Love Quote by Fulton J. Sheen

Sheen doesn’t invite belief so much as he demands an inspection. “Show me” lands like a prosecutor’s refrain, turning piety into evidence and forcing the listener out of the safe, interior theater of good intentions. The body becomes the ledger: scars, wounds, and an enlarged heart are the receipts of a life spent on other people. It’s a bracing reversal of the religious habit of speaking in abstractions. He drags devotion down to the hands that cook, write checks, lift burdens; the feet that walk toward inconvenience; the heart as an organ that must physically make room.

The subtext is a critique of sentimental faith and performative religiosity. Sheen implies that if your spirituality hasn’t cost you something, it may not be spirituality at all - just self-regard dressed up as reverence. “Scars from giving” is especially pointed: giving isn’t framed as occasional generosity but as an activity with consequences, a kind of holy friction that leaves marks. Service, too, isn’t romantic; “wounded” suggests fatigue, exposure, and risk.

Context matters: Sheen was a mid-century American Catholic celebrity, a media-savvy bishop preaching in a culture newly fluent in consumption, comfort, and public image. This reads like a deliberate antidote to that drift. Even “divine love” isn’t treated as a mood; it’s spatial and demanding - a vacancy you maintain by evicting ego. The line works because it’s both devotional and diagnostic, a spiritual exam you can’t pass with words.