A Reflection for the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
Find today’s readings here.
The lost I will seek out,
the strayed I will bring back,
the injured I will bind up,
the sick I will heal,
but the sleek and the strong I will destroy,
shepherding them rightly.
Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, died on June 11th. As is the case with the passing of any artist, this unfortunate occasion and its subsequent memorials on social media prompted a large-scale revisiting of his work. Parse through the comments section here to witness some online reminiscing. Or you could go through mine and my friends’ text messages from that day.
Over iMessage in the middle of our workdays we expressed grief for this artist we never knew. We sent links to our favorite tracks, one-upping one another with the obscurity of each deep cut we cherished. Still, through that loving competition, it has been the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, an album ever full of tenderness, that has been playing over and over again these past few weeks.
The second song on the album, “You Still Believe in Me,” is full of amazement with the patience of Wilson’s wife. After a cautious piano arrangement begins the song, Wilson sings in reverence of a relentlessly forgiving love. That humble and precarious piano sound was achieved by plucking the piano’s individual strings with fragile bobby pins (dramatized in the 2014 film Love & Mercy) and has haunted me with its feeling of being small, of approaching an acceptance of a love unfathomably grand.
While not written about the dynamics of a turbulent marriage in the 1960s, today’s first reading involves a love relentless all the same. As God’s mouthpiece, the prophet Ezekiel, line after line, marches us through God’s pastoral promises: The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal.
Between the comfort of God’s work in the Scripture and the reminder of our humanity’s absolute dependence on love in Wilson’s composition, today’s feast of the Sacred Heart feels particularly special to me this year. Walking around with that odd piano sound in my ears I will try to let myself be amazed by the warmth, the love and the mercy God has sowed all around.
I hope you can do the same, wherever you are, no matter the weather. Ezekiel provides us with God’s assurance: I will rescue them from every place where they were scattered when it was cloudy and dark.
