Aloysius Pieris, S.J.
Aloysius Pieris, S.J. is the founder and director of Tulana Research Center, Colombo, Sri Lanka. An indologist and theologian, he is also an expert on Buddhist Philosophy as well as Professor of Pali Abhid-hammika Literature.
Part One
The Historical Background: A Reflection on a Tradition
The"heart" of Jesuit spirituality is the Heart of Jesus. The Jesus-centred spirituality, which Ignatius bequeathed to the Jesuits and to the church as a whole, began to take the contours of a "Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus" somewhere towards the end of the 17th century. What triggered off this trend were the "revelations" of the Sacred Heart believed to have been relayed through Margaret Mary Alacoque to her Jesuit Confessor, Claude La Colombière, and through him to the whole Society of Jesus. The encyclical Haurietis Aquas made the whole church, and not merely the Jesuits, recognize it as an important dimension a Christian spirituality.
One of the main ingredients of this devotion was the consecration of individuals, families and other Christian Communities to the Sacred Heart. The First Friday Devotion and other practices were centred round the belief that the devotee should make reparation for the damage done by sinners to the Heart of Jesus. Acts of prayer and penance were encouraged as means of reparation and consolation to the suffering Heart of Jesus.These words, "consecration", "reparation", "consolation" echo the theology of the particular period in which this devotion took shape. They will acquire a new significance today once we subject the theological presuppositions of this devotion to a scriptural evaluation in the light of today’s apostolic challenges, specially the challenge of the Poor.
As an important prelude to this inquiry, one must discuss the meaning of the word "heart". This is the acid test, which will verify whether it is a devotion or a deviation. I say this because today the picture of a physiological heart has become an indispensable ingredient of this devotional exercise.
I must confess that I have allowed myself to be influenced by the opinion of some contemporary Christian artists who hold that recourse to this symbolism is as incongruous as using a picture of the human brain to symbolize, say, Aristotle’s intelligence! This criticism seems to raise two inter-related questions:
What is the adequate symbol for the reciprocal love between Jesus and us? And, What is the real meaning of the heart in Christian spirituality?
The Adequate Symbol
As some art-critics have noted, during and immediately after the Renaissance period of Art (i.e., up to the time of Claude La Colombière), the great Masters depicted the enfleshed Love of God in Jesus by means of two art forms: one was the human face of Jesus radiating the "foolishness of the cross", namely, that "mad love" which God was (literally) dying to show us; the other would be a still picture that caught Jesus in the very act of manifesting that love, namely, the act of feeding the hungry or healing the sick; preaching the Good News to the poor or praying for his weak companions of labor; touching the untouchable or caressing the little ones; comforting mourners or empowering women; forgiving sinners or dining with the outcasts; and above all, doing his final act of self-immolation on the Cross. The most eloquent symbol of love, therefore, is action. Or as Ignatius has put it, "love ought to show itself in deeds more than in words" (Sp.Ex. 230).
Is the physiological organ of the human heart an adequate expression of this dynamic message? Is it not a devotional sign rather than an action-promoting symbol? The Renaissance artists who influenced the Jesuit culture with their humanism even up to the period in which Claude La Colombière promoted the Sacred Heart Devotion within the Society of Jesus, could not have thought of depicting a "human heart" to symbolize Christ’s love. The symbol or the Sacrament, which God Herself chose to express His own Son’s love was none other than the man Jesus in action. We cannot improve on it. This is the first axiom with which we must begin our discourse on "the heart of Jesuit spirituality".
