75 Being Faithful to Jesus Like St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

“The Sacred Heart Devotion as told by St. Margaret Mary is recognizing that because Jesus became a true man, has a human heart and with that human heart, He loves with a Divine Love.”

SR. EMILY BEATA MARSH

WHO IS SR. EMILY BEATA MARSH?

Sr Emily Beata is originally from Buffalo, NY, and is a member of the Daughters of St. Paul, a community of religious Sisters dedicated to the mission of communicating the Gospel using all forms of media. She entered the Daughters in 2007, and has served in editorial, parish evangelization, the Daughters’ bookstores, and writing. She currently serves in the community’s vocation office in Alexandria, VA, working with young women discerning a vocation to religious life.

You can reach out to her on Twitter: @SrEmilyBeata or the Daughters of St Paul: @DaughterStPaul. You can also visit their website www.daughtersofstpaul.com or www.pauline.org.

Being Faithful to Jesus Like St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

In this episode, Sister Emily Beata Marsh tells us about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. She explains:
-Who was St. Margaret and her early life? What was the turning point in her life?
-How did this Devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus come about?
-How she stayed faithful to Jesus despite the difficulties in her life.
-What can we learn or how can we emulate this wonderful saint?

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque & The Sacred Heart

June 11th is the feast of the Sacred Heart. This is the first time I did the novena. Even though our altar has the Sacred Heart and we attend mass every First Friday.

I looked for someone who had researched and written about it. I found a book on St. Margaret Mary that was written by Sr. Emily Beata. Soon I wrote to her and she asked her superiors, to whom I’m so grateful because they allowed her to do this episode.

Our 75th episode is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Woohoo!!!! I also apologize for all the birds crying in my neck of the woods. You hear all these birds that were screeching during this recording. I’m sorry. That was just something beyond my control.

During this podcast, I love how Sr. Emily explains that God loves us with a divine love. Even in the ordinary mundane moments of our life God loves us and wants us to take everything to him. Many of you know I’ve been reading the diary of Sr. Faustina and I found so many similarities with St. Margaret Mary’s life.

Despite their circumstances, they clung to God. While I on the other hand get mad at Jesus when things don’t go according to my plan. Sr. Emily also encourages everyone to believe in their own inner experiences. I was so interested in this part because Jesus is intimate with us in so many different ways.

He is with us and speaks to us. Our walk is different and despite that she says He is always inviting us to draw deeper to him. (James 4:8)

WHAT IS THE SACRED HEART DEVOTION?

This is the altar at my home. Forgive the blurry picture, but in our Diocese, it is kind of a requirement at house blessing to have the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

The Two Elements of Devotion to the Sacred Heart as told to St. Margaret Mary are Consecration & Reparation. The Devotion includes:

1.Receiving Communion frequently
2.First Fridays: going to Confession and receiving the Eucharist on the first Friday of each month for nine consecutive months. Many parishes will offer public First Friday devotions; if they do, you must perform First Fridays publicly. If it isn’t so offered in your parish, you can do this privately, going to Confession, receiving the Eucharist, and offering your prayers for the intention of the Holy Father.
3.Holy Hour: Eucharistic Adoration for one hour on Thursdays. (“Could you not watch one hour with me?”) Holy Hour can be made alone or as part of a group with formal prayers.
4.Celebrating of the Feast of the Sacred Heart

Jesus Made Twelve Promises to Those Who Hold a True Devotion to His Sacred Heart:

1. I will give them all the graces necessary in their state of life.
2. I will give peace in their families and will unite families that are divided.
3. He will console them in all their troubles.
4. I will be their refuge during life and above all in death.
5. I will bestow the blessings of Heaven on all their enterprises.
6. Sinners shall find in my Heart the source and infinite ocean of mercy.
7. Tepid souls shall become fervent.
8. Fervent souls shall rise quickly to great perfection.
9. I will bless those places wherein the image of My Heart shall be exposed and honored and will imprint My love on the hearts of those who would wear this image on their person. Will also destroy in them all disordered movements.
10. I will give to priests who are animated by a tender devotion to my Divine Heart the gift of touching the most hardened hearts.
11. Those who promote this devotion shall have their names written in my Heart, never to be effaced.
12. I promise you in the excessive mercy of my Heart that my all-powerful love will grant to all those who communicate(Receive Holy Communion) on the First Friday in nine consecutive months, the grace of final penitence: they will not die in my disgrace, nor without receiving their Sacraments. My Divine Heart shall be their safe refuge in this last moment.

