“Jesus, on the cross you wholly embraced every person. You alone have given yourself for us with a ‘totality’ and ‘intimacy’ beyond anything we could possibly deserve or expect, beyond the measure of our understanding, yet supremely “attuned” to the depths of our humanity—our origin, our destiny, and the great desire that drives us to engage with reality in search of the fullness of meaning and goodness.
“Jesus, you alone understand the mystery of every person, because your emptying of yourself has made ‘room’ for every person in your Heart. Guide our steps, Lord. Draw us to yourself. Draw us by the inexhaustible beauty and goodness of your total gift of Love for us.”
Also, I record here more quotations from Pope Francis’s powerful new Encyclical Dilexit Nos on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as I continue to dwell on and study the text, seeking nourishment for my own seeking, begging heart—and for every human heart:
“Our hearts are not self-sufficient, but frail and wounded… We need the help of God’s love. Let us turn, then, to the heart of Christ, that core of his being, which is a blazing furnace of divine and human love and the most sublime fulfilment to which humanity can aspire. There, in that heart, we truly come at last to know ourselves and we learn how to love.
“In the end, that Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of all reality, since ‘Christ is the heart of the world, and the paschal mystery of his death and resurrection is the centre of history, which, because of him, is a history of salvation’ [John Paul II, 1998]. All creatures ‘are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things’ [Francis, Laudato Si, 2015].”
~Pope Francis, encyclical Dilexit Nos [“He Loved Us”], 30-31
