Month of the Sacred Heart: Heart of Jesus, Abyss of All Virtues

Being solidly devoted to this adorable Heart means striving to penetrate it through meditation or mental prayer, in order to know its dispositions and movements, the goals it sought to obtain, the motives for its actions, and the virtues it practiced.

It then means conceiving for this divine Heart the sentiments of love and gratitude it deserves from us; a deep regret for all the displeasure we have caused it and for everything we have made it suffer with so many sins and so much resistance to grace; a sincere and effective desire to please it, and to neglect nothing that could please it, while expiating and repairing our past faults.

Lastly, it means seeking to imitate it, as the apostle exhorts us, "expressing in ourselves the sentiments that were in Jesus Christ, putting on Jesus Christ" (Phil. 2:5; Rom. 12:14), reforming our heart after the example of His, for it is by this reform that the work of Christian sanctity begins, continues and is achieved.

The reform of the heart implies detesting and fleeing all vices and loving and practicing all the virtues.

Is that not the goal of the entire teaching of the Gospel and the epistles of the Apostles, especially St. Paul? Is there anything more solid and profound in Christian morality? Can there be any piety truer and more pleasing to God and more useful to the soul? Is this not the very basis and essence of all piety? I was right, therefore, to claim that this devotion as I have exposed it began with the Church; and that it is what made the first Christians such interior men.

Fr. Jean-Nicolas Grou, L’intérieur de Jésus et de Marie, 1862, pp. 144-145.