One sunny Saturday when our firstborn was still in the stroller, we were on a walk through Brookland, our neighborhood at the time—and the Washington D.C. enclave near Catholic University sometimes affectionately called “little Rome”—and came upon a yard sale.

In a yard filled with dusty bric-a-brac, both of us were immediately drawn to a framed image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, angled against an old chair in the high grass. “Five dollars and it’s yours!” the owner said.

“Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” the print declares at the top. Beneath the image of Jesus are the words of a family’s consecration—“We consecrate to Thee, O Jesus of love, the trials and joys and all the happiness of our family life…” After the consecration, beneath a line that reads “SIGNED,” six elegantly penned names of the Schnell family are written: Andrew, Alois, Edwin, Rosa, Victor, and Loretta. They signed it together and dated it: June 7, 1918. 

Since that summer day in Brookland, the Schnell and Johnson family’s Sacred Heart image and consecration has served as a focal point in our home. And like a way station on our own family’s pilgrimage, it has shown us different truths about Jesus over the past two decades.

To little fanfare, Pope Francis recently released an inspiring encyclical—Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us”)—which like the Schnell’s quiet act of devotion, has the capacity to bless your family in untold ways. Like a treasure tucked behind overgrown grass, waiting for you to find it amidst the world’s vast junk sale, Dilexit Nos may be your family’s on-ramp to a kind of “June 7^th moment” like the Schnells’.

Everyone is so busy. And perhaps you won’t find your two hours to read Dilexit Nos until a retreat day or family vacation next summer. Like us, you may find yourself underlining every other sentence. But in the meantime, consider choosing one of these proposed “action items” for your family:

• Begin by rediscovering your own heart. “We can’t give what we don’t have,” goes the old saying. In relentless and probing passages, Pope Francis challenges us to “rediscover the importance of the heart” in our “age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why” (2). The heart, he writes, “puts me in communion with other people” (14). “Intimacy is the proper activity and domain of the heart” (12), he writes, citing Dostoevsky. As we look to our homes—our Trinity House—as places of ever-deepening communion, we first need to rediscover our own heart.

• Place a Sacred Heart image in your home. Reflecting on the many challenges besetting all of us, Pope Francis writes, “This leads me to propose to the whole Church renewed reflection on the love of Christ represented in his Sacred Heart. For there we find the whole Gospel…” (89). Like the Schnell family’s beautiful framed print, your family can begin or deepen a journey to His Sacred Heart by investing in a visual reminder for your home.

• Consecrate your family to the Sacred Heart. Pope Francis cites Pope Leo XII, “Since there is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and the express image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ that moves us to love one another, it is fit and proper that we should consecrate ourselves to his most Sacred Heart…” (Annum Sacrum). In a simple prayer together, our family also consecrated ourselves to the Sacred Heart. Here (at EWTN) is one of many available prayers.

• Beg God to help you put your heart back into the center of your daily family life. In challenges that directly confront our “hectic pace…bombarded by technology, lacking the patience needed,” Pope Francis invites us to “speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart” (11). We all go through seasons in marriage and family life when we feel that we’re just going through the motions, overwhelmed and exhausted. But we can’t stay there. Invite Jesus to renew His love in your heart.

• Learn from Mary how to ponder and treasure love in your heart. Pope Francis points to how, without Christ, our own hearts are often weighed down by “bad habits, compulsions, attachments, weak faith, vain goals,” and “our actual sins” and “failure of our hearts to respond to the Lord’s love and his plan for our lives.” Of Mary, “who saw things with the heart,” Pope Francis writes, “She was able to dialogue with the things she experienced by pondering them in her heart, treasuring their memory and viewing them in a greater perspective” (19).
  
  
• Practice compunction and reparation. In language evocative of the Eastern Church Fathers, Pope Francis invites us to weep for our sins, to the “purification of tears” that “leaves us more desirous of God and less obsessed with ourselves” (158). Amen! And in powerful reflection on “reparation”—the word appears 18 times in Dilexit—he invites us to accept the areas of suffering in our lives, finding in these hardships “room for our free cooperation with his heart” (193). He writes, “[R]eparation can be understood as our removal of the obstacles we place before the expansion of Christ’s love in the world by our lack of trust, gratitude and self-sacrifice” (194).

• Connect the Sacred Heart to your “Trinity House.” Throughout Dilexit, Pope Francis invites us to glimpse the “Trinitarian dimension”: He writes, “We give glory to the Father ‘through’ Christ, ‘with’ Christ, and ‘in’ Christ…’[T]he Savior’s heart invites us to return to the Father’s love, which is the source of every authentic love.’ This is precisely what the Holy Spirit, who comes to us through the heart of Christ, seeks to nurture in our heart” (77). In other words, your family’s devotion to the Sacred Heart can be an accessible entry-point to living out your family’s identity as a “communion of persons, a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit” (Catechism, 2205).

• Go forth! The all-consuming love of God that we encounter in the Sacred Heart cannot stop at “personal spiritual experience,” but must press forward in “communal missionary commitment” (91). In a pivotal passage, the pope writes, “As we contemplate the Sacred Heart, mission becomes a matter of love. For the greatest danger in mission is that, amid all the things we say and do, we fail to bring about a joyful encounter with the love of Christ who embraces us and saves us” (208).

At a yard sale on a sunny summer day, we encountered the Sacred Heart of Jesus and stepped further into the vast communion of men, women and families who have drawn strength and confidence from this devotion.

With the treasure of Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis has given us all a stunning gift. He has invited us—our own hearts, our marriages, our families—into the hushed silence of awe and gratitude that comes when we kneel before the pierced heart of Jesus and step into “a direct relationship with Christ, a dwelling in his heart” (108).

“O Jesus, may all of us in paradise find again our family united in Thy Sacred Heart” (conclusion of the Schnell family’s consecration on June 7, 1918).