Day 1: The Heart, Source of Love

The first day of the Sacred Heart Novena begins where the devotion itself begins: in the contemplation of the Heart of the Lord Jesus as the source and the unfailing fountain of all love. The Catholic tradition has always understood that the Lord Jesus is the perfect Image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15) and that the Heart of Jesus is, in the order of the Incarnation, the place where the eternal love of the Trinity has been brought into human history.

Today's invocation

O most Holy Heart of Jesus, fountain of every blessing, I adore You, I love You, and with lively sorrow for my sins I offer You this poor heart of mine. Make me humble, patient, pure, and wholly obedient to Your will. Grant, good Jesus, that I may live in You and for You. Protect me in the midst of danger; comfort me in my afflictions; give me health of body, assistance in my temporal needs, Your blessing on all that I do, and the grace of a holy death. Amen.

Today's meditation

The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the visible sign of the invisible love of God. Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Haurietis Aquas (1956), the principal magisterial treatment of the theology of the Sacred Heart, articulates the foundational principle: "the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the principal sign and symbol of that threefold love by which the divine Redeemer is continually loving His eternal Father and the human race." The Heart represents three loves at once: the eternal love of the Son for the Father in the Trinity (the love that is itself the Holy Spirit, by Augustinian theology), the human love of Jesus for His Father in His Sacred Humanity, and the human love of Jesus for the human family He came to redeem.

The first day of the novena is the day of contemplation: we do not yet ask anything specific of the Sacred Heart, but we open the heart of our soul to the Heart of Jesus and let the contemplation of His love begin to form us. "We love because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19). The whole Catholic life is a response to this prior love. The Sacred Heart devotion makes the prior love visible to the eyes of faith.

Today's intention

Bring to the Sacred Heart of Jesus today the principal intention for which you are praying this novena. Be specific. Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, I bring before You today this matter on which I am asking Your love. Then ask for the broader gift: that the Sacred Heart would form your own heart in His love over these nine days.

Reflection

Catholic spiritual writers have long observed that the Sacred Heart devotion is, at root, a gradual surrender of the soul's heart to the Heart of Christ. The image at the center of the devotion (the Heart of Jesus exposed, surrounded by a crown of thorns, surmounted by a cross, and pierced by a wound from which blood and water flow) is a visual catechesis of the entire Gospel: the Heart of Jesus has been wounded for love of us, and from the wound flow the sacraments of the Church (the water of Baptism and the blood of the Eucharist). To enter the devotion is to receive these sacraments more deeply and to live by the love that flows from the Heart of Jesus.

The First Day's meditation is also a gentle correction of a common modern misunderstanding. The Sacred Heart devotion is not principally about emotion. Catholic devotion is realistic about the variability of feeling. The love of the Sacred Heart, into which the soul is drawn over the nine days of the novena, is the steady, willing, faithful love that endures even when feelings are absent. This love is the one which the Holy Spirit gradually forms in the soul.

Closing prayers

Pray three times each: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be, and the closing invocation:

Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, I trust in You.