The Sacred Heart Novitiate: A School of Love

Traditionally, June is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a particularly special devotion for Nashville Dominicans. In 1883, Father James Sheridan, O.P., dedicated our novitiate to the Sacred Heart. In the novitiate, our community’s youngest members learn to be deeply rooted in the burning love of Jesus, passionately aflame for all.

The beloved image shows one of Christ’s hands pointing to His flaming heart with the other invitingly outstretched. It is as if He were saying, “Behold this heart…” In the novitiate, the Lord invites the young sisters to grow in a “school of love,” where lessons are not limited to those in a classroom but learned in the daily living in community as St. Cecilia Dominicans, lessons that continue beyond the sisters' first four years.

Pope St. John Paul II once wrote that in the twenty-first century, man “needs Christ’s Heart to know God and to know himself.”¹ Contemplating His Sacred Heart reveals Christ and His love but also unveils to each sister who she is and who she is called to be. Exhorted by St. Catherine of Siena to “enter the cell of self-knowledge and be purified of the self-centeredness which extinguishes charity”², her introspection is not mere naval gazing but the purifying and flourishing of her humanity toward greater freedom, humility, and integrity.

Through her time in the Sacred Heart Novitiate, the sister prepares for God’s gift of a new spirit, a new heart of flesh,³ that is, the gift of loving all with the expansive love of a consecrated woman. She learns the primacy of “being” over “doing,” discovering that “when we seek Him, He has sought us first: He is always before us, He waits to receive us in His heart, in His love.”⁴ Jesus’ divine charity radiates from His human flesh, revealing how we are also to love through our humanity. As Mother Marie William MacGregor once wrote, “May God give each of us courage to be, not angels, but saints- flesh and blood saints!”