Not to disturb those who are accustomed to associate too closely the picture of the physical heart with God’s love manifested in Jesus, I wish to quote from a very early warning given to artists by the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Trullanum 692). As Leonid Ouspensky observes, it was at this Council that the church defined, for the first time, the fundamental notion and character of holy images. This was the time when the controversies about the divinity and humanity of Christ had subsided and when "symbols" were used more frequently than the human image of Jesus himself. So we hear the Council making this pronouncement in Canon 82:
We decree that henceforth Christ our God, the Lamb who took away the sin of the world, be represented in his human form and not in the form of the ancient lamb, so that the humiliation of God, the Word, be understood, his life in the flesh be remembered as well as his passion, his saving death, and thus, the redemption of the world. [Emphasis added]
In other words, those events in his "life in the flesh", specially, his "humiliation," his "passion and his saving death" are the features of his humanity which symbolize his love. If that is so, we can infer that the physical human heart which is a late comer in the history of sacred art, does not do justice to that which must be signified. Here, the teaching the Sixth Ecumenical Council is a safe guide. The humanity of Christ will always remain the ultimate sacrament of God’s Love, the most inspiring symbol that drives us to action.
That is why I have been compelled to make a distinction, here, between the symbolic use of the physical heart to convey the love of Christ (which I am discussing, here, under ‘a’, and the significance of the word "heart" in the traditional spirituality of the church, which I shall take up next, under ‘b.’
According to the ex-Jesuit Henri Bremond (1885-1933), an authority on the history of French spirituality, St John Eude’s cult of the Sacred Heart was a theocentric spirituality revolving round the "heart" as a symbol for Christ’s interior, whereas, in the Paray-le-Monial version triggered of by Margaret Mary Alacoque’s visions, i.e., in the Jesuit devotion, the ruptured physical organ of the heart became a powerful image of Christ’s love. The iconographic presentation of Christ with his physiological heart pierced and bleeding was a natural development of this new devotion.
Now, was this purely a matter of French Catholic imagination at work? Gordon Wakefield tells us that even English Puritans (Isaac Ambrose, Richard Baxter, and Thomas Godwin) had resorted to this same strong language of the cleft heart of Christ in hymns and treatises. The problem, then, is not about the literary idiom used by both Catholics and Protestants alike, but its pictorial version. Let us clarify this question by studying the literary idiom.
The Meaning of "Heart"
The explicit mention of the heart of Christ is noted already in spiritual writings of the Middle Ages, more than half a millennium before the Jesuit version of it appeared. We find it in the Vita Mystica and generally in the works of, St Bonaventure, St Anselm, St Bernard, St Mechtild and St Gertrude. The reference to the heart in any spiritual discourse constitutes a powerful literary idiom, which does not necessarily evoke the pictorial image of the physical heart. There is a simple reason for this. As Rahner has observed, the word "heart" is a "primordial word" signifying the inner core of one’s personality, not different from such phrases as the "side of Christ" (latus Christi) or the "Bowels of Mercy" (viscera misericordiae) and so on, which recur both in the Bible and in the Fathers.
The Sanskrit root hrd (which is philologically related to the English "heart") is used in early Buddhist literature as the seat of our consciousness (cit). The actions that express and characterize who we are spring from that inner seat of consciousness. Even the root shrd (another version of hrd) from which shraddha (faith) comes is the palatalized version of the guttural Indo-European root from which both Greek kardia (heart) and Latin credo (I believe, I have faith) are derived. Here, the etymological kinship between Shraddha (faith) and hrd (heart) in Sanskrit as well as between credo (I believe) and kardia (heart) goes to the very root of human language! No wonder, what I believe in my heart (my faith) and what I express in actions have an inner reciprocity.
If we turn to the history of Christian spirituality, our great saints have been struggling to name this inner core of our being or the seat of consciousness wherein happens everything that defines one’s personality. St Teresa of Avila, in her Mansions, refers to it as the "soul’s centre", which was, literally, a Christian appropriation of kentron psyches that Plotinus speaks of in his Ennead. Many medieval mystics used words like synteresis (conscience?) or apex mentis seu scintilla animae (the peak of the mind or the spark of the soul), as does, for instance, Bonaventure in his Itenerarium. This is a spiritual reality that cannot be easily depicted because it cannot be physiologically located. The physical heart is incapable of evoking this meaning adequately.
