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We are called to live ...
The Priests of the Sacred Heart are called to live a life of oblation in the spirit of love and reparation. The concept of “reparation” has undergone considerable development as it is understood and practiced. In my estimation the best current verbal expression of the meaning of reparation is found in Number 23 of the Constitutions of the Priests of the Sacred Heart. This is what we find there: “This is how we understand ‘reparation':
1) as a welcome to the Spirit (cf. I Thess. 4: 8),
2) as a response to Christ's love for us,
3) a communion in His love for the Father and
4) a cooperation in His work of redemption in the midst of the world.
It's God initiation
Reparation is not something that we are able to do on our own. God initiates our being able to offer reparation by giving us the gift of the Spirit. What we need to do is welcome that gift and respond, cooperate with the grace of God. Then influenced by God's Spirit we are moved to respond to the love manifested for us by Jesus.
We want to return love to the One who first loved us, especially since we are aware of the times we ourselves and others do not return His love. The Spirit also makes us mindful of the fact that we are finite creatures and on our own are incapable of offering a fitting of love to God who is infinite. And so we unite ourselves with Jesus in His offering of love to the Father. This happens especially in the Eucharist where we unite the offering of ourselves with the offering of Jesus to the Father.
It is the work of reconciliation
The final element of reparation moves us from prayer into action. The action that is part of reparation is the work of reconciliation. Where people are separated from God and separated from one another we make reparation by devoting ourselves to the fulfillment of Jesus' prayer “that they be one”.
To make reparation calls us to let people know of the great love God has for them so that they might welcome that love and return it, so that they might be one with God. Reparation also calls us to treat lovingly those whose condition in life makes it most difficult for them to believe in that loving God, that is the poor, the marginalized. Finally to make reparation is to give ourselves to the mission of bringing together those who are at enmity or separated from one another.
An act of reparation
A prayer that is called “an act of reparation” should in some way address those four elements that are given in Number 23 of the Constitutions as mentioned above. There should be the welcoming of the Spirit's action in our lives that moves us to respond and return love.
The love of Jesus as manifested in His life and especially in His passion and death should be brought to mind as a kind of impetus to love in return. There should be some expression of our uniting ourselves with Jesus in His return of love to the Father.
Finally, there should be a commitment on our part to giving our lives to helping people believe in God's love for them through the experience of our love for them, especially towards those who feel most alienated from God and from one another. Not ever act of reparation can contain all those elements nor is it necessary that it does, but to be an act of reparation some of those elements should be present.
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