We have already considered the sufferings of the Heart of Jesus as proceeding from the Divine light which flooded His Sacred Soul, and by which He beheld with such terrible distinctness the outrages committed against His Father, and the love and homage of which He was defrauded. We have now to consider them as the consequence of that burning love for the Father with which He was consumed.
In proportion to the intensity of His love was the magnitude of His sorrow for His Father's wrongs. The application of this truth to human love amply confirms the fact. But in respect of the love at once human and Divine which filled the Sacred Heart, its truth was evidenced in a degree to us wholly unknown.
Love necessarily engenders suffering. It renders the heart sensitive, even when otherwise it would not have been so; it causes every outrage offered to the beloved object to rebound like an arrow piercing our own hearts to the core. Thus the Heart of Jesus, the most sensitive Heart that ever throbbed, that Heart in which the love of the Father was the all-absorbing, all-prevailing element, beheld with keenest anguish, not only the gross crimes which even ordinary Christians regard with horror, but also those countless infidelities which we esteem so lightly, graces coldly rejected, high vocations slighted and utterly abandoned, indifference to the tribulations of the Church, and to the increase or decrease of the Kingdom of God on earth; it saw them all and was pressed down with the weight of sorrow which lay on it, day and night, in the solitude of Nazareth.
The weakness of our love is undoubtedly the secret of our little concern for the outrages we unceasingly hear of, as being committed against God. If the fire of Divine love has not purified our hearts from their natural selfishness, they will not be sensitive about God's glory, they will not be touched by the knowledge of His wrongs. Our soul's eye will not be quick to see where His honour is involved, unless love has rendered its vision clear and delicate. If, on the contrary, our hearts beat in union with the Heart of Jesus and have become imbued with His Spirit, then whatever touches the Divine glory will interest us; or rather, that glory will be as dear to us as "the apple of our eye." And hence it comes that, as He is everywhere and in every way dishonoured by men, poignant sorrow must inevitably spring from our love; and thus silently, wherever we may be, or of whatever nature may be our occupation, we shall be offering to the Divine Majesty the inward reparation of our sorrowing love, in union with that which the Heart of Jesus offered during the long years of His Hidden Life.
The sorrow of the Heart of Jesus at the sight of the rebellions against His Father was fruitful in results, conveying an important lesson to ourselves. It not unfrequently happens that pious persons, when they hear of offences committed against God, content themselves with the sentiment of sorrow, with perhaps some verbal expression of horror, barren of all practical reparation. Thus innumerable opportunities are unheeded in which they might have tendered to the Divine Majesty an acceptable tribute of loving atonement, had the transient sorrow they felt left beneficial results in their souls.
Far different was it with the Heart of Jesus of Nazareth. His great sorrow, the offspring of His burning love, induced an insatiable thirst for reparation, answering, as it were, to the "preparation of heart," mentioned by the Psalmist, which the omniscient eye of God perceives so readily and accepts so willingly. It is in itself a sublime act of reparative love, a silent homage of sorrowful desire, forming a hymn of praise to an offended God breathed forth from within the secret recesses of the soul.
Let us examine our own hearts, and discover whether any such generous desire springs up within us when we hear instances of the scornful rejection of God's love, and of the insults and wrongs incessantly offered to Him. Let us beg our Lord to impart to us also a spark of His own burning love for the Eternal Father, so as to render us sensitive to His wrongs, and enkindle within us a practical and permanent desire of repairing them to the utmost of our power.
- text taken from the 1906 edition of The Heart of Jesus of Nazareth - Meditations on the Hidden Life; it has the Imprimatur if Bishop John Baptist Butt, Diocese of Southwark, England, 5 February 1890