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the sacred heart

3 Comments

Let me tell you three things about the Sacred Heart.

First, I never understood it. 

As a kid I was creeped out by kitschy pictures of Jesus pointing to his bleeding, dripping heart. I shuddered and skittered away past looming statues in church basements as quick as I could. I stole only the quickest glance at Christ, standing alone, clutching his heart pierced with thorns.

Neatly filed away under “not my spirituality” in my Catholic Devotionals collection.

Second, I found myself inside it.

After Abby and Maggie died, we found ourselves inside the heart of God in a mysterious and moving way that still unsettles me every time I think about it. What was that? What are we supposed to do with that?

As I’ve been starting to write their story, I did what any author worth her salt should do: go back to the sources, collect all the evidence, do my due diligence.

Here is the surprising truth I uncovered.

Whenever my husband and I would remember the story, it would go like this: Maggie died in our arms; our hearts were broken. Then we held Abby; our hearts were full of joy. That was the moment when we were right inside the heart of God.

Except.

Upon careful review of the evidence closest to the incident, I discovered that I texted one of my closest friends after we got back to the hospital room on the night that Maggie died. I wrote to her that we were right inside the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Where everything is broken and bleeding and wounded, but somehow there is still purest love.

I have no memory of writing those words in the blur of rawest grief. I thought we only understood this truth the next day as we held Abby.

I had neatly filed away “Joy,  abundant and overflowing” under “Heart of God; characteristics thereof.”

But the proof is in the text. Somehow we recognized we were inside the Sacred Heart as soon as everything was a broken, bleeding mess. Before we ever felt joy or tasted heaven.

Somehow we knew it was holy even in the hardest moments. 

So when the next day dawned, and we wept together, and we thought for sure that the shreds of what was left of our hope would burn to ashes – as we went back to that daunting NICU, as we took another child off life support, as we held another dying baby in our arms?

The unexpected happened. Again. That abundance of joy sealed right around the suffering wounds and let us bask in the fullness of love.

Which cannot be filed neatly away. For it defies categories: Sorrow AND Joy, Death AND Resurrection, Good Friday AND Easter Sunday.

(The Divine Heart, I now know, is cross-listed everywhere.)

Third, I see it everywhere now.

I’ll admit my eyes are stretched open wider to see what I did not notice before. But the Sacred Heart is everywhere. How did I miss it?

I don’t just mean the uncanny cards and prayers that mysteriously keep showing up in our mailbox, picture after picture of the Sacred Heart from strangers and friends.

I mean something deeper. That the woundedness of God’s love is everywhere I look.

It is the beating pulse behind every heart-breaking story of death and destruction in the news.

It is the quiet love behind every tiny tragedy that never makes the headlines.

It is the steady hope that meets me whenever I want to despair of this hard life.

I have carried a pulsing, powerful image with me every day since our daughters died. It is the broken, bleeding heart sealed right around with mercy. It is everything I understand about God now.

It is undoing and remaking my life. I hope that someday it might do the same to yours.

. . .

On today’s Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, I’m reflecting at Blessed Is She. If you aren’t already receiving their free daily devotionals in your inbox every morning, click here to sign up today.

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Comments

  1. Barb Szyszkiewicz says

    3 June 2016 at 7:05 am

    WOW.
    I have to tell you–our chapel has 4 or 5 different cards, all beautiful in their own way. Obviously my “random” choice of a card was not random in the least.
    But your description of the top reminded me of my 12-year-old neighbor’s comment that she doesn’t like sitting where she can see the Sacred Heart picture on the wall in our church. As you did as a child, she finds it disturbing.
    Prayers continue for you and yours. May God hold you close and bring you comfort.

    Reply
  2. Angela says

    3 June 2016 at 8:21 am

    So beautiful! Read this through BIS email. No words, thank you.

    Reply
  3. Claire says

    3 June 2016 at 5:49 pm

    I’m so glad that you have shared your amazing journey on Blessed is She. I don’t wish grief on anyone, but I can personally attest to the blessings that accompany it. I have kept a gratitude journal for years, and my longest entries have been during times of grief (losing my twins 9 years ago, and losing my father four weeks ago). I never thought of it as pure love residing in the brokenness, but it makes sense.

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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