Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Love or charity is at the center of all created and uncreated realities.
So God, who is love, freely creates out of love, and He creates for love too.
And in His plan of creation, He first wills the one who will love Him the most.
He first wills the person outside of God who will return and share His love and His glory in the most perfect way possible.
So God wants the best.
He even wants the best for Himself.
So the first creature that He had in mind when He planned to create was Jesus Christ in His sacred humanity.
And at the center of the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ is His heart.
So when we speak of the heart of Jesus, are we speaking of His physical heart or are we using the word heart as a symbolic term in a symbolic sense?
It's actually both of those.
As human beings, we're composed of body and soul.
We don't perceive abstract and spiritual realities directly.
I asked someone recently, why is it that you can't see God with your eyes?
And the answer is because God's spirit.
We can't see spiritual beings with our eyes.
We can't perceive spiritual realities directly.
We perceive them through creative things, through our senses, which then, in turn, speaks to our reason and our understanding.
For example, if a husband gives flowers to his wife, right, the flowers aren't an end in themselves.
They're meant to point to a spiritual reality.
Flowers represent his love for her, or maybe they're a sign of repentance for something he's done wrong.
The flowers, then, are a concrete expression of a spiritual reality or a sentiment that he wants to actually communicate.
Same thing with crowning our lady with flowers during the month of May, right?
Why do we do that?
Why do we crown her statue with flowers?
It's a symbol of our love for her.
The flowers are a symbol there as well.
So it's through creative, visible things that we can communicate spiritual realities, and it's through created material things that we can arrive at understanding spiritual and supernatural realities.
And we can arrive at understanding the uncreated reality of God Himself because God's fingerprints and His footprints, as it were, are in all created things and everything that He's done.
All created things are good because they come from the hand of God, who is goodness itself, and they point back to God in various ways.
The human heart really is no different in that respect.
In our everyday language, we use the word heart.
Sometimes we mean the physical muscle in the body which circulates the blood to all parts of the body.
Then, of course, the blood is the life of the body.
It's how we actually live, but we also use the word heart to mean like the spiritual center of a person.
Talk about our affections or our hopes or talk about intuitions or the place inside of us where we make decisions.
The heart really is the center of who I am as a person.
That's the biblical understanding of what the heart is.
So our physical heart points to the reality of our soul and our spiritual life and our core identity.
The Catechism number 368 says that the heart is the place where the person decides for or against God.
We understand the heart to be the seat of the will, where we embrace what we perceive to be good or we reject what we perceive to be evil.
The heart is also a symbol of love, too.
Catechism, again, says that the Sacred Heart is a symbol of love with which Jesus continually loves the Eternal Father and all human beings without exception.
St. John Eudes was a contemporary of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.
He wrote a work called The Admirable Heart of Mary, and he said that the heart, referring to Jesus, he said it refers to three things.
The first heart, he says, this is quoting him, to be found in our loving Savior, Jesus Christ the God-man, is his heart of flesh, deified like all the other parts of his sacred body by its hypostatic union with the Divine Word.
The second is his spiritual heart, that is, the superior faculties of his Holy Soul, including his memory, his understanding, his will, all most especially deified by the hypostatic union.
The third is his divine heart, that is, the Holy Spirit by whom his adorable humanity has always been animated in a higher degree than by its own soul and heart, says St. John Eudes.
So divine heart refers to the eternal and infinite love of God.
Spiritual heart means the ability to love, which the soul of Christ has, which we have too as well.
And then there's the physical heart of Jesus as man inasmuch as he has a physical heart, just like the rest of us.
Three hearts really are one heart in Jesus because the divine heart is the life and the soul of his spiritual heart and his physical heart as well too.
So the physical heart of Jesus beats with such affection and joy for us because it expresses his spiritual heart, which loves us profoundly, and his divine heart, which loves us infinitely, eternally, and unconditionally.
But before loving us, the love for God, the love for his Heavenly Father, is what beats through the Sacred Heart first and foremost.
Because the heart of Jesus profoundly loves God, he also profoundly loves us too, who are created in God's image and likeness.
Jesus is the first one to observe the two great commandments of loving God and loving our neighbor, and is the only one who fulfills those commandments perfectly and completely.
And that commandment to love, which is the foundation of every commandment and every moral precept, the commandment to love corresponds to the nature of God himself and to the reason why he created and what we were created for.
We were created by love, who is God, we were created for love, who is God, and we were created to love in imitation of God.
And it's the love of the Sacred Heart itself which makes it possible for us to fulfill that purpose and that calling.
So I have a story which is related to this.
Most of you, many of you, have heard this already.
It's seemingly related, somewhat related, certainly related to today's feast.
Last September, I sent out an email to a number of benefactors saying that we were looking to get some nicer vestments here at the farm for our liturgies.
Some vestments from Poland, some vestments from Italy, too.
With the email, I also included about a dozen or so, probably a little more than that, maybe very high-end vestments.
I said, you know, aim high, right?
Just don't ask for the cheap stuff, just aim high.
The least they can do is say no, right?
So we sent out an email looking for that, and if anyone would like to make a donation towards that, I figured no one would want to actually buy a vestment, but it doesn't hurt to ask, right?
Not too long after that, one of my spiritual directees contacted me.
She told me she wanted to purchase a vestment for us.
First thing she said to me was that this wasn't from her.
She said, this is not from me.
The Lord wants you guys to have this, and this is not from me.
I said to her, you know, I bet I know which one it is you want to buy for us.
And she said, it's the Sacred Heart one.
And I said, I thought that was what it was, because why?
This is the Sacred Heart Chapel.
So I figured our Lord would want us to have the Sacred Heart vestment, right?
She said, yeah, I wanted to get you the most expensive one.
I said, it's not the most expensive one, it's the second most, but you're close.
I said, it was very close.
So she said, I'll buy that vestment for you guys, but it's on three conditions.
She said, the first condition was that the Sacred Heart emblem on the back had to be red, not gold, because actually the one who makes the vestment, it's actually in gold, the tailor.
So I said to tell the tailor, can you make the vestment in red, the heart in red?
She said, yes.
Second condition from the benefactor was that the vestment couldn't be used until today, which is the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart.
We fulfilled that request today.
Third one was that I had to be the one to celebrate the Mass.
So all three of those, we’re doing that today.
And in this conversation, this was back in September, I asked her, I said, when is the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart next year?
Because every year it's a movable feast.
It changes each year.
And she said very confidently to me, she said, June 24th.
And I said, no, it's not.
I said, it was this year, it was June 24th, that was last year, which is St. John the Baptist's Solemnity.
And I said, wait a minute, let's lookup on the internet, let's see when the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart is next year.
And I looked it up, and I said, oh, June 16th.
I said, oh, it's my birthday, actually, it really is from our Lord.
And he really does want this in the end.
It's something that he wants us to have in a special way.
Surprise birthday present from the God of surprises from Jesus himself.
He is a God of surprises.
The more we allow him and Our Lady to transform our minds and our hearts, the more joyful surprises they'll have in store for us, crosses too.
But joyful surprises in this life, but especially in the next life.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.

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Ave Maria.