ENJOYED THIS PODCAST?

We hope you enjoyed this podcast. Check out our podcasts on the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and Teaching Faith. Finally, if you liked this podcast, like us, leave us a comment and share our episodes on social media with those who may benefit from it. If there is a particular saint that you would like to hear about us, tell us and we’ll add him or her to our future episodes.

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Episode Transcript

Pamela: So welcome to a new episode of “The Christian Circle” podcast. Today, we have a new guest and that is Sister Emily Beata Marsh. And she’s gonna talk to us about the Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. And the reason why we’re talking about her this month is because of the Feast of the Sacred Heart.

So sister Emily, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your ministry?

Emily: So my name is Sister Emily Beata. I am a member of the Daughters of St. Paul, a religious congregation. And our mission is to proclaim the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ through the media. So that includes…we were founded about 100 years ago. Actually, we just celebrated our 106 birthday a couple days ago. And at the time the media included mostly print materials, so books and newspapers and magazines, but as things developed and came along, things like radio or video and movies, cinema, and then now so many means with the internet digital and social media. And our sisters are involved in all of these things to help people know Jesus better. Whether that’s Catholics who already, maybe are already baptized, already go to church and we want to help them deepen their faith or people who don’t really know God at all.

I mean we encounter people in our book and media centers and in our online ministry who are really questioning and just wanna know, okay, what is this all about? And we hope that our presence in the media will help people to know God.

Know who God is, know His love for them.

So that’s what we do. I personally, I work in our vocation office, but that means I help young women who are discerning a call to be a…who wanna know more about religious life, about sisters in general. And also about our community, the Daughters of St. Paul.

Pamela: You actually wrote a book about St. Margaret Mary, right. And the sacred heart of Jesus in your encounter, the same series of books.

So who is St. Margaret and what was her early life like?

Emily: So, yeah, this is a series of books that we have for children to encounter the saints, to meet the saints, and to sort of come to know who they are and to be able to imitate them as well. So I, yeah, I was blessed to be able to write the book on St. Margaret Mary. I don’t know, you know, how much you know about her, but she grew up in France in the 17th century, and she had actually kind of a hard childhood. Her father died when she was young. She had several brothers but she had…went through an illness when she was a child. And then her mother went through very serious illness when Margaret Mary was a child. So yeah, so a lot of things that didn’t make her childhood necessarily easy. Because her father died, they lived with relatives.

And you know, sometimes you read accounts of her life and it’s a little bit like a sort of like a Cinderella story. Like the in-laws didn’t like Margaret Mary and her mother very much, there was a lot of suffering there in the family.

But despite that Margaret Mary grew up very close to her family and very close to God.

So I think she was graced kind of from a young age, with this desire to know God and to be close to Him. And she really looked forward to receiving the sacraments. The Sacrament of the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Confirmation and yeah. And in participating in the life of the parish. So there’s lots of stories from when she was growing up of her, she and her mother visiting the parish priest and hosting priests, even at their home that were getting missions at the parish. So yeah, I would say in general, she grew up, you know, very close to her family, very close to her mother, and then just a special desire to kinda find out how to build for her life.

Pamela: Well, it was said that she was very particular even at a very young age, as a child, as little as nine, to spend a lot of hours with the blessed sacrament, right?

Emily: Yeah. She prayed a lot. And I think when she, sometimes in the church and then when she couldn’t be in the church she loved to pray in nature. So to be outside, you know, after she finished her chores, whatever she was supposed to do, to be outside and just to kind of take in the presence of God. So, yeah. Yeah. She definitely received that special grace of just desiring to be close to God and finding Him, you know, in all places.

Pamela: So with saints, usually there is something there’s like a turning point in their life. There’s something that just sparks, you know, their mission and spurs them on.

So what is the turning point in St. Margaret Mary’s life?

Emily: Yeah, I think there’s actually two for Margaret Mary. It’s really interesting because she’s not one of those saints that, you know, lived a wild childhood and then had this big conversion, you know, like our patron St. Paul that we remember this month also, not, you know, not like that. She was always…always had this desire to be close to God, but I think there were a couple of turning points for her that just led her even deeper.

So it kind of goes to show you that no matter how close you are to God, God can always take you deeper. So the first turning point for her was she entered the convent. She entered the Order of the Visitation in France, and that was it was a big moment for her. I think it showed her just how much God was directing her life, you know, leading her to the right order of sisters to enter, but also her family kind of opposed it a little bit.

