His Sacred Heart
I Thomas the hermit (aka Thomas Magner), upon founding the group The Humble Holy Laity, was left wondering how do I teach people how to do contemplative prayer over the internet. I knew that meditation was helpful to people learning how to pray, That focusing on a single thing had the effect of quieting the mind. And that silencing the rush of thoughts in the mind was helpful for people to focus upon God.
But there was no Catholic image that would fulfill this requirement, I had actually been thinking about it for years and I had never found such an image. Even the single focus of the exposed Blessed Sacrament would not work. Because the impact of The presence of Christ is so strong, It Causes a very scattered focus, an oversaturated experience. But I continued to look. Then, It dawned on me, and I don’t know if God sent an angel or inspired my thoughts, but eureka the Sacred heart was just such an image. It came to me the Catholic image that I had been looking for. And then I knew that the Sacred Heart could be that one focus. I knew I could teach the laity how to do contemplative prayer. A person could focus on Jesus’s Heart as a single focus. And so I planned to teach contemplative prayer in this way. But nothing prepared me for what happened next.
I scheduled in the Facebook group an online class to teach contemplative prayer. I taught the class through Facebook messenger. We did it through a chat room by sending text, and only one person showed up. And being the only one there, she was pretty shy. Feeling disappointed, I Reminding myself that sometimes God works through small beginnings. Besides, I had not yet proved myself as a teacher of prayer. The very fact that people had followed me over from YouTube to Facebook was enough of a victory, so I proceeded to Teach. But my first student was hesitant to be my first victim. But happily, she Responded to the message I sent and returned it, this is all through text, and I began to teach. And this is what happened. At first, I didn’t teach her through the sacred heart. I think I gave her a passage of scripture to repeat. I don’t precisely recall what exercise I gave her to do, But She had no success, and then I began to ask her some questions And began to think she was a visual person. Some people are affected more by what they see than by words. So I asked her to focus on the heart of Jesus. And she tried it for a few minutes, And then began to relate that she felt touched by God. I sensed in the Holy Spirit that she had experienced a fairly deep level of contemplative prayer. It was miraculous.
Here is the Acct of the woman who was the First to do Sacred Heart Contemplation.
The man was Thomas the hermit and I had responded to his Facebook post to learn contemplative prayer via an online class. He was teaching a second class on Saturday, but I had chosen the first session.
“OH NO, I’m the only one here!” I said to myself that Friday evening. The chatroom was empty.
To the disappointment of my teacher, I was his sole student. To my embarrassment, I was alone, with nowhere to hide.
The first lesson was how to lessen distractions during prayer, how to silence my mind so my focus would be on God: NO success at all and I could feel a wave of anxiety flow through me. My mind was a hummingbird flitting from one thought to the next. Since I could not focus on a scriptural text that he read, as the words themselves created interior noise for me, Thomas tried another tactic. Finding out that I had a strong visual modality, Thomas told me to think of just one image, that of the Sacred Heart of Jesus…only His heart, nothing else.
When I shifted my mind to form a picture of the image, my scattered thoughts began to lessen and my mind began to quiet, but not totally. After several minutes had elapsed, Thomas asked me what I saw and I gave the stereotypical description of the image. Then he said, “Are you feeling anything?” Without thinking, I blurted out, “that I am loved.” THAT I AM LOVED…where did those words come from? I didn’t feel any emotion.
Right after the session ended, and for two successive days, whenever I thought of “that I am loved”, an exquisitely painful rush of tears from deep within overcame me, so intense that it felt totally uncontrollable.
The understanding of myself as beloved by God awakened in me a powerful call to prayer and a response to lead a virtue-driven life, to pursue holiness, to save souls, and ultimately, to reach a closer union with the Source of all Love. This was my beginning, my calling, my first encounter with the Sacred Heart.
With Thomas as God’s instrument, the Apostle of Lay Contemplatives, God is leading me/us into the unfathomable depths of contemplative prayer, the gateway to the splendor of His Eternal Presence.
Since the first class, I taught others how to focus on the Sacred Heart, And those first results were very outstanding. Many Facebook group members experienced imaginative visions, While focusing on the Sacred heart for the first time. What is an imaginative vision? An imaginative vision is not a purely supernatural vision but rather the mind reacting to the workings of God in the person. In other words, the mind not knowing what is happening to it because of God working in it, Produces a picture. I was getting upset at my students because I told them only to imagine the Sacred Heart; at best, I expected that people would meditate and learn how to get quiet, as the contemplative prayer experience would slowly open up to them. Not a powerful outpouring of God’s grace that was causing people to report these visions that spoke of God’s blessing them. The results were not what I was expecting at all; God had orchestrated a situation showing me the Sacred Heart was an excellent focus for Contemplative prayer. Without telling me that it was going to Bless people beyond my expectations. That is how the Sacred Heart became the center of our Contemplative prayer experience.