The Sacred Heart – an invitation to love
Throughout the gospels the constant invitation is to love: to love the outsider, the widow, those afflicted with sickness and disabilities, the sinners…. In fact we see Jesus transforming people’s lives through meeting them as they were, loving them through word and touch, engendering hope. This feast, coming in the season after Pentecost, reminds us that our Baptismal responsibility is to allow the Spirit at the heart of our being to love through us in the very ordinary circumstances of each day. So the invitation today is to ponder this gift of love to be shared for the life of the world….
We see what this love looks like by watching Jesus in his daily interactions with others. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians breaks open the love Jesus is encouraging…
If I have all the eloquence of people or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing. If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding all the mysteries there are, and knowing everything, and if I have faith in all its fullness, to move mountains, but without love, then I am nothing at all. If I give away all that I possess, piece by piece, and if I even let them take my body to burn it, but am without love, it will do me no good whatsoever. |
FOR REFLECTION
Let one section of this reading focus your reflection. Can you discern an invitation here to live more lovingly? Choose one of your relationships in family or work that could be enriched through some small act of love. What will you do to allow this to happen in the next couple of days? Have some conversation with the person next to you…… mindful that whatever is shared is confidential. Sometimes we can hear another into deeper clarity if we know what we share will not be repeated. |
Spontaneous prayer of the faithful
Jesus was not only concerned with personal conversion. He ached for his religion, his country, the wider human family. On this feast of love let us bring some of the events in our world that need the embrace of love…
Response: Through us fill the world with love Let us pray: |
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Final Song: |