She had to sort of convince them that this really was God’s will for life, her mother was, you know, was afraid that she would never see Margaret again and really broken up about that.

And, her brothers kind of felt like, because the Order of the Visitation was relatively new at that point. You know, now it’s like 400 years old, but, at that point, it was only, you know, 50 or 60 years old. And they thought, well, we don’t know anything about this new order. Why don’t you enter something that’s already established? And we know, you know, how your life will go. So she had to overcome a little bit of that. And I think that was a big turning point for her just realizing how God was directing her life and would help her, you know, to overcome those challenges.

And then I think the other big turning point obviously would be when as a sister…and I don’t think she had it necessarily easy at the convent.

She had some opposition to overcome there as well.

But was very happy, you know, happy to have found her vocation. Happy to be so close to God and to be living a spiritual life, so close to Him. But as a sister she saw when she had the vision of the sacred heart of Jesus, I think that was the other major thing for her that kind of helped her discover, you know, her vocation within a vocation if you will, her calling within her calling. That not only was she called to the religious life called to be a visitation nun, but Jesus wanted to use her to reveal the love of his sacred heart to the world. And that, you know, that was a whole journey for her. But yeah, it’s kind of those two moments, I think were very pivotal for her life and teach us a lot as well.

Pamela: So how did this devotion of the sacred heart of Jesus come about? Because it was only recognized nearly 75 years after her death and most people within the church itself, weren’t very pleased with all of this. Initially, in fact, her own superior was very much against this.

How did this devotion of the sacred heart start and what is the devotion of the sacred heart of Jesus?

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense if you think about it, you know, if there were a sister in my community who started to, you know, was saying that she was having visions of some aspect of Jesus, it would take a little convincing, you know, you don’t, I think naturally we don’t automatically believe that. Right? But so, yeah, so she did encounter some opposition from her superiors and from the other sisters in her community, but basically, the devotion to the sacred heart came to its full revelation in these visions of Jesus to Margaret Mary.

But it’s also very rooted in the whole life of Jesus and in the biblical tradition because we have the line from the gospels after Jesus died on the cross, his heart was pierced by the soldier’s lance. So we have right from the very beginning, the heart of Jesus just pouring out his love for us, but it wasn’t so articulated or expressed, right.

Even though in the early interpretation, definitely in the time of Margaret Mary, the five wounds of Christ were very venerated and always on a Friday, we venerate the cross to remember the great love of Jesus who sacrificed himself for us on the cross and the wounds of Christ symbolize his love for us.

But yeah, but Jesus wanted to reveal in a really special way, the love of his sacred heart to Margaret Mary. And he gave her this condition to then communicate it to her professor and her community and from there out to the whole world. Right. So I’m sure it was overwhelming for Margaret Mary at times, but she did take it to her confessor, who was also, he had a nice name, Claude de la Colombiere and he was very instrumental in, you know, writing it down and in communicating it to the proper church authorities and all of that.

But yeah, basically the devotion to the sacred heart is recognizing that Jesus because he became a true man, has a human heart. And with that heart, he loves with a divine love. So we have a God with a human heart who loves us infinitely. So that’s kind of the mystery of the sacred heart. And that’s what we’re venerating and worshipping when we pray to the sacred heart.

But Jesus in his visions, in the appearances to Margaret Mary just revealed aspects of his sacred heart over and over to her.

So she saw Him, you know, with the image of his sacred heart. In one vision, she, Jesus invited her to put her head on his sacred heart, so to kinda feel the beating of his sacred heart and then also revealed the devotion of the nine first Fridays which is something that’s still practiced today, we are going to mass and communion and confession on nine first Fridays in a row and promises special graces, triple sacred heart to those who carry that out. Yeah. I don’t know if there is anything more you’d like me to, there’s so much to say about the devotion of the sacred heart and Margaret Mary’s role, but yeah, that’s kind of the basis.

Pamela: So I think they also included doing a holy hour, which I think became very popular during her time as well. Doing a holy hour to dwell on the Agony of Jesus in the garden and…

Emily: Yes.

Pamela: Yeah. And I don’t know there, I think there are some other things, but the main thing is the first Friday devotion, right?

Emily: Yes. Yeah. And you’re right about the holy hour. And she would often ask her superior for permission to make that holy hour on Thursday nights.

