by Joseph Hegglin, MSC

Talking about spiritual matters, and especially about the Holy Spirit, could easily become theoretical, a bit like explaining a menu card about a French meal. Rather than getting explanations about the French cuisine: the entry, the different courses, the cheese and the dessert—what they are made of, how they are prepared and what they taste like (without forgetting the wine, of course!), we would probably prefer being invited to such a meal rather than to hear someone talk about it. “The proof of the pudding  is in the eating” as you say. 

I do hope that this talk will be more than sheer information concerning our spirituality and that God’s Spirit will also give us a little taste of his goodness and love. For this to happen we should not just be looking for new ideas, but really open our heart to whatever the Lord wants to tell us personally through what I might have to say. 

As a framework for this talk I am taking No.10 of our Constitutions, a very inspiring and challenging article indeed. It is a kind of “vision statement”, or a programme. for our whole life which, in a nutshell, contains the essential aspects of our spirituality, I believe. It reads as follows: “As Missionaries of the Sacred Heart we live our faith in the Father’s love revealed in the Heart of Christ. We want to be like Jesus who loved with a human heart. We want to love through him and with him and to proclaim his love to the world”.

1.  As Missionaries of the Sacred Heart WE LIVE OUR FAITH IN THE FATHER’S LOVE REVEALED IN THE HEART OF CHRIST. 
Jesus revealed his Father’s love throughout his life, in everything he did and said. The parable of the prodigal son is just one of many stories which tell us about God’s mercy. Today, in the light and joy of Easter, the passage of Jesus’ apparition to the disciples of Emmaus (24, 13-35), can help us to understand more deeply our spirituality. 

Revelation: understanding with our mind
 As for so many people today, the question concerning suffering and evil was a big obstacle for the faith of those two men. After what had just happened, they found it not only difficult but impossible to believe any longer in the Father’s love. So they walked discouraged and hopeless on the road of their lives. Jesus joined them and gave them a lesson of history. One might say, he explained to them the meaning of all human history. He showed that his passion and resurrection is at the very heart of it: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things to enter into his glory?” (v. 26). He taught them how the cross, more than anything else, revealed the Father’s love: God took into his hands the greatest evil and the biggest sin in world history, the crucifixion of his Son, and gave it back to us as the greatest possible blessing: the redemption of the world.If the paschal mystery is the centre of human history, the piercing of Christ’s side is at the centre of his death and resurrection. Christ’s body, especially his heart, is like an earthen vessel (2 Cor. 4,7) containing the treasure of the fullness of the Holy Spirit. When this vessel was broken on the cross and Christ’s heart pierced, the Spirit, symbolised in the water, flowed out of it over the world: “One of the soldiers plunged his spear into Jesus’ side, at once blood and water poured out” (John 19,34) The Church was born symbolically from the death of Christ. John recognised the signs of it in the last breath of Jesus and in the water and blood (symbolising the sacraments of the Eucharist and of Baptism) flowing from the wound in his side. What happened on the cross was forecasting the real birth of the Church which took place at Pentecost. There is a beautiful and well-known saying of Father Chevalier’s concerning this passage of John 19:  “From the pierced Heart of Christ, I see a New World emerging, the world of those he has chosen … and it is the Church, the mystical body of Christ, which makes this new creation present on earth until the end of time.”  This “new world”, which Father Chevalier saw coming out of the Heart of Jesus pierced on the cross, is a world where the Holy Spirit leads those who receive him to the freedom of the sons and daughters of God.  

According to Jesus’ own explanation, this water which poured out of his heart, is the Holy Spirit himself. One day he made this solemn promise: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me. He, who believes in me, let him drink. As the scripture says: “out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water”. Now this he said about the Spirit whom those who believed in him were to receive. For as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7,37-39).

 This promise has now been fulfilled. The Heart of Jesus is the well of living water, which means the presence of the living God, a personal relationship with him, offered to everybody who is hungry and thirsty for God, who believes, who goes to Jesus and drinks. There is another important passage in which Jesus expresses the same invitation coming deep from his heart: “Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11,28). In our spirituality this invitation is an important element: come, come to me. As Missionaries of His Heart we are those servants sent to call everybody to the great banquet: “Behold, everything is ready, come to the marriage feast”(cf. Matthew 22, 4).
 
