.”

It is easy to overemphasize the significance of one’s own time. But it seems clear that in the past one hundred years, the Church’s mission of rescuing the world from chaos has never been more urgent than it is right now.

And yet our urgency is not mere emotional enthusiasm, even soteriologically motivated enthusiasm. Saint Paul aptly describes the true urgency driving Catholic disciples:

For the love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction that one died for all; therefore, all have died. He indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. (2 Cor 5:14-15)

The urgency in the hearts of Christ’s disciples is the love that burns in His Heart for sinners. That flame grows hotter and brighter as Catholics see their loved ones threatened on every side. They know that the devil, fueled by his own utterly corrupt urgency, which is only a rapacious hunger for victims, “is prowling like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8).

Satan suffers the eternal death of separation from God and insatiable hunger, prowling and grasping for what will ever leave him unsatisfied.

Disciples of Jesus Christ live for Him Who is our Lord and Master, our Friend and Brother. Our hunger is for the Bread of Life, celebrated especially on the recent Solemnity of Corpus Christi. The Body of Christ that perfectly satisfies us, binds us to Him, and fills our hearts with His love. The indwelling Holy Spirit brings order to the chaos of our hearts.

This is what God does. In His creative and redemptive acts, God establishes order out of chaos. We know that in the Fall, humanity submitted to the chaos of sin and death. And this chaos held sway until the coming of the Savior. “Through him all things were made,” in the words of the Profession of Faith. And He is also the One Who says, “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev 21:5).

Throughout the readings of the Easter Season, we saw the promise and fulfillment of this Paschal re-creation of divine life and order. In the Acts of the Apostles, the preaching and ministry of the apostles, often involving great signs and wonders, bring order out of the chaos of unbelief, sickness, and the threat of death.

For example, in Acts 9, Saint Peter raises Tabitha from the dead. It is noteworthy that she is described as someone who lived for Christ, whose life was ordered around good deeds and almsgiving.

Saint Peter raised her up, restoring her to the order of discipleship. But what is even more important is that the miracle Peter performed inspired faith in those who witnessed it.  The raising of Tabitha “became known all over Joppa, and many came to believe in the Lord” (9:42).

Out of the chaos of unbelief, new life begins for those who put their faith in the Lord.

Another prominent theme during the Easter Season and on Corpus Christi is the Eucharist as the Bread of Life. At the end of Jesus’ Bread of Life Discourse in John 6. many found the teaching so challenging that they abandoned Christ. They had been on the very threshold of divine life and order, and yet they walked away from Him Who is the way, the truth, and the life.

In response to the chaos of their abandonment of Jesus, what did the Twelve do? It is significant that they did not immediately follow after those who left, frantic to restore order. That would come later, in their apostolic missions.

They were not yet ready to rescue those who walked away. What they needed at that moment was to draw near to Christ themselves.

They needed to pledge themselves to Christ, to profess their faith in Him, and to share in the divine life He promised. They needed to live for Jesus. Only by living for Jesus themselves and sharing in His life could they do anything to rescue others.

Our churches are where we do precisely this. We draw close to Christ. We profess our faith in Him. And the Lord strengthens our faith as we grow in our understanding of divine truth.

Some people make a rhetorical point out of the distinction between knowing Jesus and knowing about Jesus. As Catholics, we who know Jesus seek to know more about Him. And in knowing more about Him we know and love Him more. We come to know Jesus in liturgical worship, prayer, intellectual study, community life, and the works of charity. We strive to live entirely for Christ.

We allow the Lord to order our own lives, to center our lives on Him. In this way, we become well-prepared to go out and bear witness to Christ’s “words of eternal life.”

It is easy to doubt our well-preparedness for the mission of evangelization. There are many forces conspiring to lure, shove, distract, or drag people away from Christ and plunge them into a swamp of chaos. Outright Satanism, sexual perversity of every kind, the corrosion of people’s sense of the dignity of human life, marriage, and personal identity, technological addiction, and the list goes on and on.

Even within the Church, we face myriad problems, some of them quite grave. It would be easy to look back on the state of the Church in the Acts of the Apostles with envy. And it’s easy to take for granted that the best days of the Church are behind her. The rise and fall of Christendom seems to be an arc that is now complete, and perhaps the end is near!

Well, the end certainly is near! But how “near” translates into a number of years, we have no idea. As Msgr. Ronald Knox once said, “For all we know, we may be living in the early days of Church history.”

Knox also says this of the newness of our faith in the power of Christ’s Resurrection:

Life has triumphed over death in our souls. Grace has been implanted in us, a principle of supernatural life, a seed that sprang from our Lord’s tomb. That garden of the Resurrection was the nursery garden of the whole Church. And that’s why we must never allow ourselves to grow despondent over our sins, even when we find ourselves falling into them again and again; there’s something in us stronger than sin, Divine grace, which is always thrusting up like a plant rooted in our souls, always claiming us for itself. There is no autumn in your soul; as long as you believe in Jesus Christ and in what his Resurrection has done for you, it is always spring.

We become well-prepared to evangelize by the power of our union with Christ and each other in His Church. We live for Him, and when we fail to live for Him, we run to Him for forgiveness. This is the life the people of this time and of every time desperately need.

This is what St. Catherine of Siena means when she says, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire!” The fire is the divine love the burns in the Heart of Christ. This is the love the burns in the hearts of His disciples. Fr. Tadeusz Dajczer writes in his book The Gift of Faith:

Christian love is the love of Christ in us. He is our Way, our Truth and Life. He is the one that thinks, prays, lives and loves in us with His love. The magnitude of our love is determined by the greatness of our faith, which allows us to share in the life of God.

The problems of our time need answers. We need truths to bring to a world awash in the chaos of existential questioning, misinformation, and outright lies. But more than anything, we need to live for Him Who is the Truth and to show all people that they will only find true and eternal life in Him.

The people of our time need to know the glory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the glory that shines forth whenever the Bread of Life is offered and received. May all the faithful who are dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus persevere to the end in sharing the eternal life promised and delivered in Christ’s dying and rising, the life in which we have been formed at His Eucharistic altar.