Brussels pilgrimage

Homily preached in the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Brussels 7 December 2007 Here we are in Brussels, in this vast church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotion dear to so many of us at St Saviour’s. As you know, this great church took an extremely long time to build, the first stone being laid in 1905 and the last in 1970- and what events, what dramas had taken place in that time between the start and the finish of this colossal undertaking! It was a very different world in 1970 from that tranquil world of a hundred years ago, a world that was forever swept away in 1914. And not only was the world completely different, but the church, the finished edifice, imposing as it is, came in the end to bear very little resemblance to the first ideas of those who laid out the original foundations- we have ended up with a beautiful and holy place, but it is far from how the people who began the work imagined it would look. I suppose our lives are like that. How surprised we would all be if, when we stood on the threshold of adult life in our teens and first began to imagine what kind of life we might like to fashion for ourselves, we could have done a sort of fast-forward to today, and seen ourselves in our later life- very few of us, I imagine, have been able to stick faithfully to the blueprint we had sketched out at the start of our lives, we have probably had to have a few rethinks, rubbing out a bit here and there which no longer seemed appropriate or possible, having perhaps to demolish a bit that no longer worked or was what we wanted. Probably also a few changes have been forced on us, there have been unexpected developments, surprises, shocks perhaps, that we have had to muddle through as best we can and try to make something of. But in the end, although we are not exactly- or not at all- what we thought we might be, I imagine that on a good day we can look at ourselves with something like approval and say with the poet Tennyson “That which we are, we are”. But actually, of course, it can only be a good thing that we have not been trapped in a rigid plan, a self-centred vision of ourselves that dates from a time before we had acquired much in the way of maturity. Change is growth, and in the changes of our lives we will have grown- Cardinal Newman, whom I rarely quote because I don’t really get on with him, said “To live is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often”. We are all, as Christians, trying to align our lives ever more closely to the life of Our Lord, and that is a lifelong task that we are engaged in, and it requires a readiness to be constantly making a few adjustments to the plans, to be doing that fine tuning of our souls. We need to develop a habit of introspection- not an unhealthy obsession with ourselves, but a habit of reflecting prayerfully on our daily lives, a habit that will of course inevitably involve us coming frequently to lay our findings before Our Lord in the Sacrament of Confession, and entrusting ourselves, and the lives we are trying to make and make sense of, to Our Lord’s infinite mercy, to his Sacred Heart. If we are adapting ourselves little by little to Our Lord, as we come to appreciate more and more what he wants us to be, what we could be at our best, then our lives will be what this great church was for so many years, a work in progress. St Philip, whom I do get on with, used to say “nulla dies sine linea”, no day without a touch- and so, if we have had a retouch here and there, a rethink now and then, it may be, please God, that at the end of our earthly lives we shall realise that what we have achieved with our lives is a magnificent edifice, a Shrine, like this, where the Sacred Heart of Jesus is at home. Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, Touch our hearts, and make them like thine own. Amen.