From a Mother’s Heart to the Sacred Heart

This year, May did not feel like flowers.

May felt like motion. Relentless motion.

One particular four-day stretch required an hour-by-hour list just to keep my world from falling apart. I slipped into survival mode.

It was the kind of motion mothers understand: calendars, forms, schedules, clothes, ironing, forgotten details recovered at the last minute, unexpected trips to urgent care, and celebrations that require someone quietly holding everything together behind the scenes.

By month’s end, I realized this was likely the busiest month of my life. When people comment on all that happened, I find myself smiling politely and saying, “I’m still recovering.”

I’m proud. I’m Mom. I’m a really good Mom.

But I also survived.

I dodged literal tornadoes in Central Texas on four hours of sleep to make it to the next event more than 300 miles away while juggling my job in healthcare. That was just one day. I made sure our home remained welcoming in the midst of chaos. I handled details from hundreds of miles away so important moments could happen.

It all took a toll.

Only one season comes to mind as a comparison: April of 2011, when I brought Jack into the world. A complicated pregnancy gave way to a traumatic birth, followed by months of hospitalizations and health complications for both of us. Fifteen years later, I am still navigating. Still carrying. Still making it happen behind the scenes. My body keeping the score of it all.

Two very different seasons. Yet both carried the same thread: motherhood and sacrifice.

The kind of thread that stretches you beyond what you think you can carry and leaves you simultaneously grateful and exhausted. The kind that breaks your heart open in ways no one can fully explain.

That is why May felt tender to me this year and likely always will. It was beautiful, but it was not easy. Some moments were joyful. Others were hard-fought.

Motherhood has a way of exposing every corner of your heart at once. And fittingly, the Church gives us Mary during this month.

Not Mary silent and peaceful in stained glass. Not a distant figure on a holy card. We are given Mary as a mother who knew joy and confusion, wonder and worry, celebration and sorrow. A mother who treasured things in her heart even when she did not fully understand them.

I found myself thinking about that in a bathroom in Austin.

In a moment of both grief and joy, tears streamed down my face as I looked in the mirror and told myself to get it together. And at the same time, to remember this moment. One of the lasts of my eldest child’s childhood.

Treasure when you do not fully understand.

I find myself grateful that the Church’s calendar does not leave us in May. Mary’s heart was never meant to be the destination. It was always meant to lead us somewhere, or rather, to Someone.

June invites us into devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Catholic devotion. Catholics do not worship Mary. Worship belongs to God alone. We honor Mary because of her unique role in salvation history and because she does what every good mother does: she leads us toward her Son.

At Cana, her instruction was simple: “Do whatever He tells you.” That has always been her message.

And this year, I find unexpected comfort in that.

Mary understands hidden sorrow. She understands loving deeply and carrying burdens that cannot be explained to a crowd. She understands standing faithfully in places where love is not always returned in the way we hope. She knows what it is to keep showing up, to keep loving, and to keep trusting.

And because she knows those things, she leads us to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Heart that was pierced.

The Heart that loves without reservation.

The Heart that continues loving even when that love is rejected, misunderstood, or ignored.

We spend a month contemplating the heart of a mother, and then we are invited into the Heart of the Son she has been pointing toward all along. And this transition comes on the heels of Pentecost, which felt especially significant to me this year.

For many years, I struggled to articulate my discomfort around the way the Holy Spirit was often presented. I frequently encountered the Spirit primarily through the lens of intensity: bigger emotions, louder experiences, heightened expectations, and extraordinary manifestations.

For some people, those environments were life-giving. For me, they often felt like shaky ground. What I have discovered in the Catholic Church is that the Holy Spirit is no less powerful because He is orderly. In fact, I have found the opposite.

The same Spirit who descended in wind and fire at Pentecost is the Spirit who guides the Church, preserves the faith, animates the sacraments, and draws believers into communion with Christ generation after generation.

There is still mystery, awe, and transformation.

But there is also stability, depth, and richness.

There is an overwhelming sense that I am standing on solid ground rather than chasing an experience.

What once felt unsettling now feels like coming home.

I am grateful for a faith spacious enough to hold both wonder and order, and grateful that the Spirit’s presence is not dependent upon how intensely I feel Him on any given day.

That is why the movement from Mary to Pentecost to the Sacred Heart feels so fitting. The Holy Spirit always leads us to Jesus. And the closer we draw to Christ, the more we discover the inexhaustible love burning within His Sacred Heart.

As we move into the readings of this week, we see the natural result of Pentecost. The apostles cannot keep Christ to themselves. Filled with the Holy Spirit, they go forth and share Him. That remains our calling. That is my calling.

That is why I write: not merely to know Jesus and admire Him, but to carry Him into the world through my words, my actions, my sacrifices, and my ordinary life.

Sometimes that witness happens in grand ways, and sometimes it looks like a mother quietly surviving a difficult month, loving faithfully, and entrusting the tender places of her heart to Christ.

Mary teaches us how to do that.

She takes our hand.

She steadies our gaze.

And she points us toward the Sacred Heart.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, lead us always closer to Him.

The Heart that never grows weary.

The Heart that never stops loving.

The Heart that is large enough to hold every joy and every sorrow we carry.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love.