What is stressed, here, is that the word "heart" (the literary idiom, and not the picture) is the most common way of referring to this inexpressible reality. It is where we are truly ourselves. It is where we discover and decode the secret name by which God calls each of us into existence. It is where I find the creative word by which I am personally addressed by God. It is there that I recognize, by name, who God desires me to be, the name, which contains my specific mission as willed by God. In fact I would say, that spiritual growth is necessarily accompanied by a progressive discovery of and increasing response to this secret identity code that we carry in our "heart" from our conception. Hence, everything that happens there, in that secret place, good or bad, leaves a visible stamp on my personality. Therefore, it is there, in the heart, that we must seek conversion and spiritual progress. Hence the biblical plea for circumcision of the heart rather than of the flesh.
Let us now apply this notion of the heart to Christ. When we speak of the "heart of Christ" we mean that which makes him Christ, namely, God’s love flowing into action from the very centre of his being. For this is what the "Word of God" or dabar Yahweh means in the bible when applied to Jesus: an action-word or spoken deed. That is what Jesus truly is! In him God’s Speech coincides with God’s Action. He is this Action-Word in human form. In other words, Christ is God’s Love proclaimed by being acted out in human life. The Word of Revelation is a Gesture of Love!
If this is the case, the encounter of my heart with the heart of Jesus is not a mere devotional exercise of romantic heart-gazing, but a programmatic faith leading to a shared commitment to brave deeds of love on behalf of his least brothers and sisters. It is this commitment which Jesus described as the "sweet yoke" and "light burden" which he would place on our shoulders, as we are about to see in the ensuing scriptural meditation, which takes us right into the heart of Christ!
Part Two
Jesus, Meek and Lowly of Heart: A Scriptural Meditation on Mt 11: 29
Let us, then, take away the image of the physical heart from our horizon and stand before Jesus the Man and hear him make that famous utterance:
Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you will find your lives restful. For my yoke is easy and my
burden sweet (Mt 11:28-30).
This has not been the key scriptural text for the Sacred Heart devotion. The main inspiration was drawn from the Johanine reference to the crucified Christ’s pierced side from which blood and water are said to have flowed (Jn19:34). The encyclical endorsing this devotion begins with the phrase Haurietis Aquas (draw forth the waters) which alludes to Jn 19:34 taken in conjunction with Jn 7:37-40 where the water that flows from his inner being ("guts," koilias) is identified as the Spirit).
Today, let us have recourse to Mt 11:29. It is the only passage in which Jesus uses the word "heart" with reference to his own self, revealing something of his own inner being and inviting us to share his yoke and his burden ---a yoke and a burden which are associated with our becoming meek and lowly of heart just like him.
The words meekness and lowliness can easily be misinterpreted, resulting in a distorted image of the Person whom we are called to emulate! In that case, we might not be following the Jesus of the gospels when practising the devotion to his heart! For, these words, "meek and lowly," have a particular resonance in the New Testament usage and, there, too, they come from the lips of Jesus only in Mathew, and is presumably part of the Mathean emphasis on the microi (God’s little ones). As in the other Mathean phrase, "poor in spirit," here, too, one is called to be meek and lowly of heart, i.e., from the depth of one’s being.
Meekness as prophetic anger and disciplined strength at the service of God and the lowly ones
In classical Greek, William Barclay tells us, meekness (praotes) is a "lovely word" meaning gentleness as in the case of a gentle breeze. For Aristotle, it was a virtue, and therefore always stood between two extremes. In medio stat virtus: "virtue stands in the middle," says he. Thus meekness is said to be the mean between two extremes; one extreme is orgilotes or uncontrollable anger; the other is aorgesia (inability to be angry at all). To put it in down-to-the-earth language, the meek person is neither a "beast" who is easily provoked into fits of destructive rage, nor a "vegetable" that is incapable of manifesting even the semblance of an irate reaction!
