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Divine Mercy Sunday

What makes our prayer for mercy powerful, capable of changing not only our lives but the whole world?  From my childhood, Pope John Paul II helped me learn to be confident in prayer.  In particular, his efforts restoring the devotion to Divine Mercy proposed by Sr. Faustina Kowalska as well as his encyclical on Divine Mercy have helped me deal with personal suffering and begin to learn to be merciful to others.  The secret to confidence in prayer is union with Christ – He perfects our prayer.

For the last nine days, my family has gathered each evening to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy for ourselves and the whole world.  The prayers “Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus” and “For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy” are deep and rich.  They dispose the soul to the logic of God’s mercy, the logic of the Cross.  They also are Eucharistic – and help me think about the sacrificial and liturgical dimensions of our faith.  The death of Christ released his saving power into the world and his resurrection restores and raises up the dignity of humanity so that we might pray in a way the pleases God.  The power of Christian prayer is its union with the prayer of Christ, the Heavenly Man, whose prayers are always heard by the Father.

Christian prayer filled with the Holy Spirit is taken up by the Risen Lord from our hearts into His Heart where our human weakness is infused with divine power.  In  the sanctuary of his Heart, our prayer is transformed into something beautiful for God, something worth offering to the Father. This is because in His Heart all that is true, noble and good about humanity has been rescued from death and raised up above the heavens.  Our prayers find their place in this heavenly humanity of Jesus.  These prayers breathed in the believer by the Holy Spirit co-inhere in Him and His prayer co-inheres in them. In such prayer God is praised, and men and women are heard.  Elisabeth of the Trinity contemplated how this union of hearts with the Lord “thrills” the heart of the Father, and Faustina Kowalska understood how our prayers made pleasing and acceptable by the blood of Christ extend the splendors of his power and glory to the whole world.

For those who are celebrating the mercies of the Lord tomorrow,  for those joined either physically or spiritually with the beatification of John Paul II on this great Feast of Mercy, we are participating in a great spiritual revolution which the world needs today more than ever.  Our prayers are no mere exercise in sentimentality or mental hygiene. Joined to Christ, they have the power to change the world.  Our prayers ride on the waves of the divine mercy that flow from the heart of Christ.  Have confidence in the power of God and pray ardently – for He is the unfailing Fount of Mercy who counts on our prayer and our witness.  It is his plan to use our frail efforts, our humble prayer, to envelop the whole world in His power of love, especially those people and places that are most in need.  Hope in God …He hopes even more in you.

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The Passion of Word and Silence

This week we make pilgrimage with the Word made flesh to the Cross.  We walk with crowds who welcomed Him, souls who could not stay awake with Him, souls who betrayed Him, souls who denied him, souls who falsely accused Him, souls who mocked Him, souls who abused Him, souls who ignored Him, souls who condemned Him, souls who were too afraid to stand for Him, souls who ran from Him, souls who wept over Him, and souls who followed Him.  This week I remember that I have been, in different ways, all these souls – and it is time to ask the Lord for his grace, to get up and to follow Him on the Way.  This week, whoever we are, Christ crucified looks on us with love – his eyes searching for our eyes, his heart thirsting for ours.

It was the Beloved Disciple who stood at the foot of the Cross with the Mother of God’s son – they stood in faith believing even in the face of the anti-thesis of all for which they had hoped.  It was there Christ entrusted one to the other – so that every Beloved disciple who takes her into his home learns the wisdom of this moment.   This is the moment where the immortal Word weds our mortal silence – embracing our death that we might finally live life to the full.  May the Lord draw us into this moment – the moment which discloses the immensity of his inexhaustible love.

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The Mystery of the Cross

The Cross of Christ is the threshold where the broken heart of God embraces the broken heart of man.  There is no other way to God.  No technique, no method, can replace the Cross.  No amount of self-indulgence, insobriety or concern for worldly affairs can give us life like the moment of Golgatha.  In Christ crucified He shows us our sins against the vast horizons of his love.  If we allow these unimaginable horizons to pierce us to the heart, to draw us out of ourselves and into Him, then there is the most beautiful of all encounters.  This is a real heart to heart: we ponder the truth about ourselves in Him and God contemplates the truth about Himself in us.

Some say that they cannot find the Cross in their life.  They cannot find sacrifices to make.  If this is really true, I do not think it is, it means that there is a lack of love.  We can only truly love at our own expense.  Whenever we set out to do something beautiful for God, whenever we try to love to the end, we must go by the way of the Cross.  Only when we have spent ourselves for the Lord and for those He has entrusted to us do we begin to taste this mystery.  Here, the limits of our humanity meet the limitlessness of God.

