You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Monday, June 20th, 2020. Now this week on the Catholic Spouts, we are going to be preparing for an incredible feast day that we will be celebrating on Friday. It's one of my favorite feast days

of the whole year. It is the feast of the sacred heart of Jesus. Now, this is such an important

feast because it is when we celebrate Jesus's heart, which is such a beautiful and incredible mystery that we are asked to

contemplate. Now, chances are that no matter what church you belong to, there is an image of the

sacred heart in that church. Usually it is a statue of Christ with his heart shown. And that heart,

it has flames coming out of the top of it. It is encircled with thorns. There is light

shining from it. And there is usually a wound blood, and a cross on the top.

Now, all of these parts of the Sacred Heart, all of these details of the image, were shown to a saint back in the 1600s, a French nun by the name of St. Margaret Mary Aliqui. Now she was sort of unremarkable in real life,

but she was a mystic, meaning that Jesus chose her to appear to several times, and he

entrusted to her the devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus. He showed her his heart with all of these

elements so that we might better be able to come to understand his heart and the way he

loves us and the way that he is united to us. And so this week we're going to be going through all of these parts.

We're going to talk about the heart itself of Jesus, the fire coming out of it,

the thorns wrapping around his heart, the wound, the cross coming out the top,

the fact that it is producing light, all of these things, because they

remind us not only of God and all these powerful symbols, but also how Jesus is united with us

as human beings. So today we're going to start with the most obvious part to talk about is the

heart, the heart of

Jesus. Now, of course, Jesus was a human being. He had a body just like ours with hands and feet

and everything. Why do we have a special focus on his heart? Well, you might think that's

pretty obvious, right? A heart is important. Heart sits at the center of who we are. And also, if you've ever had someone close to you expecting a baby, we know that the first way we're able to tell if this is alive, this baby is alive, is by looking for a heartbeat, right? Oftentimes,

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