Revelation: understanding with our heart
[All through his life, Christ revealed the Father’s love:  each miracle was a sign of it, the washing of the feet of the apostles a very clear and explicit one. The greatest of them all was his death: “No one has a greater love than the one who gives his live for those he loves.” After the piercing of his side, all the possible signs of love have been used; there are none left. But what is left is the reality of love itself. This love which burnt in the Heart of Jesus has now been entrusted to the Holy Spirit: God’s love is now “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom 5,5).] 

The revelation of the Father’s love is much more than just information we have to believe in. Revelation is not first of all a matter of the intellect, otherwise the “learned, clever and wise” would be advantaged. Jesus tells us that they are not, but just the opposite is true. It is much easier to God to reveal his love to the little ones. So Jesus revealed his love to the disciples of Emmaus from “heart to heart”: “Did not our hearts burn within us, while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?” the disciples later said. The risen Christ enkindled their hearts with the “fire he came to cast upon the earth” and which he was waiting for that it would spread and enflame all human hearts. It is the fire of love, communicated through the Holy Spirit. 

It is the same fire which was burning in the heart of Father Chevalier, when he first heard about the devotion to the Sacred Heart. At that time he was still at the major seminary in Bourges. “This doctrine went straight to my heart” he later wrote. The Holy Spirit touched his heart in a personal revelation and experience of Jesus’ love, in a personal grace of Pentecost which, I believe, is part of MSC spirituality.

 Saint Theresa of Lisieux describes a similar experience: " I just began the Stations of the Cross when all of a sudden I was seized by such a violent love for God that I can only express myself in saying it was as if I was plunged entirely in fire.  What a fire and what sweetness at the same time.  I was burning with love and felt that if it had lasted one second more, I could not have endured it without dying.  I understood this was the kind of experience that the saints often talked about.  For me, this experienced was only once and for an instance, after which I fell back immediately into my usual dryness."  A friend of mine, Liliane a mother of several children, told me the same kind of story.  Early one morning, while she was still in bed, she was literally woken up by God’s burning love. She answered spontaneously: “ I love you too”, after which her husband woke up, asking to whom she was talking.

2. As Missionaries of the Sacred Heart WE WANT TO BE LIKE JESUS WHO  LOVED WITH A HUMAN HEART. 
This is a very powerful statement indeed! There are sayings like “We want to follow Jesus” or “We want to love Jesus” or “We want to be with Jesus”, but this one is much more challenging. “We want to be like Jesus”. It seems to say that we want to be the same as Jesus:  yes, we want to love through him and with him. We want to be caught up in his life and love.   How can we become like Jesus? It won’t be so much our effort or our hard work that would make that happen. We are not meant to “copy” Jesus externally, but to become and “be” like him internally. This desire is beautifully expressed in the old, traditional prayer: “Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine.”

“Upper-room spirituality”
 When we are talking about MSC Spirituality, we mean a spirituality which forms, models and changes the human heart more and more into the Heart of Jesus. To become more like Jesus, we have to let this happen to us, and to allow the Holy Spirit to transform us by his love. An important scripture passage concerning this transformation is Ez. 36, 25-28: “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you…”

The Lord repeats several times “I, I will … I shall…” This “transformation” or “change of heart” is entirely his work if we let him do it. There are three actions of Jesus which all took place in the “upper room” which are significant to us. MSC spirituality could be called an “upper room” spirituality! 

1- “I will pour clean water over you”. The evening before he died, Jesus washed the feet of his apostles, symbolising all the meaning of his life and death. Saint Peter wants to resist. But then, when he is told ”if I do not wash you, you have no part  in me”, it becomes clear that this action of Jesus is much more than an example of mutual service: Peter, and all of humankind after him, needs to be cleansed, i.e. redeemed through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. 

2- A second "upper room" event took place on Easter evening, when Jesus met the disciples for the first time after his death. They were in shock, going through the first stages of grieving: within the last 48 hours, two of their group died violently, one tortured to death and the other one had committed suicide. To grieve means to experience sadness, anger, fear, guilt etc. The hearts of the disciples were as hard and as heavy as stone. Jesus gives them a "new heart" through the gift of his peace, "Shalom". What happened that evening was a real inner healing.
 3- The third time we find the same apostles in the upper room is of course at Pentecost, when Jesus puts  “a new spirit” within them, his own Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Then only the apostles left the upper room, ready for mission, and the Body of Christ was born.  After having received this new heart, they could “be like Jesus” (cf. the whole of the book of the Acts). 