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The Mystery of Mercy and Penance

Pope John Paul II, soon to be recognized as among the Blessed, understood the importance of mercy and penance in the Christian life.  He understood mercy to be love which suffers the misery of the beloved in order to affirm the beloved’s dignity.  Penance he explained in terms of a loving response for mercy received.  In his thought, mercy and penance as moments of intimacy between God and humanity coincide on the cross.

The Pilgrim Pope explores these ideas in his teachings by reflecting on Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.  In this parable, the sons (who are more concerned about things than persons) are contrasted with the father (who is more concerned for his sons than things).  The truth about justice is revealed in the implications this parable has regarding our response to mercy.  Justice is not enough for the human spirit.  Instead, in the order of mercy, justice serves our love for one another.  The handmade of mercy, it protects the conditions that true friendship, true family demands.  

The Beginning of Contrition
The son came to his senses.  A key moment in this parable is when the prodigal son realizes not only his impoverished plight but also sees that he has broken his relationship with his father.  His life project had become a failure and he had squandered his possessions and his dignity.  Mysteriously, because he has not completely forgotten his father’s love, he has confidence, enough confidence to begin his journey home.  It is not that he presumes he is owed anything at all.  Instead, his heart has an insight into the heart of his father – he sees that truth a child always sees in a good father, a goodness that inspires confidence.  Knowing this, he does not doubt that there would still be a place for him in his father’s home, if only as a servant.  In a certain way, this kind of confidence is like the beginning of contrition or true sorrow for our sin.  This kind of sorrow springs out of our humble confidence in the goodness of God.

Mercy
The father sees his son coming from a long way off and his heart is pierced by the plight of his son – and he runs to embrace him.  The story is told as if the father had been anxiously awaiting his son’s return, as if he was even impatient that it had taken so long.  But this is exactly the character of merciful love –  it yearns, aches, sorrows over the beloved – especially because it cannot bear the thought that even for a moment the beloved would be deprived of dignity.  It is impatient to suffer anything that the dignity of the beloved might be restored.  In the case of the father, he would suffer being misunderstood, rejected and humiliated – but for love of both sons, he could not have it any other way.  Through Christ crucified, God the Father communicates this kind of suffering love to humanity – so that only by passing through the wounds of Christ may one cross the threshold of union with God.

Penance
The parable of Christ reveals a reality to which we must respond.  When we see the heart of God pierced by our plight, our hearts must not remain unmoved.  His sorrow must pierce us, too.  The only adequate value response to the suffering love of God is to embrace it in loving gratitude.  And we can only love at our own expense.  Sacrifice, intercession, renunciation, restitution, trials, perseverance, bearing with one another, suffering abandonment, betrayal, denial, persecution, rejection – all these are but a small return for the love the Father has given us through his Son – love crucified for our sakes.  

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Sacrifice and Mercy – the Spiritual Mission of St. Faustina

Sr. Maria Faustina Kowalska died at the age of 33 in 1938 misunderstood by most of the religious sisters with whom she had lived her life.  They appreciated her kindness, hard work, and faithfulness to their rule of life, but many of her fellow religious also thought that she was delusional and tormented.  Indeed, she claimed to have received several revelations from the Lord, sometimes involving direct commands, all of which concerned his divine mercy.  She believed that she was entrusted with the mission of making the Lord’s mercy known.   Through living a life of sacrificial love for the Lord, the absurdity of Sr. Faustina’s claim has become an occasion of hope for the world.

To accomplish this mission, she was humbly faithful to the promptings of the Lord even in the midst of great suffering.  With great humility, developing confidence in the Lord and growing determination, she would act on what she believed the Lord asked of her only after she submitted to her confessor first, even if he misunderstood her – which was often at first.  She also worked under the authority of her religious superior.  She seemed to trust that the Lord would speak through those in rightful authority even more clearly than when He addressed her directly.  Not only was her message rejected initially, she would also suffer incredible spiritual trials where she felt like the Lord was angry with her, and in total darkness and tears doubted her own experience.  This would make her question whether she was in fact as crazy as everyone else thought her to be.

Jesus slowly helped her see these kinds of experiences, as intensely discouraging as they could be, as opportunities to love and trust Him even more.  She would offer to the Lord by a simple act of loving faith all – her doubts, the pain of not feeling the Lord’s presence or love, even the fear that God had rejected her and was angry with her.  Even though she felt this way – she chose not to believe it, not to live out of these feelings, but to live by faith in the Lord alone.  She believed the Lord knew what she needed, that He would not allow her to deal with more than she could handle.  Her job was to trust in Him.  To experience these things but to continue to trust, love and be faithful in her daily duties, to patiently love even those who thought she was crazy – this was her sacrifice, a sacrifice of love that she could offer Jesus for all He had suffered for her.  It was a way for her to be in solidarity with all those who had lost or were losing their hope.  She understood them, felt one with them and was able to really pray for them.

