Contemplatives and Evangelizers
Apostles of the Kingdom According to the Heart of Christ
Novena Prayers
Day 1 – June 2, 2021
The Heart of Christ, Apostle of the Kingdom, comes out to meet us and give us life.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the limitless love God has for humanity. It beats for us — to give us life, to purify us, and to unite us in one body. Just as the heart receives blood that has been emptied of oxygen and then returns it to course throughout the whole body filled with nutrients, Jesus Christ assumes our humanity, receives our sin, redeems it, and transforms it into life.
To be an apostle is to live within the heart of Christ. Whoever knows the One who gave his own life so that we “may have life and have it abundantly” (see John 10:10) begins to be imbued with his convictions, his attitudes, his love. They begin to experience the mystery of a gift they cannot contain: Christ Himself, and they become his apostles.
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
Day 2 – June 3, 2021
The apostle’s heart beats in a two-part rhythm: contemplative and evangelizing
The Heart of Jesus beats for us. He loves us always: he welcomes us with mercy, he gives himself up for us.
The heart is a muscle that beats non-stop in a two-part rhythm, expanding to receive and contracting to send. Without the constant pattern of these two movements, which are complementary and inseparable, the heart simply does not work. The same is true of the heart of the apostle. Moved by the impulse of love, it beats in two movements: contemplative and evangelizing.
To contemplate is not only to look, but above all to receive and welcome; to evangelize is not only to preach, but above all to give and transmit. To be contemplative is to discover and welcome God, present in the different realities of life; to be an evangelizer is to know how to communicate through living. Being contemplative and evangelizing is the existential attitude that allows us to enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ, to know Him intimately, to love Him, to share life with Him and be his witnesses.
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
Day 3 – June 4, 2021
The Heart of Jesus is wounded by our sin, but from that wound he restores us
The Heart of Jesus is wounded by our sin. Sin divides and makes us live in a fragmented way. At some point or situation in life we all experience a fracture between God, the world, and our brothers and sisters. There is a confrontation between the deep yearning that our hearts have for God and the sin that seduces us and drags us down, between the desire to love Christ and the inability to see Him in our neighbor which makes us isolate and compartmentalize the various facets of our life, and leads us to say with St Paul “I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I do not want” (Romans 7:19).
When an organ in the body does not receive the blood that the heart pumps, it becomes sick and dies. Sin is the obstacle that blocks the coming of grace; yet from the wound in Christ’s heart flow water and blood, forgiveness and life, the spring of salvation for all people. Living immersed within the heart of Christ restores unity in us.
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
Day 4 – June 5, 2021
The Heart of Christ the Apostle unifies us in a vocation and a mission
The Heart of Jesus unifies the human and the divine. Through it we can see God’s heart in all its tenderness, goodness, and mercy. “From the infinite horizon of his love, God wished to enter into the limits of human history and the human condition. He took on a body and a heart. Thus, we can contemplate and encounter the infinite in the finite, the invisible and ineffable Mystery in the human Heart of Jesus” (Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus June 1, 2008).
The heart is a physical organ that responds to feelings, it is where the body integrates with the soul. If we live within the mystery of Christ the Apostle—letting him live in us and through us—everything that happens to us is integrated into a vocation and mission, coming to love and find God in all things and all things in Him.
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
Day 5 – June 6, 2021
Listening to the harmonious heartbeat of the Sacred Heart impels us to beat with love with Him
The heart is the place of interiority. Silence is the key that opens the door of the inner life, and allows us to hear a heartbeat. In deep silence we become aware of our being, decipher our needs and those of others, and discover with amazement the action of God in us. Silence allows us to contemplate. St. John reclined on the heart of the Master and listened to the wonderful language of his heartbeat. Listening to the heartbeat of the Sacred Heart brightens the soul and warms the hearts in which love has become cold. In the palpitations of the Heart of Christ the Apostle, we discover the gift of effusive love that God offers for free, which leads us to marvel, to give thanks, to be generous. Contemplating the meek, humble, and merciful Heart of Jesus invites us to rest in Him, to abandon ourselves in Him, to let our own heart beat with love together with Him, casting ourselves into a complete surrender like his. It moves us to evangelize, to give away that same priceless gift without recompense of any kind. “Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give” (Matthew 10:8)
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
Day 6 – June 7, 2021
The Heart of Christ the Apostle is contemplative in evangelization
The heart does not produce blood, but delivers the blood it receives, and if it does not expand first in order to be filled, it cannot give anything. Just so the apostle of the Kingdom must be “united to the vine” (see John 15:1-8) to speak of what he has “seen, heard, and felt” (see John 1:1). Jesus Christ does not proclaim himself. He is the Apostle of the Father, and through his humanity he makes palpable the mystery of the love of the Trinitarian God. If one does not know the One whom they seek to transmit, they only proclaim themselves. Only by learning to be with Him and in Him can we go out and speak in His Name.