Kind of like Jesus made it on holy Thursday. Margaret Mary would ask permission to make that holy hour to keep Jesus company in the garden on Thursday nights

. And it’s interesting because sometimes the superiors would give permission and sometimes not and Margaret Mary struggled with that because Jesus was asking this of her, but then her superiors weren’t giving her permission. And Jesus at one point told her that her obedience to superiors was the greatest sacrifice that she could make and the greatest expression of her love for Jesus that she could make. So I think that’s really, really important and really encouraging in the sense of, we might feel like we should be doing something or doing something more in our spiritual life. But as long as we’re being really faithful to what Jesus is calling us in our state of life and in the even sometimes mundane, you know, duties of the day, that’s kind of the greatest sacrifice, the greatest expression of love we can offer to Jesus like Margaret Mary.

Being Faithful

Pamela: Yeah. In a way, it’s similar to what Mother Teresa says, right. God is not calling us to be successful but to be faithful.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I mean, you see that definitely in Margaret Mary’s life, because when I was writing the book, like so many times I had to figure out how to express her… She felt like a failure so many times, you know, and, we’re reading it, you know, 400 years later, I think, wow, this was, Mary was so faithful and so fully and so devoted to our Lord, but she didn’t feel that all the time, you know, she felt like, “Gosh, I can’t do what Jesus is asking me. I’m a failure at being a nun.”

Like, you know, she had all those thoughts kind of running through her head. And that too was very encouraging just the humanity of the saints and of St. Margaret Mary. But yeah, totally like Mother Teresa, not asking for success, you know, even in the case of Margaret Mary, but really for that faithfulness to whatever the day is giving, you know, whether it’s, yeah. You have permission to make this holy hour or no, today you don’t. And just being obedient and faithful to that.

St. Margaret Mary and Her Simplicity

Pamela: And, you know, there’s a line, I think I was reading about her on Wikipedia and they said, oh, her colleagues and everybody else said she was not very skillful at any of the tasks that she was assigned, so.

Emily: Yeah, they put her in formation for a while. She was with the novices. I think she was pretty okay at that. But that she was in the infirmary for a while and supposed to be helping, you know, with the sisters who weren’t well, and she didn’t do very well at that and she couldn’t really cook and yeah.

Pamela: And it’s funny because 400 years later she’s a canonized Saint and these things are still remembered.

Emily: It was because of her faithfulness and her… I guess she really teaches us to like trust in our experience of God, because she could have kind of like blown that off, you know, that prayer experience where she actually saw Jesus. And he asked her, you know, to take this to your confessor and this devotion is… you know, I want people to know how much I love them. But because she was faithful to that, like we can know, you know, more about God’s love than we did before.

The Love of Jesus

Pamela: And another thing is I think if we truly understood the love that Jesus has for us, I think it would change the way we look at the world itself. Right?

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. And Jesus kind of said that in so many words to Margaret Mary, you know, saying over and over again, look at my heart, which loves people so much. And yeah, it has to change the way that you look at the world, the way that you look at yourself and the people around you, for sure.

Pamela: So what can we learn? I mean, there’s so much to learn about her and it would be hard to emulate someone who is so devoted, who is so obedient and from such an early age.

But what can we as ordinary people do, or, you know, learn from this wonderful saint, and be like her?

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, one of the main things that I took away really was to believe in my own experience of God. So Margaret Mary had this experience of God, where she was drawn to Him from an early age. She followed Him to her vocation, and to the convent. And then, you know, to the point of Jesus wanting to reveal his sacred heart to her. She believed in that, and she followed that and she clung onto that with all her strength, even when it got really, really difficult.

Obviously, you know, my path is not gonna be exactly the same, but I think each of us has experiences of God in prayer. And sometimes it can be easy to discount them and to say, well, you know, okay, that was a nice thought or, you know, I don’t know. Sometimes we don’t always quite believe what God is telling us in prayer, or believe what He’s revealing about his love for us.

And I think Margaret Mary taught me to really believe and to cling to what God reveals to me in prayer and to let that direct my life in a certain sense.

And then, yeah, you know, other things just like we talked about just being faithful to her daily duties, you know, we can do that too. We can learn that from her. And I think also, you know, we talked a little bit about her not being like really skilled at a lot of things or sometimes feeling just constantly like a failure, but it’s what she did in that, that I think we can emulate.

And she always went to Jesus. She, you know, when she felt like a failure, when she felt like she couldn’t do something when she didn’t know what to do, she always went to Jesus and then always sought the advice of her confessor and always said the things to her superior too. So, you know, people relate to her.