Conclusions? To be meek (praüs) is to be angry in the proper measure for the proper reason at the proper time. Once the word with this meaning enters the New Testament, I presume, it must refer to "prophetic anger" which is the Wrath of God reacting against injustice.
St Paul, after all, advises us to be "angry without sinning" (Eph. 4:26), because, presumably, he admitted the legitimacy and the necessity of a non-sinful anger! Anger is not hatred; anger could very well be an expression of love. Jesus controlled his anger when he was himself betrayed and blasphemed, captured and tortured, and finally killed in cold blood; nevertheless he did fly into a holy fury when God was exchanged for Mammon in the Temple and when the lowly ones (the poor and the sinners) were discriminated against or harmed. This is prophetic anger, anger at the service of God and the Poor, for, God and the Poor (the lowly ones) are the two partners of the Covenant which the prophets came to defend. Whenever one of them is sinned against, the prophet protests vehemently.
Thus, in the book of Numbers, 12:3, later redactionists calls Moses the "meekest of humans"! For, he was the first "prophet" (also according to the later redactionists). The association of meekness with the prophetic calling is understandable. No wonder, the prophetic tasks of "guiding in judgment and teaching God’s way" is entrusted to the meek (Ps 25:9). When Jesus, fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah (2:2) had entered the city of Jerusalem "meek and sitting on a donkey" (Mt 21:5), his immediate action was to cleanse the Temple with his Holy Anger.
Meekness is not timidity. It is the marshalling of human courage to breathe out a merciful God’s wrath against injustice in defense of its victims. This is what the Jesus was deep in his heart!
Barclay notes also a second cognate meaning of the word praus in Greek and mitis in Latin (and meek in English) which illuminates what is said above. It connotes the state of one who has disciplined one’s brute strength. In classical literature the word is usually used with reference, say, to a wild horse that has been tamed to work for the master; trained for obedience to bit and bridle. In becoming meek, the brute force of a beast is not eliminated at all, but only harnessed for a noble purpose. It is made available for service. Behind the gentleness of the meek, therefore, there is strength of steel, observes Barclay.
Gentle, indeed, are the strong ones, whose strength is at the service of those that are not strong! This is the second characteristic of meekness and it dovetails with the first, namely, the exercise of prophetic anger on behalf of God and the lowly ones. The meek one is gentle towards the lowly, employs one’s pyscho-physical energy on their behalf rather than for one’s own benefit, and courageously registers one’s angry protest against those who are neither meek nor lowly. This is a modus agendi quite typical of the meek Jesus we meet in the gospels.
Here is a parable that may clarify this twofold meaning of meekness.
A Parable about the Anger and Strength of the Meek
I like to recall a children’s story from India. I have read it in Sydney Marcus’ Sinhala version. I like to re-tell this story in such a way as to illustrate the two characteristics of Meekness, mentioned above, namely, anger and strength disciplined for service. The story is about an elephant called "Mahagir". The name means "colossal rock" and alludes to its gigantic strength. It was a wild beast that had been tamed and trained to serve people as a disciplined worker.
According to this story, Mahagir was the pet of the village, because it did hard work for people, hard work which others could not do. In other words its massive strength was placed at the service of the people.
One day, there was a great festival in the village, and the elders planned to put up a very large tent to accommodate all the villagers during the festive activities. To construct this large tent, a gigantic pole was to be erected right in the middle of the village compound. The villagers, accordingly, dug a huge hole, deep and wide enough to receive the massive beam. Naturally, it was only Mahagir who had the strength to carry such a huge and heavy load, and drop it right into that hole. Its service was indispensable, and as at other times, it reported to the scene of work as ordered by its Master and in calm compliance. The villagers were waiting to do their job after the elephant had finished its.
With consummate ease, Mahagir carried the massive pole, a pole fatter than its leg and many times longer than his body. At the command of the Mahout, Mahagir brought it near the hole and stood there, while the villagers were all watching the scene with eager expectation.
