Consoling the Heart of Jesus

My wife and I have been listening to a good primer on mental prayer. Though I have practiced mental prayer for a number of years now, it’s always good to go back for refreshers, as well as to remind ourselves of the basic essence of why we should be praying regularly in this manner: to advance in the spiritual life.

St. Alphonsus and St. Francis de Sales lay out the four steps to mental prayer (St. Teresa of Avila does so in five, rather than four steps), which includes 1) preparation; 2) meditation/considerations; 3) affections and petitions; 4) conclusion and spiritual bouquet.

As someone who came to Christianity and the Catholic Church by way of Buddhism, a bit of unlearning was called for in my approach to prayer. In the East, “meditation” is a method of emptying the mind of thoughts and imagery as a way of learning to extinguish the ego/self. The Christian nomenclature when it comes to prayer can sometimes be confusing for those new to this spiritual discipline; Contemplation (contemplatio) is a way of resting with God that goes beyond thoughts, words, and images, with the goal being ultimate union with God. In this, we do not exterminate the self but dissolve the barriers between our will and His will, our thoughts and His thoughts.

Meditation (meditation) in the Christian sense relies on the imagination to put oneself before the Lord as if he were really there. Because our bodies, our minds, and our intellect were created by God and deemed good, and because God took on human flesh in Christ and lived in time and history, we can employ these faculties as a way to draw closer to Him.

Reading Scripture in the way of Lectio Divina (Divine Reading) can help jump start meditation, as can gazing upon a crucifix or holy icon. Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, one may notice a word or phrase that speaks to the soul, and one can subsequently slowly work it over and digest it slowly. Likewise, a particular aspect of Christ’s life and Passion, using the faculty of the imagination, may be singled out for meditation.

While at Adoration this week, I was led to focus on a physical feature of the person of Christ that had gone unnoticed in former meditations—that of his feet.

In the Gospels, we see Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, teaching them that they are called to be servants of men, not masters (Mt 9:6; Mk 2:10; Jn 14:1-17). This scene appears in three of the Gospel accounts, so we know it is important. We also see Peter almost recoiling at Jesus undertaking this act (Jn 13:8); it must have been deeply embarrassing, given how filthy that feet got from walking barefoot or in sandals among dirt and dung.

In Luke’s Gospel (Lk 7:36-50), we find another scene, but this time it is a sinful woman who washes, dries, and anoints Jesus’ feet—not with water and a towel, but with her own tears, hair, and perfume (which perhaps had been purchased with the wages of her sin). Unlike Peter’s recoiling, Jesus permits her and lauds the act. And why did he laud her? Because “her great love has shown” (Lk 7:47).

In my meditation, I focused my attention on the feet of Christ—both in these scenes and on the Cross. Because the Cross was elevated at Calvary, Christ’s feet would have been at eye level or higher. I saw the heavy head of the nail protruding from the small bones in his feet, one resting on the other and the stake driven through both. His feet were calloused and almost blackened with dirt and blood, and they writhed in agony. The goal of crucifixion from the Roman perspective was, in fact, to accomplish this exercise of power by reducing a man to a helpless, worm-like creature. The Empire has determined your punitive fate—you are under their power, pinned to a tree, unable to come and go as you please. And so it is fitting to recall the words of the Psalmist: “I am a worm and no man; a reproach of men and the scorn of the people” (Ps 22:6). Christ himself quotes from Psalm 22 when he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22:1).

In this meditation, I realized that the most painful scourging, the most humiliating crowning, the most exhausting marching, the most brutal torture on the Cross was all endurable even to Christ as a man. But his heart was torn and he suffered most because the love he poured out to men from the Cross was left laying fallow beneath his feet. It was not returned to him, but remained an agonizing and unrequited love.

God, by his very nature, is Love (Jn 3:16); He creates man in his own image (Gen 1:27), which means we are capable of love. But because we were created in freedom, we can withhold that love as well by an act of free will. The act of love is to do the will of the Father (Mt 21:28-32), and Christ himself says that “He who loves me will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15). And what is the foremost and greatest commandment? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mt 22:37).

The love of Christ and his divine mercy burns so hot and so intensely that it pains him when it is left unrequited. This was communicated to St. Faustina when Christ told her, “The flames of mercy are burning Me. I desire to pour them out upon human souls. Oh, what pain they cause Me when they do not want to accept them!” (Diary, 1074).

Notice that it is not even that we do not love God, or love Him for His own sake. It is that we do not accept the love and mercy he pours out on us. Whereas loving is active, acceptance of love—allowing ourselves to be loved—is a passive act. It asks very little, and yet it demands everything—just as the Commandment calls for loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind. When we truly love Christ, it is only because he has first loved us (1 Jn 4:19).

When my kids were babies, my favorite part of their body was their feet. I would cup them in my hand and kiss their little toes. Because they had not taken to walking yet, they were clean and wrinkly, pure and undefiled. When I reflected on this, I recalled a moving scene from The Passion of the Christ when Mary the Mother of God kisses the bloodies and disfigured feet of her Son as he hangs on the Cross. She does so with the greatest tenderness, but also with the most heart-rending pain. No one loved Jesus like Mary did. Because there were so few at the foot of the Cross during her son’s most agonizing moments, her consolation to him was that she sought to love him, returning his love to him when so many had abandoned him and left him alone. Maybe this is also why St. John is referred to as “the disciple Jesus loved,” because he was there, too, in addition to Mary Magdalene, who “loved much.”

It’s a cultural cliché to borrow from The Beatles and quip that “all you need is love.” But, truly, at the end of life and at our particular judgment, this will be the only thing that matters, the only thing that that isn’t burned away in the refiner’s fire.

We can love God because He first loved us. We can return that love and console his broken heart, a heart that seeks to find love as it goes out and comes back feeling desolate because it finds so few who truly love him. We can wash our brothers’ feet because he washed ours, and we tenderly can kiss the feet of Christ because they are there before us at eye level, just as his mother did. We have the capacity to love both God and neighbor because that love has been poured out to us. And he does not wish for it to go unrequited.