Sometimes I feel that there is a huge hole in my heart that nothing on earth could ever fill. Not wealth, not power, not fame, not even the love of a special person. This hole is so huge I could easily fall within in. Many times, in the course of daily life, I somehow forget. But when I remember, what terrible pain is there! What hunger and what emptiness. I have a thirst within me not even all the oceans of the world could possibly fill.

I’m reminded of what St. Teresa of the Andes told her father once:

“I wanted to be happy and searched for happiness everywhere. I dreamed of being very rich, but I saw that over night rich people can become poor. And even if at times it doesn’t happen, one sees that on the one hand riches abound, and on the other hand, people are overwhelmed by poverty of affection and unity. I’ve thought of happiness in the affection of a perfect young man, but the very idea that some day he might love me with less enthusiasm or that he could die, leaving me alone in the struggles of life, makes me reject the idea that by marrying I’ll be happy. No. This doesn’t satisfy me. For me, happiness is not found there. Where, then, I ask myself, is it to be found? Then I understood that I hadn’t been born for earthly things but for eternal ones. Why go on denying this fact any longer? Only in God has my heart found its rest. With God my soul found itself fully satisfied, so that I desire nothing in this world but to belong to Him completely.” (St. Teresa of the Andes to her father, Letter 73)

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. So where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his children and his livestock?”
Jesus answered her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
– John 4:10-14, WEB-BE

When you are beginning to be scrupulous again, remember what sin is really all about. Sin is not a technicality. Sin is not a transgression against a whimsical rule set by a tyrant. Sin is something that violates our nature to love. Sin is something we do that creates a wound not only upon the soul of the one we transgress but also and more so upon our own soul. When we sin like that, let us ask for help from Him who has redeemed us by His wounds of love. Let us ask for forgiveness, and then let us trust Him to be who He is- a compassionate, just and merciful God.

So many images of Jesus depict Him as One who is suffering, as the Lord with a wounded heart. Is this not the image of the Sacred Heart? There were times when I wondered why it should be like this. Why couldn’t He just be a Lord of joy? After all, that’s what I also want – to be happy.

But then I’ve realized that it was the way Jesus chose so that He could reach me. Have you ever noticed how lonely people find it hard to open up to those who often tell them to cheer up and just be happy like them?

Lonely people find it easier to approach those to whom they can relate to, people who have also experienced heartache and pain, people who also know suffering.

I think that’s what Jesus does. To let us know that He Himself has suffered, and that is why we can trust Him to hear the deepest cries of our hearts.

“The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart,
and saves those who have a crushed spirit.”
– Psalm 34:18, WEB-BE