At the next command, the jumbo lifted the pole high up and held it over the hole. Then came the final order: "drop it into the hole." But, something unusual happened at this moment…. The elephant remained motionless, with the pole lifted high and resting on its raised knee. The Mahout gave the command again, to drop it in to the hole. Mahagir would not comply. There was surprise on everybody’s face. The Mahout lost his temper and yelled out his command, ruthlessly hurting the elephant with the goad until its skin opened. The tusker, however, remained stubbornly still like a painted elephant on a painted ground!
The Mahout was not a meek person by any means! He gave vent to his anger by using the goad with indiscriminate force until the elephant’s ears bled enough to provoke its anger. Angry, though it certainly was, it displayed a load of self-discipline. It could have easily thrown the Mahout down, pounded him with that pole or crushed him to death under its massive foot. Yet it would not use its mighty strength destructively. Mahagir was, indeed, a meek animal. And it was because of its meekness that it registered its anger for every one to see. With a loud trumpet that reverberated in the distant hills, it whirled the pole around in frenzy and hurled it several yards away from the hole, shocking the onlookers with its unprecedented behavior!
Then something even stranger caught the eyes of the villagers. After the massive wooden beam had bounced on the ground several times and had finally come to a rest, the villagers saw a tiny little kitten jumping out of that hole and running away!
Mahagir indeed was a paragon of meekness. Its gigantic strength had been well disciplined for service to others, and would not deploy it to harm even the least of creatures, not even to avenge its undisciplined persecutor.
For, meekness is not cowardice before injustice; rather it is a show of courage in and through an action, which draws everybody’s attention to that injustice and thus provoke its outright rejection. Such indeed was the meekness of the heart of Jesus!
The Lowly Heart of Jesus and the Lowly Ones of Jesus.
In the Mathean text cited above (Mt 11:29) lowliness pairs with meekness (as also in Eph. 4:2 and Col. 3:1). There is an affinity between the two. The word for "lowly" in Greek is tapeinos, and its first meaning is not associated with the virtue of humility as such, but with the lowly social condition of the poor, which reduces them to the status of serfs and slaves whose life, consequently, is subservient to the power of the wealthy. In the Old Testament the notion of meekness was so much identified with the abject lowliness of this kind that it was never used with reference to God, remarks Schultz (in Kittel). However, the New Testament uses not only "meekness" but even "lowliness" as a characteristic of the Son of God.
Lowliness of heart in Mt 11:29 would mean social lowliness interiorized as humble obedience. The reason for this particular usage can be inferred from the general trend of the bible. The lowly ones (tapeinoi) are the poor who are humbled by their social status. God’s Covenant is always sealed with these lowly ones, never with the powerful ones! Now, Jesus is this Covenant made flesh, and therefore, he is both partners in one; he is both God and Lowly in one!
Hence, lowliness as a social condition is essential for comprehending the Heart of Christ. Just as it is a high social status (Ignatius would call this "riches" in Sp.Ex 142) that leads to pride and thence to all other sins, so also it is the low social status ("poverty" in the Sp. Ex. 146) which leads to humility, and thence to spiritual progress. That is why I said, that lowliness (tapeinosis) is the lowly social status so internalized (accepted within the heart) as to generate humility.