This is what it means to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1-2).  This kind of faithful love is what we mean when we say “offer it up.”    This humble attitude gave Jesus the space He needed to accomplish great things.  It is through our union with the Cross of Christ that mercy comes not only into our lives – but into the whole world. The Lord uses our trials to extend his his mercy.  Because of her faithfulness, the whole Church is blessed with a greater awareness of the inexhaustible mercy of God.

Mercy – love that suffers the misery of another to affirm his or her dignity – is one of the most beautiful ways a person can be like God.  This is the way of the Cross.  Divine Mercy is God suffering the plight of humanity, enduring with each person the incredible pain and sorrow that marks human existence.  Christian spirituality is an invitation to enter into this mystery of love by our small sacrifices.  We fast, we give alms, we pray that mercy might enter into our lives.  It is especially in small and hidden sacrifices like renouncing contention and hostility in our marriages and family life, or even lovingly bearing with each other and not taking offense in a confrontation.  Such sacrifices have real spiritual value.  They have the power to crack open the world, to lay vulnerable the heart, so that men and women, friends and family, even strangers and enemies might remember their dignity – that they are loved by God.

Because of the generous and humble sacrifices of St. Faustina in those chaotic years before World War II, one week after the great Easter Triduum, Catholics around the world now celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday.  In fact, this Divine Mercy Sunday, the Pope who canonized her will himself be declared blessed.  Their missions converge on this feast of mercy.  But what is Divine Mercy Sunday?  It is a day of prayer where we ask the Lord to renew our trust in his merciful love so that we might live it more fully in our lives.  It is a day we pray for those most in need of Divine Mercy – the despairing, the dying, the lonely, the suffering.  Our generosity with Christ, our readiness to make sacrifices out of love for Him this Lent, this humble effort to love Him in return for all He has suffered for us – this will make space in the world for His Mercy to be unleashed.

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Boldly Entering the Heart of Another

Catherine de Hueck Doherty believed the Lord told her to boldly go into the hearts of others.  She could only do so if she committed herself to a life of mercy – which she did.   But she also needed most of all a gift from God which our tradition calls the Gift of Counsel, a gift given at baptism and confirmation, a gift renewed and deepened by prayer.  

We are normally told that the gift of counsel is when the Holy Spirit prompts us to do the right thing in a tricky situation.  True enough.  But St. Thomas understood this virtue as deeply related to mercy.  It is a gift that lets us see the plight of another, the misery that they suffer in their heart.  We need to be able to see this, to understand it a little, if we are to be merciful at all.  

In the mystical tradition, there are those who can even “read” the hearts of others.  Padre Pio had this gift – and I have heard accounts of Catherine de Hueck which suggest she was blest with this special charism as well.  They know secret sorrows that someone is trying to hide – and they speak the truth about them to help people face their situation with new courage.  But the gift of reading hearts, as extraordinary as it is, has its basis in this more common experience – the heart piercing prompting of the Holy Spirit which will not allow us to remain indifferent about the plight of another.  While this gift does not allow us usually to “read” what someone is trying to hide – it does help us to see things that people may not know they are communicating.  It operates in the order of mercy – for mercy’s sake.  Bot h Padre Pio and the Baroness of Madonna House lived for mercy, followed the promptings of the Holy Spirit – because they lived lives of deep prayer.

Mercy is love that suffers the misery of another to affirm their dignity.  This is what the Father of the prodigal son did.  He saw his son’s plight from a long way off, and his son’s loss of dignity pierced him to the heart.  So he ran to his son to restore him to his household – to give him back a little of the dignity he lost.  From the outside, it looks like the father is allowing himself to be taken advantage of – but from the inside we have a son who trusts his father enough to try to return and a father who loves his son so much that no other return than his son’s full return into the household is acceptable.  He repeats the action of going out to restore the dignity of his sons – twice.  Similarly, the samaritan who sees his beaten and nearly dead enemy as his neighbor.  His heart is pierced so deeply by his neighbor’s plight, it is not enough for him to bring him into safe harbor.  He pays all his neighbor’s debts, concerned for his complete restoration.  In both cases, the merciful lose themselves in the plight of the one they love – and their love looks squandered from the outside.  But with the gift of counsel – God helps us to see what is really going on, and when we see things from the Lord’s perspective, when we accept his counsel, we cannot have it any other way.  His gift of counsel not only helps us choose what is right in a tricky situation – it helps us choose what is merciful, what helps restore our neighbor’s dignity.

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