A Benedictine Monk, In Sinu Jesu.
Written by an anonymous Benedictine Monk, In Sinu Jesu, When Heart Speaks to Heart: The Journal of A Priest at Prayer, is a supernatural book. In the future it will have a rightful place alongside The Dialogue of Catherine of Siena and The Imitation of Christ as a devotional work of unique power and beauty, coming providentially to the Catholic Church at a time of deep crisis.
At the foot of the cross, stood Saint John, the Beloved Disciple. Gazing upon the Son of God in His passion, he would, like no other Apostle, lay bear with his gospel the Love beating eternally within the Divine Heart. In Sinu Jesu is an ear upon this Heart in the stillness of Eucharistic adoration. Seeking reparation for the many among his brethren who have fallen, the exchange that unfolds between this one priest at prayer and the “King of Love” are words of guidance, healing, and purification for all believers.
Adoration, from the Latin adoratio, means “to give homage or worship to someone or something.” We adore in prayer the One whom we love, who in the impenetrable mystery of His merciful Will restores to the human race the gift of Divine Life by His sacrificial death. For those who celebrate themselves, clinging haughtily to their vices, adoration is not present, since a heart that is not handed over to God in attentiveness, cannot serve.
In his great hymn, Adoro Te Devote, St. Thomas Aquinas sings, “Prostrate, I adore Thee Deity unseen, Who Thy glory hidest neath these shadows mean; Lo, to Thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed, tranced as it beholds Thee, shrined within the cloud.”
We are living in a time of Church history when many fundamental beliefs of the Catholic Christian faith and its anthropology are openly challenged, even by Church leaders. Concern for the wholeness and rational nature of the faith as a worldview is blindly compromised as the truth that doctrine precedes praxis is forgotten. The teachings of the Church, and Divine Revelation and natural law from which they stem, may exceed in important respects the human intellect, but they are not intrinsically absurd. They are thinkable and exist within an intelligible framework. From these teachings flow the moral discipline of the faith and its coherent unity as a truthful picture of the human condition.
The devastating blow inflicted on the Church is largely due to a refusal to surrender to the story of a sinful humanity in need of redemption, contemplated over centuries of time. Media sentiments are taken-up unreflectively by laity and clergy alike, while theologians allow Christianity’s cultured despisers to dictate the conversation. Violence and depravity flourish because the necessity for humility before the Mystery of God has been abandoned for a do-as-you-please life.
“My Heart will beat in yours and yours in Mine. This is the union to which I am leading you. This is the ultimate meaning of your passage on earth.”