The Magnificat (Lk 1: 46-55) reveals the role of the lowly ones in economy of salvation. Listen to the way Mary refers glowingly to her own tapeinosis or lowliness. As she rejoices in God her Savior (vs. 46-47), she also gives the reason for her rejoicing (v.48):
Because God’s loving attention fell on the lowly social status of his slave-girl [my translation of epeblepsen epi ten tapeinosin tes doules autou]
Note the self-effacing humility with which she refers to herself: God’s slave-girl (doules autou); a typical attitude of the tapeinoi as we had demonstrated above. Here, God "lovingly takes notice" (epeblepsen) or "is attracted to" something in her, which is very much to God’s taste:- not so much the virtue of humility as the root of her humility, namely, her low status in society! Virginity was not a status symbol in Israel (unlike in the Greco-Roman culture). As Luke put it (1:26), God’s word came
to [an insignificant] city named Nazareth in [despised] Galilee to a virgin [i.e., an as yet unproductive woman]
She was truly lowly! When God looks for a partner for God’s redemptive work, God’s eyes always fall on someone who is tapeinos or lowly. The qualification for divine election is tapeinosis of those who are humbled by their own society because they lack something which that society values highly. For example, God chose a group of downtrodden slaves of Egypt to found Israel as a light to the nations; or, earlier, God’s favor fell upon a couple who could not face society because of the shame incurred by their infertility. Yet they were chosen by God, not necessarily because they were holy, but simply because they were lowly. This seems to be the general principle of election in the Bible. For, they become holy only when they begin to live out the mission for which they are chosen!
Thus, in the Magnificat, this highly favoured lowly one rejoices that she will be called "blessed" because God did mighty things for her in view of her lowliness. We can treat this Marian confession of faith as the ninth beatitude:
Blessed are the lowly, for they will be chosen to partner God in the work of redemption!
The rest of the Magnificat is a commentary on this Marian Beatitude. The vv. 51-53 shows that God’s prophetic anger is unleashed against those who are not lowly. God disbands (or scatters) the showy class or the haughty high society (huperephanous); dethrones the power-wielders (dunastas) and deprives the rich (ploutountas) of their riches. On the other side (that is, on God’s side), are those without any social standing (tapeinous) whom God exalts, i.e. elevates to the level of God’s collaborators; and the hungry, i.e., the indigent ones who lack the essentials of life (peinontas), whom God provides with an abundance of blessings.
This up-side-down change that Jesus brings with him at his coming clearly demonstrates God’s refusal to tolerate a society divided by humans into High and Low Status groups. God registers the divine protest in the midst of, and by means of, low status group. The implication of this divine protest seems to be that the only way to prevent God from reversing the position of the two groups is by eliminating the class- or caste-difference on our own initiative! This is a basic demand of God’s Reign.
Thus, when God-in-Christ comes to live amongst us humans, S/He becomes a lowly one among the lowly ones, a tapeinos among the tapeinoi. Here, we see the Exercise on the Two Standards making this same point in a graphic shorthand. St Ignatius contrasts the "lowly place" that Jesus occupies (Sp.Ex. 144) with the "Great Chair" on which his Opposite Number sits (Sp.Ex. 140). St. Paul explicitly mentions that Jesus in so far as he was divine, "took the status of the lowly ones" or "lowered himself socially" (etapeinosen eauton). In Philp. 2: 5-11, we told of
Christ Jesus, who, being (huparchon) in the form of God ["being in the form of God = "because" he was of divine nature, not "although" he was…], did not count equality with God a thing to be clung to, but emptied himself (ekenosen) taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness (homoiomati) of humans and found as a man in [his psycho-physical] structure (schemati), he lowered himself socially (etapeinosen eauton), becoming obedient unto death, even death on the Cross [death reserved for slaves, the lowest stratum of society] Wherefore God exalted him above every name…….
Being in the form of God, i.e., because of his divine nature, he fell in love, i.e. fell into the status of a slave by accepting the humiliating death-penalty reserved for the scum [the humiliores] of the Roman Empire, namely, the slaves. Here, again, the verb tapein (to descend lower in social status) describes his divine behavior. He reached the abyss of social lowliness of a slave and was, therefore, raised high above all as the Lord.
[One can sense here Paul’s allusion to Christ’s contrast with Adam who did just the opposite: the latter tried to exalt himself to equality with God and dropped down into the abyss of sin!].
Jesus, therefore, did more than just become human; even among humans, he identified himself with the low-status group! It is as one of the lowly ones that he exercised his meekness on their behalf.
