Our daily life in Our Lord Jesus Christ is a difficult struggle between pursuit of the true happiness He freely offers to us and beguilement by the false happiness marketed to us, at the cost of our freedom, by a world burdened with the effects of Original Sin.
Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to consuming itself to witness its love. And in return, I receive from most of them only ingratitude from their irreverences and their sacrileges and by the coldness and contempt that they have for Me in this sacrament of love.
The poisonous and ultimately lethal error of closing our human heart to the Sacred Heart of Our Lord, to His unceasing and immeasurable outpouring of love, leads us to a search for happiness in places where it can never be found. It leads us to abandon holiness of life in Christ, the sure way to happiness, in order to pursue our fulfillment in unholy places, places in which we are robbed of our freedom and eventually destroyed.
Contemporary culture, marked so heavily by addictions – abuse of alcohol and drugs, greed, abuse of authority and power, sexual promiscuity, and so forth – , manifests the deadly poisonous fruit of our abandonment of the Lord and His way of blessedness. A supposed happiness which is totally severed from the source of Divine Love is no happiness at all.
It is the beguilement of Satan who, as Our Lord Himself teaches us, is “a murderer from the beginning” and “the Father of Lies” (Jn 8, 44). The allurement to abandon Our Lord and His Way can only harm us. Indeed, it is diabolical.
A society which rebels against God’s plan for the world and for us, claiming to provide for us security and peace apart from Divine Law, offers us only unhappiness and violence. It is anti-life and anti-marriage and anti-family, refusing to honor the inviolable dignity of innocent and defenseless human life and the integrity of its cradle in marriage and the family it forms. The Father of Lies is, above all, seductive. He appears in many appealing guises. He uses attractive language which is, in fact, duplicitous. If we are so foolish as to let ourselves be beguiled by his false glamour, we will find no peace, no happiness.
The “narrow way” in no respect diminishes our nature or limits our freedom. It rather permits our nature to express its fullness, procuring for us freedom and peace, leading us to our eternal destiny, our lasting home with God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – in Heaven, in the company of the angels and all the saints. Christ alone is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14, 6).
We only find peace by living in Christ. Christ alone gives us peace (Jn 14, 27) during our earthly pilgrimage, a foretaste of the perfect peace of our home with Him in Heaven. The “blood and water” which flows from His glorious pierced Heart into our hearts, above all through the Sacraments, purifies us of all that is false, hateful and deadly (Jn 19, 34). It animates us with Divine Truth and Love, so that, as Our Lord promised, “rivers of living water” will flow from our hearts (Jn 7, 38) as a blessing for others and for the world.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5, 8). By means of a pure heart, we give our hearts completely into the Heart of God which became flesh in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. By means of a pure heart, that is a heart completely united to the glorious pierced Heart of Jesus, we find true happiness and peace. By means of a pure heart, we rest our hearts in the Heart of Jesus, so that we can be purified of the sins of pride and rebellion, and can be fortified with His pure and selfless love.
Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke
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