by Ottavio De Bertolis

This litany perhaps seems a little too "philosophical", and in this sense it may not please everyone. I thought so too, but then I discovered that in reality it really reveals to us the meaning of the spirituality of the Heart of Christ. In fact, a person's heart is revealed by what that person says, does, or, even more, shows in himself; so for the Heart of Christ.

The invisible Heart of our Redeemer is in fact manifested by his visible works: and thus the spirituality of the Heart of Christ is nourished precisely by the word of Jesus. Every devotee of the sacred Heart, like Mary, safeguards the word of his Master and Lord, in his own Heart. The Word, kept, meditated on, celebrated in the Liturgy and lived in life, takes us to the One who pronounced it; all the words of Jesus that we find in the gospels are gifts of the Heart of Christ. Furthermore, all Scripture is a gift from the Heart of Christ, even beyond the Gospels, because it is always He who speaks: He is in fact the very Word of God, the Word outside of time that enters into time, and becomes listenable to us . it is the experience of Easter itself: Jesus explains in the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms what refers to Him, and our hearts burn in hearing it. 

But the Word of Jesus is also everything that He did and accomplished: so we, when we contemplate the scenes of the Gospel, and see Him in all his actions, we see something of his Heart. One could say that all the words of the writing are like mosaic tiles, which draw the single image of his Heart. Whether we contemplate him as a child in the nativity scene, or hidden in private life, or in the gestures of mercy he performs by revealing the love of the Father to sinners, the poor and the little ones, and in short in every line of the Gospel, his Heart offers itself to our gaze and our love. Even more, when he no longer says or does anything, because he is on the cross, silenced and disfigured by the evil of men, even more, paradoxically, he speaks and says. And so looking at Him, his very body, we see the Father, precisely because he is united with Him, he is "substantially united with the Word of God". 

This litany reminds us that the spirituality of the Sacred Heart is not based on private revelations, but on the Word of God itself, which is fully shown in the humanity of Jesus, in his human and divine Person, in his flesh assumed by the Word of God: « Whoever sees me sees the Father."

And so our worship of the Sacred Heart is not made up of more or less personal formulas, nor of particular forms of devotion, but coincides with the worship of the Church itself: in the Mass that we celebrate we listen to it and are nourished by it at the double table of the Word and some bread; in the Divine Office we listen to Him speaking in the Psalms and in the readings; and so also in the forms of private devotion, the Rosary or the holy hour that we holyly observe, we cling to the sacrificed Lamb, participating in the praise that the whole Church continually gives him.