Sometime in the early months of 1674, St. Margaret experienced a vision that would forever define the iconography of the Sacred Heart and shape Catholic art for centuries to come. While she was praying before the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus appeared to her again. This time, His five wounds shone like brilliant suns, and flames erupted from His sacred humanity.
But He opened His chest to reveal the source of this blinding light: His loving, yet agonizing, Heart. St. Margaret’s description of this Heart is vivid, highly symbolic, and deeply theological. It was not a sanitized, peaceful image. The Heart was on fire, resting on “a throne of flames. But it was also bound tightly by a crown of thorns, and a cross was planted at its top. Christ explained the meaning of these symbols to her directly: the thorns were the pricks of human sin, the daily acts of selfishness, cruelty, and apathy that wound Him anew. The cross represented the sorrow He embraced from the very first moment of His human existence, a sorrow born of knowing how many would reject His sacrifice.The Lord showed her that it was His great desire of being loved by men and of withdrawing them from the path of ruin into which Satan hurls such crowds of them, that made him form the design of manifesting His Heart to men. He should be honoured under the figure of this heart of flesh, and Its image should be exposed. “He unfolded to me,” she says, “the inexplicable wonders of His pure love, and to what an excess He had carried it for the love of men, from whom He had received only ingratitude. ‘This is,’ He said, ‘much more painful to Me than all I suffered in My Passion. If men rendered Me some return of love, I should esteem little all I have done for them, and should wish, if such could be, to suffer it over again; but they meet My eager love with coldness and rebuffs.” He did not speak with the wrath of a strict judge, but with the sorrow of a spurned lover. He lamented the bitter reality of unrequited divine love. He asked her to make up for this ingratitude, to offer her own heart as a place of comfort and reparation. She was no longer just a recipient of God’s love; she was called to be a consoler of God’s sorrow. Do you, at least,’ said He in conclusion, ‘console and rejoice Me, by supplying as much as you can for their ingratitude’”Furthermore, Christ gave St.
Margaret two specific practices to draw souls into His redemptive love. First, He requested the reception of Holy Communion on the First Friday of each month to make reparation of the sins and ingratitude of humanity. Second, He instituted the "Holy Hour." He asked her to rise between eleven o'clock and midnight every Thursday night, prostrating herself to the ground in prayer for an hour to share in the mortal anguish He endured in the Garden of Gethsemane, to plead for mercy for dinners, and to appease the anger of God.The physical toll of these visions on St.
Margaret was immense. The sheer weight of encountering the divine, coupled with the emotional burden of Christ's sorrow, overwhelmed her frail constitution. This frailty was put to the ultimate test by Mother de Saumaise, who sought to verify the divine origin of St. Margaret's experiences. Approaching her bedside while she lay apparently dying, the superior commanded her in the name of obedience to ask God for her restoration — adding that she would recognize the healing as a sign of the supernatural character of all that had taken place in her regard.
In return, she promised to permit St. Margaret to receive Holy Communion on the first Friday of every month and to keep the hour's prayer during the night between Thursday and Friday. Scarcely had she uttered a short prayer before her fever fell, her pulse beat less rapidly, and the astonished physician pronounced her cured. From that day, Mother de Saumaise, no longer resisting the voice of God, granted her the permissions she had promised.
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