Desire of the Eternal Hills

At family faith formation this past Sunday—our parish’s version of CCD—we prayed the Litany to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Since June is the Month of the Sacred Heart, it’s a beautiful time to revisit this powerful devotion. If you haven’t prayed the Litany recently, I encourage you to take a moment with it. You can find it here.

One line in particular stayed with me—at first, because it confused me:

Heart of Jesus, desire of the eternal hills,
(or sometimes translated, the everlasting hills).

My first instinct was to flip the phrase around in my mind—desire for the eternal hills. That made more immediate sense: after all, we do long for heaven.

But this prayer is saying something more. It’s not that we desire the hills. It’s that the eternal hills themselves desire Him. The Heart of Jesus is their desire. Our desire.

Creation doesn’t long for some abstract eternity. Heaven isn’t just a beautiful landscape or a peaceful escape. The “eternal hills”—a poetic image of heaven—ache for Christ. And so do we. Our longing isn’t ultimately for a place, but for a Person.

Jesus is the one our hearts were made for. He is the desire behind all our desires. The where we long to go is really the who we long to be with.

And when we find Him—truly find Him—we’ll realize: this is what we were made for. This is the Heart we were always homesick for.