Everybody has those ups and downs of life and those moments when we feel like, oh, I really messed that up or, just feel like I don’t know what to do in this particular situation or just moments of feeling overwhelmed, you know, if it’s a busy time with the end of the school year and the beginning of summer and it easy to feel like, oh my gosh, there’s so much to do.

But I think bringing all those feelings, confusion, or feeling overwhelmed, bringing that to Jesus, just like Margaret Mary did and maybe, you know, maybe we don’t feel anything too special from him, but just knowing that we can like Margaret Mary kind of put our head on his heart and hear his heartbeat and remember that he loves us. And that that’s the most important thing in our lives.

Pamela: And like, you mentioned, no matter where you are spiritually, God is always drawing you deeper. Right.

Deeper and deeper like St. Margaret Mary

Emily: Yeah, exactly. And for St. Margaret Mary, you know, even starting off very close to God, we can see looking at her life like, oh my gosh, God did so much. And I think if we’re honest and we look at our lives, we can see God doing that with us too. You know, if you look back at your life 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years ago, God has done things in our lives. Right. And we can sort of do Him the favor or pay Him the compliment of really believing what He’s done in our lives.

Pamela: And I think during this time, especially, with all these social media, with all these things clamoring for our retention, we’re slowly losing belief if not becoming lukewarm to the devotion of the sacred heart and to Jesus himself.

Emily: Yeah. It can happen, you know, there’s so many things to divide our attention these days for sure. But I think, yeah, even with all of that, maybe the devotion to the sacred heart is what we need right now, you know, kind of that one thing that sort of focuses us. And it’s an image too, right? It’s the image of the heart with the flame of love.

And that’s something that we can just kind of like, fix our gaze on. When we are feeling divided or, you know, things are calling out for our attention here, there, and everywhere we can sort of close our eyes and just picture that heart that’s beating, that’s loving us. And then when we open our eyes again, you know, we kind of, we’re able to see that heart in all those things that are clamoring for our attention. So yeah. It might be kind of exactly what we need.

Pamela: In India we actually have, like, in every home, it was asked of every home to have the image of the sacred heart and immaculate heart of Mary on the altar. Every altar.

Emily: Yeah. And kind of dedicate the home to the sacred heart too, I think, enthroning the sacred heart.

Pamela: Yeah. Do you have any last words on St. Margaret Mary and the sacred heart of Jesus?

Emily: Yeah, I guess it’s just impressive, you know, to think about a woman 400 years ago, who was a cloistered nun, and, you know, 400 years later, we get to reap the benefits of her faithfulness to Jesus. So I think that’s just inspiring in a sense. You know, people 400 years from now might not remember my name or your name, but certainly, there will be people who have been affected by our lives if we can put into practice that faithfulness to Jesus and that real strong belief in his love.

Yeah, I think also it’s just really beautiful that God raises up saints at the times when they’re really needed. Right. So if you look at history at the time of Margaret Mary there was kind of like a harsh tendency, right? So spiritually speaking, like people were being instructed to like perform these penances and, you know, kind of a harsh view of like how God would judge you at the end of your life.

And instead, God reveals to Margaret Mary that His heart is just longing for His people and really longing to love His people.

And not denying the judgment. Like we need to, we need grace, we need to avoid sin. And we need to remember that we will be judged at the end of our life, but we’ll be judged by a God who became man and took on a human heart for us. So, I think that too, it’s really hopeful for our times when we look around and see, you know, so much confusion and a lot of different crises, we can trust that God is gonna raise up the saints, holy men, and women that we need for our time as well.

Pamela: So thank you so much, Sister Emily, for talking to us about St. Margaret Mary, and the sacred heart devotion. And thank you for also writing the book, because if it wasn’t for the book yeah. You know, it’s so hard to find books on her, and it’s so hard to find people who are alive, who have written these books about her. So thank you so much for agreeing to come on this podcast. Thank you to your superiors as well.

And tell people where they can find you and where they can find your books online.

Emily: Sure. Yeah. And thank you. This is a real delight to speak to you, about a project that I loved doing. People can find me on social media @SrEmilyBeata. They can also find out what our sisters are doing on social media @DaughtersStPaul and our website is daughtersofsaintpaul.com. And the book is on online.org.

Pamela: All right. Thank you so much once again, and we wish you all the best for your ministry.

Emily: Thank you so much. God bless you.