The Sacred Heart:
A Love for All Times
ISBN 9780829458749
eISBN 9780829458756
ASIN B0DQFZQ1BH
I picked this up as one of the volumes I wanted to read on the Sacred heart of Jesus during the month of June. Unfortunately, I got busy, and it dropped down on my kindle, and it was not read until July. But once I started reading I could hardly put it down.
The description of this volume states:
“Connect Heart to Heart with Jesus
Award-winning author Dawn Eden Goldstein, JCL, SThD, brings the profound beauty and transformative power of the Sacred Heart devotion to life through an exploration of its history, the lives of the saints, and personal reflections.
The Sacred Heart: A Love for All Times takes you on a journey into the depths of Jesus's unshakable love. Weaving a rich tapestry of historical insights, scriptural observations, and modern-day reflections, Goldstein seeks to inform our faith and elevate our spiritual practice. By expanding our awareness and appreciation of this sacred devotion, she offers readers a unique invitation to be enveloped by a love that never ends.
Whether you're a devout Catholic, a seeker of saintly wisdom, or someone longing for divine comfort, this book offers a fresh perspective on the enduring power of Christ's love to heal, transform, and guide us in our everyday lives. In addition, this book serves as a timely companion to Pope Francis's encyclical, Dilexit nos (He Loved Us), packed with insights on the saints and theological thinkers who inspired the pope's reflections.”
About the author we are informed:
“Dawn Eden Goldstein, SThD, is the award-winning author of several books, most recently The Sacred Heart: A Love for All Times and the Christopher Award-winning biography Father Ed: The Story of Bill W.'s Spiritual Sponsor. She began her working life as a rock-and-roll historian and went on to editorial positions at the New York Post and the Daily News before publishing her first book in 2006 under the pen name Dawn Eden. In 2016, she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in sacred theology from the University of St. Mary of the Lake, and she went on to earn a licentiate in canon law from the Catholic University of America. She lives in Washington, D.C., and has taught at universities and seminaries in the United States, England, and India.”
The chapters in this volume are:
1 The Heart of a Beloved Disciple - St. John
2 The Restless Heart - St. Augustine
3 The Heart Made Manifest - St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
4 The Heart of Mercy - St. Faustina Kowalska
5 The Heart of the Church - Pope Pius XII
6 The Heart of Service - Julia Greeley
7 The Heart of Sacrifice - St. Tarcisius, St. Juliana Falconieri, and Catherine de Hueck and Eddie Doherty
8 The Heart of a Missionary - Father Pedro Arrupe, SJ
I highlighted a number of passages while reading this volume, some of them are:
“During the 1930s, when devotion to the Sacred Heart was at its peak, the visions of St. Margaret Mary found an echo—one might even say a completion—in those of a Polish nun, St. Faustina Kowalska, who is the subject of chapter four.”
“As you read this book, my prayer is that, whatever you may feel or not feel, you will discover that, in the words Lucia of Fatima reported hearing from an angel, “the Hearts of Jesus and Mary are attentive to your supplications.” 7 For wherever you find the Heart of Jesus, you will find the heart of his mother as well, and you will find both Jesus and Mary where I found them: in the heart of the church.”
“During Jesus’s earthly life, his body radiated healing power for those who approached him in faith (see Luke 6: 19). Just as the wondrous flow of blood and water represents the church that Jesus creates through pouring himself out, it also represents the means that Jesus has chosen so that, acting through the church, he might bring his healing power to people in every age: the sacraments. From the earliest days of the church, commentators have understood the blood and water to represent the Eucharist and Baptism, the principal sacraments from which the power of the other sacraments flow.”
“In short, through John’s Gospel, we come to understand that when we listen to the Heart of Jesus, we find that we ourselves are beloved disciples—for, to borrow a thought from another John, church father St. John Chrysostom, God loves each of us as though there were only one of us.”
“We do yet rest in God, in the sense that, having found him, we seek no other. But when we reflect upon our encounter with him, we long to get closer. Like C.S. Lewis’s cry to go “further up and further in,” 7 we find that if we remain where we are, we risk Christ’s passing us by. We need rather to call after Jesus like the blind man in Luke’s gospel who, when he heard that Christ was close at hand, insistently cried out until Jesus invited him to draw near (Luke 18: 35–43).”
“To Augustine, as with all the saints, there can be no sideways movement in the spiritual life—only growth or backsliding. (As Jesuit Father Daniel A. Lord, SJ, put it, “Grow! When you stop growing spiritually, you are asleep or dead.”)”
“He accomplishes this attunement in innumerable ways, from reading sacred Scripture to living virtuously and practicing acts of mercy. But one indispensable activity underlies all he does to make his heart like that of Jesus: the constant work of prayer.”
“That is to say, when we pray, the words we use should bring us to reflect upon what it is that we truly need and desire from God.”
“The entire thrust of Letter 130, then, is to impress upon the reader that we don’t pray to change God’s will so that he may give us what we desire; rather, we pray to change our own will so that we may desire what God wants to give us.”
“If we are praying rightly, we are asking the Lord unceasingly to enlarge our hearts—that is, our desires—and to unite them with the desires of his own Heart.”
“As we will see, there are many similarities between St. Margaret Mary’s experience of Jesus and that of St. Faustina. Each of them felt from a young age that God was calling her not only to enter the convent but also, in doing so, to share intimately in the sufferings that Jesus endured for the salvation of souls.”
“Margaret Mary gained a reputation at Paray for being prone to becoming completely absorbed in prayer. Her ecstasies, however, did not endear her to her superiors; rather, they caused concern.”
“With those four revelations, we have the substance of St. Margaret Mary’s experience of the Sacred Heart. Ten years would pass before her religious community, and the church at large, would learn of her revelations and begin to take them seriously. In the meantime, she confided her visions in the confessional to a young Jesuit priest, Father Claude La Colombière, SJ, who today is likewise a canonized saint.”
“To take that idea to its logical conclusion, nuptial spirituality is, in a sense, the living out of each Christian’s experience of being transubstantiated into the Body of Christ.”
I hope those quotes give you a feel for this volume. This is an excellent volume to work through. It does a good job of giving an overview of this devotion in history and down to our current day. It draws examples from people of all walks of life and from around the world who have had a devotion to Jesus’s Sacred Heart.
It is easy to engage with and would be great to work through with teens or young adults. It would also be excellent for a book club or small group to work through together. I was moved greatly by the book and plan to read it again, hopefully next year in June.
An excellent volume I can easily recommend. It is a book any Catholic would benefit from reading.
Note: This book is part of a series of reviews: 2025 Catholic Reading Plan!
Books about the Sacred Heart of Jesus:
