XIV — REPARATION

Presence of God. — Heart of Jesus, wounded for our love, make me worthy to repair the wounds our sins have inflicted on You.

Meditation

1 — The hymn of First Vespers of the feast of the Sacred Heart says: “Behold how the insolent and horrible host of our sins has wounded the innocent Heart of a God” and, with greater realism, continues: “The thrust of the soldier’s lance was directed by our sins” (Roman Breviary). These expressions recall to our mind the words Jesus addressed to St. Margaret Mary and which each year the Church rereads in the Office of Tuesday during the octave of the Sacred Heart: “Behold that Heart which has so loved men... but in return for its infinite love, instead of finding gratitude, it met forgetfulness, indifference, outrages, at times even from those who should render it special love” (lesson VI). Before the lament of the divine Heart, the loving soul cannot remain indifferent: it wants to expiate, repair, console. And it wants to do so, Pius XI teaches, for a double motive: “of justice and of love; of justice, to repair the offense done to God by our faults... of love, to suffer with Christ suffering and satiated with reproaches and to offer Him, according to our poverty, some comfort” (Enc. Miserentissimus Redemptor). That we must repair our sins is easy to understand, but that we can do so also to console the Heart of Jesus may not be equally clear. “How can it be said,” asks Pius XI, “that Christ, reigning blessed in heaven, can be consoled by these acts of reparation? ‘Give me a loving soul and it will understand what I say,’” answers the great Pope (ibid.). In fact, the soul that penetrates with love into Jesus’ mystery understands well that when He, in Gethsemane, saw all our sins, He also saw all the good works we would do to console Him and, in reality, those acts we do today with that intention consoled Him then. This thought drives us ever more to works of reparation, so that Jesus may have no reason to address to us as well the pitiful lament: “sorrow has broken my Heart... I looked for someone to console me, and I found none” (Mass of the Sacred Heart).

2 — The concept of reparation calls to mind that of the “reparative victim,” a concept well known to devotees of the Sacred Heart and officially recognized by the Church through Pius XI’s Encyclical on reparation. The venerable document explains what the soul that intends to offer itself as victim must do: “it must without doubt not only abhor and flee every sin as the greatest evil, but offer itself wholly to the will of God and strive to make reparation for the injured honor of the divine Majesty by assiduous prayer, by the voluntary use of penances, and by patient endurance of those trials that befall it; finally, by a whole life lived according to this spirit of reparation” (Miserentissimus Redemptor). We are far from that fanciful concept of victimhood whereby, under the pretext of having to offer themselves to extraordinary immolations, souls evade the reality of daily life and delude themselves into thinking they are capable of who knows what sufferings, while in fact they try to avoid everyday sacrifices. The concept of reparative victim offered us by the Church’s doctrine is, instead, something very serious, concrete, realistic. The victim soul must repair sin, and it will repair it by doing the opposite of what sin is. Sin is an act of rebellion against God and against his will manifested in law and in the dispositions of divine Providence. Therefore, the opposite of sin will be total adherence to the divine will, embracing it with the whole heart and in all its manifestations, despite the repugnances one may feel. Here, then, is the program of the victim soul: not only to avoid sin, even in its lighter forms, but to go so far in meeting God’s will that He can truly do with it all that He wills. It will then add voluntary prayers and penances, but these will have value only in the measure in which they spring from a heart totally surrendered to the divine will. And let us note that the first penance also indicated by the Encyclical is always “the patient suffering” of life’s trials.

Colloquy

“O God, why can I not wash with my tears and with my blood all those places where your Heart has been insulted? Why am I not permitted to repair so many sacrileges and so many profanations? Why do You not grant me, for one moment only, to be mistress of all men’s hearts, to make reparation by the sacrifice I would make to You for the forgetfulness and senselessness of all who did not want to know You or who, even knowing You, loved You so little? But, adored Savior, what covers me with confusion and causes me greatest sorrow is that I myself have been one of these ungrateful ones. You, my God, who see the depths of my heart, behold the sorrow I suffer for my ingratitudes and for seeing You treated so unworthily. Here I am then, O Lord, with my heart broken by sorrow, humbled, stretched out, ready to receive from your hand all that You may please to require of me in reparation for so many outrages” (St. Margaret Mary Alacoque).

“Yes, my Son, You know that I desire nothing other than to be a victim of your Sacred Heart, wholly consumed in holocaust by the fire of your holy love, and therefore your Heart will be the altar where this consumption of myself in You must be accomplished, my dear Spouse, and You must be the Priest who must consume this victim with the ardors of your holy Heart. But, my God, how confounded I am seeing how guilty this victim is and unworthy that You should accept its sacrifice; yet I trust that everything will remain reduced to ashes in that divine Fire.

“By the offering I have made of my whole self to You, I intend that I have left You my free will, since from now on You alone must be the ruler of my heart, and therefore your will alone must be the rule of my actions. Dispose always of me, then, as pleases You best, for I am content with everything... because I desire to love You with patient love, with dead love, that is, wholly abandoned in You, and with operative love; in a word with solid and undivided love, and, what matters most, with persevering love” (T.M. Sp. pp. 324, 325).