SERVE THE LORD WITH GLADNESS | Take every emotion of the heart and relate it to God

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

This week the Church turns us toward a consideration of the end.

For the next two weeks, we’ll be reading from the Book of Revelation — about the end of the world. In the Gospel of Luke, we’ll be reading about the final ascent of Jesus to Jerusalem — which brings Him to His end on the Cross. The final reading of the week is a question about death and resurrection — which is appropriate for the month of November, when we pray for the dead and each of us considers the end of our own lives.

This turn toward the end is not meant to scare us; it’s meant to prepare us. The Church returns to this theme yearly, like the state’s monthly tornado siren or a school’s periodic fire drill, and asks: Is there anything we need to do to be prepared for the real thing?

Here are three things that can help us with our preparation.

First, we read both Psalm 1 and Psalm 150 this week. In the ancient Jewish way of thinking, to cite the first and the last of something was to say, “and everything else in between.” That’s a lot of Bible verses! How might we capture what it means to refer to all of the Psalms? One simple way is to name what the biblical and spiritual traditions tell us: That an outstanding feature of the Psalms is how they contain every emotion of the human heart and draw them into relation with God.

That would be a great way to test whether we’re prepared for the end: Do we take every emotion of our heart and relate it to God? If not, that’s something to work on! Whatever the emotions are, Jesus wants to help us follow Him as we experience them. Sometimes that means expressing our emotions, sometimes it means resisting them, and sometimes it means channeling them in new directions.

Second, we celebrate one of our patron saints this week — St. Rose Philippine Duchesne (Nov. 18). St. Rose Philippine was a Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus who came from France to the United States and lived right here in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. She always wanted to be a missionary — to help people experience the love of the heart of Jesus, and invite them to love Him in return. Not a bad mission statement there!

Third and last, Pope Francis recently published “Dilexit nos,” (“He loved us”), an encyclical letter on the Sacred Heart. Let me quote just two of the many beautiful things he wrote. 1) “In the end, the Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of all reality.” People today usually think of fundamental particles or fundamental forces as the unifying principle of all reality. Pope Francis is inviting us to think more deeply! 2) “May (Jesus) 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.” A lot of advertising today asks us whether we’re using artificial intelligence to its fullest potential. Pope Francis asks us whether something else — the heart — might be even more essential to our flourishing.

Placing our hearts — in all their messiness — into the heart of Jesus, and receiving His Sacred Heart into ours: Those strike me as great ways to prepare for the end.