Faith

There is a moment at the Last Supper that captures my imagination. While most of the apostles are arguing about which of them is the greatest, and while another is already calculating Jesus' betrayal, John does something altogether different. He leans back and rests his head on the chest of Jesus, close enough to hear the heartbeat of God-made-flesh.
I find myself returning to that image because it tells me something essential about what devotion actually is. We tend to think of devotion as a matter of feeling, or of discipline, or of getting our beliefs in proper order. But before it is any of those things, devotion is a matter of location. It is about where we are willing to place ourselves. John placed himself against the heart of Christ, and from that closeness he came to understand himself in a way the other apostles, for all their zeal, had not.
When he later wrote his Gospel, John never referred to himself by name. He called himself only "the disciple whom Jesus loved." That was not a boast. It was the truest thing he knew about himself.

This is the heart of the matter when it comes to the Sacred Heart. The devotion is not, at its root, about an image, however beautiful, nor about a private revelation, however compelling. It is about drawing near to the living center of divine love and letting that nearness teach us who we are. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the love that took on our flesh and mingled with our blood, the love that gives life through a death freely embraced rather than avoided. To venerate that Heart is to put the love that beats at the center of the world right at the center of our own lives.
We cannot work out the meaning of this devotion in advance, standing at a safe distance to decide what it ought to mean before we commit to it. The order runs the other way. We draw near first, and only from that nearness does the meaning unveil itself. Christ did not love John because John drew near; John drew near, and drawing near revealed how thoroughly he was already loved. The grace is always already there, waiting for those willing to come close.
I think of it the way I think of the sunrise. None of us can summon the sun or hasten its rising, any more than we can control the love of God. But if we want the dawn to become part of our days, we know what to do. We rise early and place ourselves where the horizon is visible, returning morning after morning, present to a movement that has everything to do with gift and nothing to do with our preferences.
More than 16 centuries after John, the Lord opened the wonders of his Heart to a young and often sickly Visitation nun in the French town of Paray-le-Monial. It was the feast of St. John the Apostle, and Margaret Mary Alacoque was at adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, drawing near, as she always did, to the one she believed dwelt there in silence. On that day her senses opened.
Just as John had reclined against the breast of his Savior, she rested upon that same Heart, listening to its sounds and feeling its warmth, until the rhythm of her own heart began to keep time with his. And when she offered her heart in return, he gave her a share in what it costs to love: the fervor of his love remained with her as a wound in her side. This is the pattern of the devotion. You stay near his Heart, and he opens his pain to you. It is the pain of love.
We live in a moment that makes such nearness difficult. We are formed, mostly without noticing, to keep our distance, to manage our exposure, to protect ourselves from anything we cannot control. Ours is a restless world, and restlessness is precisely what keeps us from leaning in. The Sacred Heart asks the opposite of us. It asks for the courage to lay our heads against the chest of Christ and stay there, even when we cannot dictate what we will hear.
The Beloved Disciple shows us where to begin. Not with mastery, not with certainty, but with the willingness to come close. Yet such intimacy cannot be rushed or seized all at once. It is learned slowly, in the daily returning, which is why the great devotions of the Church have always unfolded over time. That conviction is what led me to write The Rule of the Sacred Heart: Finding Rest in a Restless World, a 33-day devotional that guides us, bit by bit, toward this intimacy.
His Heart is already beating. The only question is whether we will draw near enough to hear it.

LEONARD J. DELORENZO IS A PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE IN THE MCGRATH INSTITUTE FOR CHURCH LIFE AND CONCURRENT PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF THEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME. YOU CAN FIND HIS WRITING AT LEONARDJDELORENZO.COM.

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