Rome, Italy"Meditation this morning on the Pierced Heart.
Last summer while praying outside a cottage on God's love and my poverty, down floated a leaf with a hole in the middle. To me, it represented a pierced heart. I have it still.
"In prayer today, I felt another dimension to the Pierced Heart of Jesus and myself. It symbolizes emptiness; the hole through which drained the blood and substance of life. It is Kenosis, self-annihilation. Man's/my poverty both as creature and as sinner. 'I am He who is and you are she who is not,' God told Catherine of Siena.
"But by His wounds we are healed. And His wounds are our wounds. By our own wounds as taken up by Him, as lived with and in Him, we are healed. Jesus' Pierced Side echoes the tragic emptiness of my own heart, the nothing at my core. But it also reveals how God as turned my wound into the Fountain of Life in and through Jesus.
"The sluice through which flows the river that gladdens and gives life to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the Church, to me...is that Pierced Side of Jesus which passes through my own pierced side. I give God praise and zeal in my poverty."
(7 years after this was written, Fr. Tomasek physically had his heart pierced by surgery which necessitated removing a sarcoma growing on the inside of his heart and the subsequent grafting of healthy pericardium to the site. His condition was diagnosed on June 19, 2009, The Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the opening day of The Year for Priests, as proclaimed by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.)
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