During a Catechism lesson, a catechist in France asked the children who knew what the Feast of Pentecost was about. A boy said: “It is the feast of the horse”.  A bit surprised, she asked why. The boy explained that he saw an advertisement concerning a horse race which takes place in a nearby town over Pentecost. The poster read: “Pentecost, the feast of the horse in …”.  There is an even more important question than what happened at Pentecost: did I have a personal Pentecost where Jesus revealed to me the Father’s love and when my heart caught the fire of the Holy Spirit? 

Many people who leave the Lord don’t seem to experience real pain. Any separation or divorce where there was once real love is painful. A separation which does not hurt means often that there was never real love in the first place. Catholics who have had a moment of personal revelation of the Father’s love for them can’t just leave Him, or even the Church, like that. For this reason alone, our Spirituality which should lead people to understand from within, through the gift of the Holy Spirit “what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ” (Eph. 3,18) , is of uttermost significance for the Church and the world today. 

Although this new heart has been given to us in the sacrament of baptism, it needs continuously to be renewed: purified; reconciled, thanks to the peace which only Christ can give; filled by the Spirit. There might be important moments in our lives where a real change of heart took place, events we will always remember. But then there is, of course, an ongoing education and growth of this new heart throughout all our life. Each new day, in every situation we have to call upon the Holy Spirit again and again in order to live in an ongoing Pentecost. “One retains an old grace only if able to welcome a new one.” (Georges Bernanos).

“To be like Jesus”: poor but full of the power of the Holy Spirit
 The Holy Spirit transforms us more and more into the likeness of Jesus. I would like to highlight one specific aspect of our desire and our vocation “to be like Jesus”:  to experience the power of the Holy Spirit in our weakness. Jesus was sent into the world poor and powerless. That is the way he lived from Bethlehem to Golgotha.  His poverty was not just an external lack of material means, it was a visible external sign which expressed his poverty of heart. Jesus was truly and totally “poor in spirit”.  Yet at the same time, Jesus was sent into the world and fulfilled his mission with the power of the Holy Spirit. 

• “You know about Jesus of Nazareth, how God poured out on him the Holy Spirit and power”.  (Ac 10,38).
• “Jesus returned to Galilee, and the power of the Holy Spirit was with him” (Lc 4,14).

Whenever Jesus spoke and acted, the power of the Spirit became visible.  The people said; “He preached with authority and not like the priests or the Pharisees.”
 
“As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you”. To be like Jesus means to experience the presence, the guidance, the strength and power of God’s Spirit in the midst of our poverty, powerlessness and weakness. The Church, in our European countries at least, seems to be losing more and more of its earthly power and influence. With all our modern and theologically revised pastoral approaches we can’t stop, it seems, the gradual erosion of faith. In some countries this trend is faster than in others. Did not the Church rely perhaps for too long on her own “power”?
 Maybe the same has to be said of us, MSC. We are confronted with the fact that all our human means, efficient organisation in which we so often put our pride and hope, though very useful, are not worth more than those fishing nets the apostles were mending after they had fished all night without taking any catch. We are always in need of better structures, of reform, readjustments, improvements etc. But we, our Congregation, the Church, are even more in need of new life, life which only the God’s Spirit can give. While we are capable of inventing and producing pipes and whole systems of pipelines, we can’t make a surging well. 
 
The experience of Alcoholics Anonymous
Our spirituality leads us to accept first of all our own weakness, but then it has to open us up to the Holy Spirit. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” the Lord told Saint Paul. To accept human frailty in order to let the power of God’s Spirit take over, is also the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first three of the “12 Steps” state the same principles and experience: 

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol. As priests, brothers, lay people involved in Church work, we have to admit too, as I have just said, that in so many pastoral situations we are powerless too. The first step to finding a way of salvation is always humility, acceptance of truth, acknowledgement of our powerlessness.
 

