“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
And I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
And you will find rest for yourselves.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” - (Matthew 11)
When I grew up, there was an image of the Sacred Heart on the wall in our home, a gift from a beloved Jesuit friend of my family. That same image is on the wall in my room here, as I write this reflection.
The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is about the unconditional love Jesus has for us. The challenge comes when we struggle to let ourselves experience love. There are lots of reasons for that. Often, it’s because we have experienced rejection or hurt, and those wounds cause us to defend ourselves against being hurt again. Sometimes we just don’t feel good about ourselves, for a whole variety of reasons. If someone gives us a compliment, sometimes our first instinct can be to say to ourselves, “They don’t really know me.”
That’s why the first part of the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius is so liberating. In that early part of the retreat, we discover that we are loved, sinners. We discover love without condition. We experience tender mercy. We’re not loved when we get our act together. Even when we struggle, even when we wander, we are loved passionately. This is the breakthrough, the grace, that each of us can ask for on this feast – to know how deeply we are loved and to receive it.
We respond to this kind of love with devotion, i.e., with gratitude, commitment, loyalty, and imitation. Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is to be committed to loving others the way we have experienced love. In his last encyclical, Dilexit Nos [He loves us], on the Sacred Heart, Pope Francis wrote:
The Second Vatican Council points out that “the ferment of the Gospel has aroused and continues to arouse in human hearts an unquenchable thirst for human dignity”. [24] Yet to live in accordance with this dignity, it is not enough to know the Gospel or to carry out mechanically its demands. We need the help of God’s love. Let us turn, then, to the heart of Christ, that core of his being, which is a blazing furnace of divine and human love and the most sublime fulfilment to which humanity can aspire. There, in that heart, we truly come at last to know ourselves and we learn how to love. #30
In the presence of the heart of Christ, I once more ask the Lord to have mercy on this suffering world in which he chose to dwell as one of us. May he pour out the treasures of his light and love, so that our world, which presses forward despite wars, socio-economic disparities and uses of technology that threaten our humanity, may regain the most important and necessary thing of all: its heart. #31
Let us pray.
Loving Jesus, soften and heal our hearts. Renew our sense of your deep, merciful love for us. Yoke us to yourself, so that we can see as you see and learn from your meek and humble heart. Free us to love, to comfort, to heal, to reconcile and to find ways to live together lovingly in our families, our communities, treasuring human dignity and the common good. We ask this with growing desire for intimacy with you, now and forever.
Rev. Andy Alexander, SJ
Co-founder of Creighton’s Online Ministries, Retired 2025
I served at Creighton from 1996 to 2025. I served as Vice-president for Mission for three Presidents, directed the Collaborative Ministry Office and co-founded the Online Ministries website.
I loved seeing the number of faculty and staff who over the years really took up the mission as their own and made Creighton the Jesuit university it is today. I was also consoled to witness the website – a collaborative effort - touch the hearts of so many around the world.
I’m now living at St. Camillus – a Jesuit care facility in Milwaukee. Many of my days are spent dealing with my own health issues, as I carry out the mission we’ve been given, “to pray for the Church and the Society of Jesus.”