Every true act of evangelization is carried out in a contemplative spirit. We need to contemplate the people around us and the circumstances of the world with the gaze of Christ and with the feelings of his Sacred Heart, to see everything as he sees it and thus discover what he is doing and how he wants to work through us.
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
Day 7 – June 8, 2021
The Heart of Christ the Apostle is evangelizing in contemplation
Just as the heart has to give up all the blood it receives because it is unable to just keep it contained for itself, an apostle of the Kingdom cannot stay in contemplation alone, they have to act. Contemplating human beings wounded by sin, God goes out to meet them by assuming his own humanity and offering his life for them. Contemplating the crowd that did not have food to eat, Jesus felt compassion and multiplied five loaves and two fish until what he provided left them satisfied. The heart of Christ the Apostle looks at us, knows us, welcomes us, and calls us as the Good Shepherd of the Gospel, not content with giving his life for us on the cross, he remains with us in the Eucharist, gives us his Mother, and sends the Holy Spirit to act in us as a torrent of living water. Still today, he gives all of these to us to continue to knock on our door: he gives us the gift of devotion to his Sacred Heart, to Divine Mercy.
Those who truly contemplate, evangelize, and if they do not do so they cease to be contemplative, because this Life that is present in the soul agonizes and does not develop when it cannot express itself in the gift of self to others. Looking at the pierced Heart of Christ, each one person experiences the gift of gratutitous love, and that experience cannot be hidden or contained. Like St. Paul, the need to exclaim “We are impelled by the love of Christ” springs from the depths of the soul (see 2Cor 5:14) as well as “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel!” (see 1Cor 9:16).
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
Day 8 – June 9, 2021
Living with a heart that’s in love
The heart is the symbol and place of love. The Sacred Heart of Jesus burns with love for humanity, and loves us with a passionate, faithful, magnanimous, creative love. This loving heart yearns for us to love Him and let him love through us so that in him we may find true life and fulfillment in love.
To love with a heart like Christ’s is to be aware of our fragility redeemed by his mercy. The experience of being weak but also being alive because of love introduces us to the Easter wisdom of dying in order to live and give life. The experience of discovering that God “makes all things new” (see Acts 21:5) leads us to live with a heart that is in love. This is the Love that never stops making us good Samaritans who go out to meet the pressing needs of our neighbor. Christ’s fidelity, his constant forgiveness, is what keeps alive in us the certainty of knowing “in whom we have placed our hope” (see 2Tim 1:12). This leads us to face the challenges of life with strength, putting our whole being into our work and offering our own poverty and fragility, because our confidence is not in ourselves, but in him.
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
Day 9 – June 10, 2021
The Heart of Jesus Is Alive
Christ is alive, loving and acting in us now, through his Spirit, to bring us to the Father. He is alive, acting and loving in service of others and the world. We want to be contemplative and evangelizing so we can be more and more in harmony with Him, accepting his love, perceiving his action, discovering the flashes of his light in us and around us, discovering the darkness where he wants to shine brighter, and lending him our whole being so that he may love and act through us.
Prayer
Christ Jesus, give us the grace of experiencing the strength of your love. Help us to live within your Sacred Heart so that by remaining united to you and imbued with your feelings, your way of seeing and acting, we can synchronize our heartbeats with yours and you may live in us and through us. Amen.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Give me an apostle’s heart like yours.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Help me live within your Heart.
Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Your Kingdom Come!
