CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - O Sacred Heart of Jesus, O burning furnace of divine Love, you are the symbol and summary of the whole mystery of our Redemption.  You are the symbol of the divine and unbounded Love of the one and only God in Three Persons, a Love which became incarnate in a human Heart and so divinized human love by joining it to the Godhead through the Eternal Word. 

O mystery of mysteries, an infinite Love which no vessel can contain emptied itself into a finite human vessel of love-and so became the divine-and-human instrument for the redemption of mankind.  In your Sacred Heart, Love speaks to love, as Heart speaks to heart, as God speaks to man. 

Let me reflect on this Love symbolized by your Heart, that I may praise it, indeed, that I may adore it, and that others may learn of it and learn to love it.

Your Heart, O Jesus, is a living symbol, a beating, fleshly, and living icon, of the threefold love of the Incarnate Word.  But your Heart, O God, is not an ordinary created symbol, like the icons we paint to focus our devotion or the words we use to speak of you.  It is a symbol--which, caught up into the very bosom of the Godhead through its joinder in the Eternal Word--that we may adore, and in adoring that symbol, adore it as a visible sign of the divine Love, "which went so far as to love intensely, through the Heart of the Word made Flesh, the human race stained with so many sins." (Pius XII, Haurietis aquas, 104)  This is the Heart we love, because this Heart loved us first.  (cf. 1 John 4:19)

It is through that three-fold Love, at a point in history become both human and divine, that the Word came down to man and made his dwelling among us, and it is through that three-runged ladder of Love that we climb up to God, your Heart being a "sort of mystical ladder by which we mount to the embrace of 'God our Savior.'" (Pius XII, Haurietis aquas, 58).  Indeed, your Heart my dear Jesus is a sort of mystical Jacob's ladder, by which Love both descends from God to man, and ascends from man to God.  You are the Mediator that makes this possible.

Your Heart reveals, in a singular and unique human way, the Love eternally shared between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  This infinite Love, we believe by faith, is not something that is reserved to the Trinity, for your human heart, dear Jesus, now participates, by virtue of its hypostatic union, in that uncreated, eternal and infinite Love.  In that Heart, a Heart of both God and Man, a Heart formed by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary (our nature's solitary boast), dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily.  (Cf. Col. 2:9)  This Heart of the God-Man Jesus, which participates in the very triune love of the Godhead, loves God and, what is more, loves mankind who is at the apex of all the rest of creation.

Your Heart is also symbol of the love of God which was infused in your human soul, which so entirely possessed you as man and infused you with the vision of God and perfect knowledge.  And with this perfected love--perfected through the beatific vision, which we one day hope to enjoy--that you loved both God and man as man with supernatural efficacy.  So it is that in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we may find all the treasures of natural and supernatural wisdom and of knowledge so far as it is allowed man to see.

Your Heart is finally a symbol of a purely human love, a sensible, passible love, the love you share with us and we with you.  This is the love with which we are familiar, the everyday love between father and mother and child, the love between friends, though only yours is entirely pure and uncorrupted by any stain of egoism or selfishness or fickleness or infidelity.  With this natural love, like ours in everything but sin (cf. Heb. 4:15), you loved both God and all mankind, perfectly fulfilling the commandments of the Lord.

All three of these loves join hands, as it were, in your Sacred Heart, redeeming us, rescuing us from our existential predicament, which is our apartness from you, indeed our state of enmity with you, our lack of integrity, our original sin inherited from Adam, and these three loves draw us into your intimate embrace, repairing the rift as only Love can do.  Indeed, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in the three-fold embrace of your Sacred Heart.  We were born to love; it is our vocation.  And we were born to love Love.

It is through the Incarnate Word's passible love, that love as perceived by the senses and of which we read in the Scriptures, that love which we can see, that we get caught up in that love that we cannot see.  From this sensible love, we climb to "to a consideration and adoration of the infused heavenly love," ...