The heart !!! The heart is the center of life, if it doesn’t beat life ceases. Figuratively it means that this very vital organ is also the seat of emotions and feelings. Jesus also, being God and man, had a heart like ours, a heart that loved us to distraction, but alas, without being reciprocated, because we, miserable creatures, often let other feelings overwhelm us, forgetting that the heart, as the center and source of our affections, must beat first of all for God, our Supreme Good. When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He replied: " You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matthew and Mark).
Jesus’ heart began to beat with love and to suffer for men from the first moment of His Incarnation. He spoke to Luisa about the excesses of love that led Him to incarnate Himself in Mary's womb, to clothe Himself with all the unhappinesses of creatures – and all this in order to make an exchange, to give them His destiny, His joys and His eternal happiness. But, alas, He found in them highest ingratitude and obstinate perfidy, so that His Eternal Love wept even in the maternal womb.
Ingratitude was the sharpest thorn that pierced His heart, from His conception. He said to Luisa:“Look at my little heart - it is wounded, and pours out blood. What pain! What torture I feel!”.
And then, again: “Look at Me and listen to Me, in the middle of this chasm of flames I breathe nothing but flames; and in my breath I feel that the flames of my devouring Love bring Me the breath of all creatures. My tiny little Heart palpitates flames which, extending, capture the heartbeats of all creatures and place them inside my Heart; and I feel all heartbeats palpitating in my little Heart. I am still little, yet, I am spared nothing!”. The mystery of suffering can be already glimpsed in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Each conceived soul brought little Jesus the burden of her sins, of her weaknesses and passions.
How much sorrow we give to the heart of Jesus with our continuous indifference, outrages, sacrileges, oh poor Jesus, oh poor Love offended! Luisa’s writings help us to understand the inner and horrible sufferings of the Heart of Jesus. This knowledge will help us to "merge" our stone hearts, to move us and to yearn to heal His wounds, or at least to mitigate them. How much tenderness Jesus instills when He spoke to Luisa of three mortal wounds of His Heart!
Among the many wounds that His Heart contains, there are three wounds which give Him mortal pains and such bitterness of sorrow as to surpass all the other wounds together. This is the pain of His loving souls. When Jesus sees a soul, suffering because of Him, tortured, crushed, ready to suffer for Him even the most painful death, Jesus feels her pains as if they were his - and maybe even more. Love can open the deepest gashes, to the extent of making one feel no other pains.
His dear Mama enters first into this first wound. Her Heart, pierced because of Jesus’ pains, overflowed into His. All the souls who suffer because of Him, and only out of love, enter into this wound.
A soul who loves Him and who suffers for Him is all His contentment, His happiness, His reward for everything He has done. And while this wound of His Heart is the most painful, such as to surpass everything, it contains two effects at the same time: it gives Him intense pain and highest joy; unspeakable bitterness and indescribable sweetness; painful death and glorious life. These are the excesses of His love - inconceivable to created mind.
The second mortal wound of His Heart is ingratitude. With ingratitude, the creature closes His Heart; even more, she herself turns the key with double locks. His Heart swells, wanting to pour out graces and love, but It cannot, because the creature has closed It, and has sealed It with her ingratitude. And Jesus, poor Love, becomes delirious - He agonizes, without hope that this wound be healed, because ingratitude keeps embittering it more and more, giving Him mortal pain.
The third one is obstinacy. What a mortal wound for His Heart! Obstinacy is the destruction of all the goods He has done for the creature; it is the signature that the creature puts on her declaration that she no longer recognizes Him – that she no longer belongs to Him. It is the key of hell into which the creature hurls herself. His Heart feels this tearing; It is torn to pieces - and He feels one of these pieces being taken away from Him. What a mortal wound obstinacy is!
We read in “The 24 Hours of the Passion”: “O Jesus, I kiss your Heart. how much You suffer! I seeYou faint, submerged by the waves of our iniquities. I compassionate You, and I want to soothe the bitterness of your Heart, pierced three times, by offering You the eternal sweetnesses and the most sweet love of dear Mama Mary, as well as those of all your true lovers”.
Jesus wanted to reveal to the world the wonders of His heart by showing His pierced Heart, surmounted by a small cross and surrounded by flames. In the seventeenth century He appeared so to a poor French nun, Margaret Mary Alacoque. The sign of the cross means suffering, renunciation, devotion. Jesus for our redemption, underwent all kinds of pain, up to the point of giving His life, He was humiliated as a malefactor, with the death sentence. Jesus embraced the cross, He carried it on His shoulders and died nailed to it, He wants us to become like Him, therefore, He invites us to consider the salvific value of the Cross: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”(Mt 16: 24)
Thus in the sufferings of life let us feel more united to Him, let’s pray, turn to His heart that sees, knows and can everything and we will draw comfort, joy; His words are comforting: " Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Mt 11:28).
In fact when Jesus spoke to Luisa of His indescribable sorrows, inconceivable to human creature, He revealed another aspect of His interior life, saying that each beat of His Heart was a distinct sorrow (as Human life is a continuous palpitating we can imagine what torrents of sorrow each beat of His Heart brought and bring Him).
But then He added that His Divinity, which was inseparable from Him, watching over His Heart, while letting a new sorrow enter at each heartbeat, at each heartbeat It also let enter new joys, new contentments, new harmonies and celestial secrets. If Jesus was rich in sorrow and His Heart enclosed immense seas of pain, He was also rich in happiness, in infinite joys and in unreachable sweetness.
If we could look into His Heart, we would see everything centralized in Him - all possible imaginable sorrows, from which creatures rise again to new life, and all contentments and divine riches, which flow within His Heart like many seas, as He diffuses them for the good of the whole human family.
But who shares more in these immense treasures of His Heart? One who suffers more. For each pain, for each sorrow, there a special joy in His Heart, which follows that pain or sorrow suffered by the creature. Sorrow renders her more dignified, more lovable, more dear, more worthy of sympathy. And just as His Heart drew upon Itself all divine sympathies by virtue of the sorrows suffered, in seeing sorrow in the creature, with all love He pours upon her the joys and contentments which His Heart contains.
So, His joys follow the sorrow, but in seeing that the sorrow has not been received with love and honor and with highest submission, His joys do not find the way to enter that sorrowful heart and, grieving, they come back into His Heart. Therefore, when Jesus finds a soul who is resigned, who is lover of suffering, He feels her as though regenerated within His Heart, and He holds nothing back of all the goods which He can pour into her.
Therefore, oh my Jesus, I pray You, let everyone can say like Luisa: “Oh, how I long to live heart to heart with you! My Love, Jesus, in my pains I look for Your Heart to rest, and in Your pains I intend to give You shelter with my pains”. “I pray You to imprison me in your Heart and in your Will, so that I may repair for everything and so my prison will be your Heart, my chains will be made of love; your flames will be my food”.
The first impulses toward the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus come from German mysticism of the late Middle Ages, however, the great flowering of this devotion occurred mainly by the private revelations made to a nun from France, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Three encyclicals are important in the development of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: Pope Leo XII promulgated the encyclical Annum Sacrum (1899), Pius XI promulgated the 'Miserentissimus Redemptor encyclical (1928) and Pope Pius XII also wrote an encyclical, Haurietis Aqua (1956). The feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was celebrated for the first time in France, probably in 1672, and became universal for the Catholic Church only in 1856 by Pope Pius IX.