Praised be Jesus Christ.
Carissima famiglia, my dearest family.
The good news that each of us is called to proclaim, (because as we heard the names of the apostles read to us today, there was a spot, ‘your name here’, because you and I come this evening to be commissioned to go out and gather the harvest, the harvest of the Lord) is “The kingdom of heaven has come near”( Matthew 10:7)
How near?
When I was living in Edmonton, my dear friends – they continue to be a very dear friends of mine – Bob and his wife Jen were great witnesses to me of, of Christian love. Their only child suffered with an addiction to drugs, and it required the adoption of her two boys, which they did. And Joe and Josh were eight and 10 at the time, and they were 70. Can you imagine taking that on?
And to deepen the story, dear Jen and Bob’s daughter was murdered by a drug dealer. But they are just remarkable, generous people, and it was a great day that I could invite them all over to supper because they were Alliance Church members. I wanted to show them the rectory that I was living in.
And so, they came into my chapel, and immediately Josh and Joe looked at the statue of the Sacred Heart and ran right over and said, “Look at that. How gross. Cool.”
And so, they just loved staring at it. Of course, an eight and 10-year-old, can you imagine?
I had to take a second look at the Sacred Heart statue, because for me it’s just part of the iconography of my faith.
But for them, it was gross. Some guy holding his heart right in front of him? Ugh… neat.
Well, that is how near the kingdom of God has come near.
You see, the Sacred Heart of Jesus has been revealed particularly in the Middle Ages to wonderful women mystics, St. Mechtilde of Magdeburg, and Gertrude of Helfta – St. Gertrude the Great – one of the most brilliant minds that the Church has known.
At age four, she was put into a monastery because her family was going through all kinds of trauma. We don’t know what exactly, but we think it was because her parents had died, and the situation at home was not healthy. So, in she went to this community where she flourished and eventually joined this community, a master of music and of mathematics and of secular knowledge. Until the age of twenty-five, when the Lord opened up for her a mystical experience that would continue throughout the rest of her life, and she left behind her studies in order to be present to that.
What was the essence of that mystical experience?
That she was the Bride of Christ.
Like Catherine of Siena, she had this intimate relationship with Jesus. Jesus showed her his Divine Precious Heart, saying, “Speak about me to everyone so that they may draw forth all they need from my divine heart.” (Herald of Divine Love)
This Heart, which St. Gertrude knew was the center of everything in Jesus. How?
Because in the Middle Ages, the Aristotelian and Galenian approach to anatomy understood the heart, not the brain, but the heart to be where all intelligence came from. The heart was where the soul was joined the human body. The heart was where sensation happened. The heart was the center of everything.
And to expose your heart is to expose everything of yourself, which is what a beloved does in a marriage.
This is what Jesus showed Gertrude – not with abstract ideas, but with intimate flesh, “ooh, gross, flesh”, that he was revealing everything to her.
Now, these mystical experiences abound in Gertrude’s writing and particularly we can find them in the book The Herald of Divine Love.
On the Feast of St. John – and we met John in today’s list of the apostles – he is the brother of James, together the “sons of thunder” – She met St. John, and she had a question for St. John.
“You lay on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper. Why didn’t you write about what that was like? What an experience that must have been.”
And St. John, in her vision, said to her this,
“It was my task to present to the first age of the Church the doctrine of the Word made flesh, which no human intellect can ever fully comprehend “,
Indeed, the Gospel of John is the place in which our Church Fathers and Mothers were able to found the faith that the Word became flesh. John’s Gospel taught people the truth, because if you not, do not know the truth, and you aren’t doing the truth, then even if you’re doing nice things and kind things, they will not prosper the world or creation, because they won’t be part of God’s plan, which is only the Truth. And so, for the first thousand years of the church, getting it right was very important.
John continued in his conversation with St. Gertrude,
“The eloquence of that sweet beating of his heart is reserved for the last age, in order that the world growing cold and torpid may be set on fire with the love of God.“
Dear family, these are the last ages.
The sweet beating heart of Jesus, the real beating heart of Jesus offered to us, is now given to us in this age of a world growing cold and torpid.
