The total yes to God

Sorry for the quiet blog but work is intense currently. Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the gospel casts us immediately into the realities of the Sacred Heart. He is also the Sacred Child who thanks the Father for hiding the deepest truths from the learned and revealing them to the little ones. This is disconcerting for us. We can feel so often the cost of our lack of calculation - our lack of foresight or simply our lack of awareness - that it seems bewildering to think that the Father would deliberately hide things from us. 

Yet this sentiment of Jesus converges with that of our Mother in the Magnificat who tells us that the Almighty casts down the powerful from their thrones;  leaving them - she might have added -  to their ignorance. Knowledge, we assume, is power, but that is too simplistic. In God's eyes love is power, and knowledge comes from the heart as well as the mind. Since it is love that makes us most like God, it is love - supreme love, not the dishwater we normally take for love - that helps us to have what Lizzie calls "a God's eye view". Love is power for us especially because while our knowledge of God is limited by our intellects, our love of God is capable of infinite growth through grace. And in God's eyes, that love is just as likely to be found in the heart of the physically weak and the humanly powerless, as in in the humanly powerful and influential. Both kings and beggars have been saints, but only because they had this one thing in common: the deepest and profoundest love of God and neighbour. This is the greatness of the lowly, and it is no doubt why Jesus' yoke seems light to them.

Still, such love can only be our anchor when it means 'yes' to everything God calls us to be: dishwater love, the kind of love that holds back from total self surrender, will just not do. 

This is the 'yes' of the Sacred Heart, a 'yes' He learned humanly at the knee of his Mother who shouldered her own burdens with a secret joy and glorified the One who works marvels for the lowly of heart.