7 Ways to Honor the Sacred Heart of Jesus

“Behold this heart which has so loved men.” – Jesus Christ
“Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, of its very nature, is a worship of the love with which God, through Jesus, loved us, and at the same time, an exercise of our own love by which we are related to God and to other men.” – Pope Pius XII
At the very center of Christianity is love. Love is the whole message, the whole law. Now, I don’t mean love in the sense of quickly passing infatuation or sexual attraction, two mistaken definitions of our confused culture, but rather sacrificial self-giving. In its essence, love is nothing more than laying down your life for the good of another.
The deeper we grow in the Catholic and Apostolic faith, the more we realize that the gospel is centered not so much in our love for God, but in God’s love for us. Holy Church has dedicated the month of June to a devotion that is designed to remind us of the depth of God’s passionate love for his creatures: devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
In the burning and wounded Sacred Heart, we see that God’s heart is consumed with love for us—so much so that he was willing to suffer and die for us in the most gruesome manner. The Sacred Heart teaches us that true love is always costly, but that it always gives life.
There is much more that can be said about devotion to the Sacred Heart, but today I want to focus on 7 ways we can honor it.
1. Consecration – In mediating on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we realize the depth of God’s sacrificial love for us. Jesus gave himself to us completely on the Cross to prove his love for us, and he continues to do so every day in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. When we receive the Eucharist, we receive