A few months ago I began developing chest pain. Nothing serious but noticeable. Over the next few days, this pain intensified so I gave it a bit more attention. There is history of heart issues in my family so I thought that might be a possibility. I practice martial arts on a regular basis so I thought maybe I just pulled a muscle. I didn’t panic but kept an open mind as to what might be going on. But “what could it be” was a persistent thought in the back of my mind?

When the pain began to grow more intense I focused on what the pain felt like. The best way to describe the pain was that it felt like a needle piercing my heart. And at times, like a thin steel wire wrapped around and constricting my heart. The pain began radiating outward. I had plenty of energy, no shortness of breath and other than the pain in my heart I felt healthy. I was perplexed.

Then, Sunday morning during consecration of the Holy Eucharist, I uttered the words, “Jesus, unite my heart with yours.” I had been saying that phrase for the last several months at each consecration. That’s when it hit me. Could that be exactly what Jesus was doing? Uniting my heart with His? Was I beginning to feel the smallest portion of what he experienced during His crucifixion?

The 1996 Buenos Aires miracle host came to mind. A consecrated host had been found discarded in the back of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church which was then placed in a bowl of water and placed in the tabernacle to dissolve and seemingly began to bleed. Then in 1999, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, instructed scientific researcher Ricardo Castanon, Ph.D., a professed atheist at the time, that the host be scientifically analyzed. Dr. Castanon sent a sample of the Host to Dr. Frederick Zugibe, a forensic expert in New York and was not informed on what the sample was. Dr. Zugibe testified that the sample was a fragment of a heart muscle and contained a large number of white blood cells.

Dr. Zugibe explains,  “It is my contention that the heart was alive, since white blood cells die outside a living organism, They require a living organism to sustain them. Thus, their presence indicates that the heart was alive when the sample was taken. What is more, these white blood cells had penetrated the tissue, which further indicates that the heart had been under severe stress, as if the owner had been beaten severely about the chest.”

I decided it best that I stop asking that my heart be united with the heart of Jesus at the moment of consecration.  Over the following few weeks the pain in my chest began to dissipate and disappear.  Although thankful for the answered prayer of being united with the heart of Jesus, I was not prepared for exactly what that meant. The amount of pain and suffering Jesus willingly endured for you and me is unfathomable. And the amount of Love Jesus has for you and me is limitless.