Part Three
A Devotion without Deviation Consecration, Reparation and Consolation
Devotion of the Meek Ones towards the Lowly Ones of Christ
In the light of our scriptural reflection on the true character of the Heart of Jesus, let us now re-visit those key words that determined the nature of the traditional devotion to the Sacred Heart: consecration, reparation and consolation. Karl Rahner was among the prominent Theologians who, while trying to give a Christological basis to this devotion, had nevertheless warned the church of the theologically dubious and spiritually unhealthy consequences of the practice of reparation and consolation to the bleeding heart of Christ.
The practice of reparation for the damage done to the Sacred Heart [depicted as a physiological organ pierced and bleeding] and the consolation we are called to offer to the sad and suffering Christ runs counter to the revealed truth that Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, is now risen from the dead and reigns gloriously with the Father; he neither does nor can suffer any damage that needs reparation, nor does he experience desolation that awaits to be removed by our offer of consolation. Hence such devotion would be a deviation, a sort of pathological inversion.
Sound Christology would have us recognize that his Bleeding Heart needing reparation and yearning for consolation lies in his members, namely the lowly ones who form one body with him, here, on earth. Christ’s own reference to himself as the Sacrament of those who need our food, clothing and, shelter, as well as our care and concern in sickness and our comfort in prison (Mt 25:36 ff.) tells us where he awaits reparation and consolation.
When, therefore, we consecrate ourselves to the Meek and Lowly Heart of Jesus, we accept the "sweet yoke" and the "light burden" of being meek and lowly like him; that is to say,
we bind ourselves to the person of Christ (who is Jesus plus the Lowly Ones, covenanted together as One Body) as the object of our passionate love and service, in a life-time commitment that incessantly renews our baptismal calling;
we consecrate all our strengths and powers in disciplined service on behalf of lowly ones, exercising prophetic anger that reveals and rejects injustice while making reparation for the damage done to the persecuted members of his body. Here, reparation implies restoration of rights and restitution of justice.
we associate ourselves with the lowly ones (as St Paul recommends, in Rom.12: 16), to share with them the consolation that comes from the fulfillment of God’s promise to them (Lk 1:51-53).
As a fitting conclusion to this meditation, I wish to present a new formula of the Prayer of Consecration of the Family to the Sacred Heart, which incorporates these insights without disturbing the simple faith of the ordinary Christian.
Consecration of the Family to the Sacred Heart: An Alternative Formula
Lord Jesus, burning with love for us, you have revealed to St Margaret Mary, that you wait eagerly to be invited into Christian homes as Head and Sovereign. Acceding to your wish and accepting your love, we gather today as your family and renew our baptismal promise to do only what you have commanded and avoid what displeases you, believing firmly that you seek us as a shepherd when we stray and receive us like a friend when we return.
Jesus meek and lowly of heart, the invisible guest at our family gatherings, you are the bond of unity among us, calling us to forgive one another’s wrongs and support one another’s work.
Jesus meek and lowly of heart, may you ever be the centre of our life, the sole motive behind our actions, our inspiration in all that we say, our counselor in all that we plan, our guide and companion in all that we do, the source of our joy when we succeed, the source of our courage when we fail, our comfort in pain, our hope in trials, and our strength in temptation.
Jesus, meek and lowly of heart, may we recognize and serve you in the poor and the needy. May we be a source of comfort and consolation to you in the afflicted. May we boldly see and defend you in those who are treated unjustly. For it is your desire that, through our service and solidarity, we make reparation for the damage done to your Sacred Heart in the least of your brothers and sisters, broken and scattered because of our sin.
Jesus meek and lowly of heart, may our family be received into your kingdom by your little ones, whom we serve today as your vicars on earth, so that we may sing with them your praises in the company of Mary, your mother and ours, and all the saints, for ever and ever. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus we place our trust in you
Immaculate Heart of Mary pray for us sinners.
PS. This prayer was first published in the Sri Lanka Jesuit Province News Letter and then was widely distributed by late Fr Pio Ciampa, S.J., in Africa, with ecclesiastical approval from Bp S.Ndingi, of Nakuru.