Sometimes we forget that prayer can be as simple as using our imagination to picture Jesus standing in front of us, inviting us into his deep and abiding love. This simple exercise can increase the love we have for God, as well as invite him to speak to our soul.
In the 19th-century book Meditations on the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, there are printed several inspiring meditations that help form our imaginations and let us see Jesus in a new light.
For example, one of them focuses on Jesus’ love for us as revealed in his Heart.
Imagine you see Jesus Christ in the most holy Sacrament, opening His divine breast, and showing you His Heart as on a throne of sweetest light and of living fire. Beg of Him to give you a share of that sweet light and of that divine fire, to undeceive and inflame your heart.
With this picture in mind, we can recall those moments in our lives when we had an ardent love of God and try to stir within us those same feelings of love.
Call to mind those days, or at least those hours of your life, when your heart was most inflamed with love of your God. O sweet and yet bitter recollection! What was then wanting to your happiness? Compare the tranquility of your heart then with that which it enjoys at present. Ask pardon for having allowed that holy love for His Heart, the sweetness and peace of which He has formerly made you taste, to be extinguished by your dissipation. Make great, but practical and particular, resolutions to disengage yourself from that which is the special impediment to the increase of divine love in you, and consequently the impediment also to the acquisition and increase of the happiness of your heart even in this life.
Sometimes we forget that Jesus is always offering to us his most precious Heart and that we are the ones who put up barriers to that Heart. As we pray each day, let us recall that image and do what we can to let God’s love flood our soul.
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Ask Jesus to open his heart to you with this prayer