June is the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The late Fr. Benedict Groeschel told me that he had based his entire spiritual life on the Sacred Heart devotion. I remember being quite surprised by this declaration. Father was a renown author, psychologist and speaker. For all his mighty gifts and towering intellect - it was the devotion to the Sacred Heart which guided his relationship with God.
Appearing as the Sacred Heart, Jesus once told Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque that Saint Francis was the saint who best understood his heart. I wonder if this revelation sparked Father Groeschel's interest. The heart of the Sacred Heart devotion is the belief that God comes close to us in Jesus. God is real. God knows me and is concerned about me. In his love for me God provides for me. He can ask me to love him with all my heart (the shema of Deuteronomy 6) because he has first loved me with his whole heart! (see 1 John 4).
While praying at a local convent this morning, I saw a strange site. The Sacred Heart of Jesus was welcoming me to a big white cooler. "What is in the cooler?" , I asked. "The cool and refreshing Living Water of the Holy Spirit", was his answer.
John 4: 10, 13-14
Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water ... Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
+ Fr. Luke Mary Fletcher, CFR
Yonkers, NY
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