And that’s the world into which we are sent, ‘insert your name here’, as an apostle, into that world to set it on fire with the love. And Jesus gives us authority.
Didn’t we hear that? Jesus, “Gave them authority, over unclean spirits to cast them out.“(Mt. 10:1)
What are the unclean spirits that happen in coldness?
Well, let’s look at the modern age, and how the Divine Sacred Heart of Jesus is now manifesting itself more powerfully in these last days.
Five hundred years after Gertrude’s vision, the Lord Jesus revealed once again, in a powerful way, His Sacred Heart to another woman, St. Margaret-Mary Alacoque, in Paray-le-Monial in France. And it was the Lord teaching us, ‘you need to listen to the beating of my heart for the foundation of what you will meet. Because twenty-five years after that revelation, the French Revolution, began the attack on God, the intensification of the modern opposition to God and his Church.
Now, what precisely is this unclean spirit? I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What is the unclean spirit of the modern age? Well, the French Revolution shows us:
It is to replace people’s flesh, real people, with an attention to the idea of who a person is. They had a beautiful idea, “liberty, equality, fraternity”. And to realize it, they killed thousands of priests, tens of thousands of nobles, slaughtered the people of the Vendée, who rose in rebellion against the attack on the Church, just butchered two hundred thousand Chouans, all in the name of having the right idea of what a person is.
Modernity has continued this. What butchery since the French Revolution, it’s just become more and more intense, Because we have an idea. Men and women and their governments have an idea of what a person should be, what a “person” is.
When you have an idea, you forget the flesh.
So, you have a great idea: “My freedom of choice” and you leave behind the flesh of millions of unborn. Or maybe you can use their flesh in order to experiment and do other things to achieve an idea.
We have an idea of, oh, ‘people should have an easy life free of suffering’, so we take our elders who have built this culture with their money and their sweat and their labor and prayers, and we say to them, “The best thing you can do for us now is have yourself MAiDed out of existence, because we’ll save $1.5 trillion.”
“The progress of the proletariat” – great idea – the flesh of tens of millions left behind in gulags and concentration camps.
“Development of industrial might”, the flesh of an ecology that is not respected, left all behind.
That is the unclean spirit of the modern age, over which you and I, along with the apostles, ‘insert your name here’, have authority.
And the foundation of that authority, we heard tell of way back in the 1290 from St. Gertrude.
The foundation is the Flesh Heart of Jesus with its eloquent speaking to us.
Yes, this is the difference: God never treats us as an idea.
When we enter into prayer and meet Him in the flesh of the Word, Jesus, we hear a voice speak to us but not “we’re going to fix you so that you can be perfect and we can transhumanize you into the perfect genetic manifestation of our idea of humanity”. Not that.
God says to us, “you are my treasured possession”. (Exodus 19:5) How treasured?
In a world where people are left behind so quickly, canceled because of an idea of what should be, the Word Made Flesh died for us when we were at our worst. St. Paul tells us how upside down to the world this is. You can understand dying for someone that’s good. But or someone that falls so short of the “idea”? We have concentration camps for that. We have laboratories to fix all of that stuff. We have abortorium’s to handle this. We’ve got the Parktown Hotel where people can go and get MAiD.
We’ve got all of these armaments for dealing with you when you are broken and don’t fit into the “us” we think we should be.
Not Jesus. Jesus died for us when we were sinners, broken.
And that’s not an abstract thought. That’s flesh truth.
“Look at that. Gross. Cool”
And so tonight we come to receive this Sacred Heart in the Flesh, to eat His Body, to drink His Blood, to listen to the heartbeat of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and have our ears and our hearts attuned so that when we go out with “authority over the unclean spirits” that reduce people to objects, we have loving hearts in the Sacred Heart.
We don’t leave behind the fetal alcohol syndrome person. We don’t leave behind the person in our family who makes everyone crazy. We never, ever leave behind those who ask for love and support because we are what we eat. The Sacred Heart of Jesus now beating in us.
That is God’s authority. That is good news. That’s what we honor this month.
A Lord and God who loves us with flesh, passionate love.
And we, we do the same.
Let us be holy.
Let us be saints.