2.  We came to believe in a Power greater than ourselves (that could restore us to sanity). This power exists and is available to each person who in her powerlessness knows how to open herself to it. This faith is a constant feature of all the saints, and among the non-canonised ones, that of our Founder. He knew by experience that God is in control of everything: “If God wants a work done, obstacles for him become means”. 

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. This is what conversion of the heart is about and what the traditional invocation: “Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, I trust in you” really means.
 
Allow me once more to talk about Theresa of Lisieux. The "little way” she discovered and taught is nothing else than the power of the Spirit working in our poverty. She realised that she could become a saint not in spite of her weaknesses, but thanks to them! (The reason why I often refer to her is, that she seems to be the saint closest to our MSC spirituality as it is expressed in our Constitutions. The driving force in her life was "Making Love loved" (Love with a capital L). We just have to add "everywhere" and "forever" to have a more modern way of saying, "May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be everywhere loved"!)
 
“To be like Jesus” during a Provincial Chapter
 If we want to take seriously this statement of our Constitutions, I would suggest that an important aspect of your approach needs to be contemplative. There is a lot of work to be done by the Chapter. But the truth of what God is asking of us will come as a gift if we are contemplative. This approach is certainly going to mean a lot of listening to one another and to what God is saying through one another. It might mean a lot of listening in our prayer time too. “To be like Jesus” means to find time for God. When Jesus chose his apostles, he spent a whole night in prayer. Afterwards he could thank his Father for “those whom you have given to me” (John  17,6). After the election of a leader in a religious community, after the election of a Provincial and even the delegates to the General Chapter, we should also be able to give thanks too for those “you have given us”.   

3. As Missionaries of the Sacred Heart WE WANT TO LOVE THROUGH HIM AND WITH HIM (who loved with a human heart).
 As MSC we are missionaries of love! Love has to be our ambition! Our vocation is not just to proclaim to others that God is love, but to let God’s love flow through us to them. We want to “love through him and with him”. 

Every Christian spirituality has to lead people to the only thing that really matters in life: love. Sad enough, many people don’t know the aim and the rules of the “game of life”.  They believe that in order to win, they have to become rich and powerful. As Christians, we know that the aim of life is totally different: we have been given life in order to love. Life is meant to be a school which teaches the science or the art of loving. This is also the only road to true happiness.
 
What really matters
 Even as religious we sometimes easily forget this basic rule and the aim of our vocation. It happens that we mix up the “real battle field” and engage in useless struggle when we fight to impose our view or opinion, instead of winning the only battle which is worth engaging in - to overcome our selfishness and to love. If there is no real charity without truth, there is no Christian truth without charity. We are not going to be recognised as disciples of Jesus because of our good ideas on how to change the world, nor because of our hard work, nor because we say a lot of prayers.  People recognise in us God’s love first of all when we love one another. True Christian love becomes possible only “through him and with him”.  Our Constitutions remind us that we are called and “we want to love like Jesus, who loved with a human heart”. Much could and should be said about all the human aspects of Christ’s and our love which has nothing to do with angelic charity but which either is incarnate, or it is not. To love is not to have plenty of joyful sentiments and emotions. Love, as Saint Theresa of Lisieux says, is to give all, including oneself. The Eucharistic Prayer No. 4 says that Jesus sent the Holy Spirit as his first gift for those who believe “so that we might live no longer for ourselves, but for him”.  To love means to live for Christ who identifies himself with the poor. Here is where working for justice and peace comes in, or preferential option for the poor. [When speaking of it, we need to be aware that there are many other kinds of poverty besides material poverty.  For example, to be rejected, unloved, and unwanted is much worse than being materially poor. (I am not talking about the misery of destitution). In our modern society there are more and more people who lack love, and are in want of true love. In the evening of our life, we will be judged only on one thing: how we have loved not in word or sentiment, but in action.] We all know how love can be difficult, in married life as much as in religious life. MSC spirituality stresses the fact that love is first of all a gift, a gift to be desired, to be prayed for, to be received. The Heart of Christ is the source of all love, the fountain of the “Spirit of Love”. Instead of accusing ourselves from time to time in confession for not having been charitable, we would do better to pray seriously for the gift of love.  As in our Spirituality it is Mary, “Our Lady of the Sacred Heart” as we like to call her, who leads us to the source of living water.  Why not ask her to intercede for us in this regard.  

4. As Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, WE WANT TO PROCLAIM HIS LOVE TO THE WORLD  
The aim of Father Chevalier’s Sacred Heart spirituality is not reparation, but mission, the topic of this last section. In the first rules of 1855, he wrote: “The purpose of the little Society of the Sacred Heart is… to make known to people all the treasures of love and mercy which this adorable Heart contains, and to urge them to give themselves to Him.”
 
Why did Christ let his heart be pierced on the cross? Why is there a devotion to the Sacred Heart, a spirituality of the Heart? Why did God call our Congregation to life? What is the deepest reason why this Provincial Chapter is being held? In answer to all those questions there is only one: God wants his love to be known by all people and to flow into our society and into the world. For this to happen, he has called us and associates us to his work.
 
According to the Encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi, the Church exists to evangelise. The same applies to our Congregation. The word “mission” is even part of our name, of our identity.
 
Proclamation of Christ’s love can happen in many different ways: through words and deeds, through preaching and concrete action on a social or even political level. (Politics is the greatest field of charity!). It implies assisting people, where needed, to have the means to live and even more, to give to all people reasons to live. The ultimate reason for everything is because, as Saint John says: “God is love”.
 
What Mission, or Evangelisation means can be expressed in a very simple way: it might be compared to a hungry beggar who tells another of his fellow beggars: “I know where to find food”. As MSC’s, we know where to find what people are most hungry for: love. We know about a hidden, but real source, where love is freely given: in the Heart of Christ. If our proclamation of love is not to be ineffective talking, or worse religious propaganda, it has to be the work of the Holy Spirit himself.

CONCLUSION
In the view of Father Chevalier, Sacred Heart Spirituality is the richest possible of all spiritualities, “Devotion to the Sacred Heart is the essence of Christianity, the cornerstone, the pivot... around which everything turns... The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the quintessence of the Christian faith; the epitome and substantial summary of the whole of religion.  The Christian religion is a work of love in its beginning, development and end; its history is found wholly and entirely in the sublime statement: God so loved the world”…

Without the action of the Holy Spirit any spirituality remains dead. No one can say, “Jesus is Lord” without him (cf. 1 Cor 12…). Also to proclaim or to tell somebody “God is love”, or “Jesus loves you”, words like these become “life and spirit” only through him. The Holy Spirit has to come upon our spirituality in a similar way as he comes over the bread and wine on the altar in order to bring it alive and make it nourishment for us and for the people we introduce into it.  

During the coming days, this same Spirit of Jesus wants to enliven this gathering of your Provincial Chapter. Some time ago, before a rather difficult meeting which took place in Issoudun, I went for a moment to pray in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. A pilgrim came in and knelt down in the bench right in front of me. He was at least three times as fat as I, wearing a T shirt on which was written in big letters just a few centimetres from my eyes: “Remember the Holy Spirit who dwells in you”.   From time to time we all need reminders like this. The purpose of this talk is exactly the same: to remind all of us that the Spirit of the Living God dwells among us as we are gathered in Jesus’ name.  

We all have received the Spirit on many occasions during our life as Christians, as religious and priests. But like the early Christians, we have to ask again and again for his coming and for a new outpouring of his gifts. While we can be sure he is within us, we have to make sure all the time that we are in him, under his influence and power. At this moment, we as a group gathered in the name of Jesus, have to put not just our personal lives but this Provincial Chapter under the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit and to submit radically the programme, the contents and everything which is going to happen during the next days to the care of God. 

I would like to close with a prayer by John Paul II, adapted to fit our present situation:
 “Today, from this upper room, a great prayer rises: Come, Holy Spirit, come and renew the face of our Province in Ireland, of the Church in this country, come and renew the face of the earth! Come with your seven gifts! Come, Spirit of Life, Spirit of Communion and Love! Our Province needs you. Come, Holy Spirit, and make ever more fruitful the gifts you have bestowed on us. Give to all of us new strength and missionary zeal. Open our hearts; renew our religious and Christian commitment. Make us courageous messengers of the Gospel, witnesses to the risen Christ, Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”