Tag: Divine Mercy

2022 ~ Word of the Year

Ok, Pee-Wee Herman, get your giant underwear ready, I have picked a word of the year. Wait for it, drumroll… 

RECEPTIVITY 

No, wait that’s not it… The word of the year is: 

FORGIVENESS 

Ach, that’s not quite right… Yes, I know: 

MERCY 

Can it be all three? Are there rules about the word-of-the-year? I’ve had a hard time settling on just one, as you can see, and I think that’s because I am going into this year with more of a concept-of-the-year. 

Nearly the very first thing I did this year (besides waking up, eating breakfast, etc) was go to Confession. This wasn’t an ordinary Confession, but a healing general Confession with a priest who offers deliverance prayers and blessings. By the fall of last year, the piercing, revelatory light of God’s love uncovered dark cobwebbed corners of my soul. A better image would be wounds that had been scabbed seven times over with grotesque scars. (I have written about that elsewhere, and more about the general confession elsewhere.)  

But January 1, I marched up the church steps, slid into the narrow confessional, and encountered Christ the Healer in a way I never have before. It pulled back the scars from those wounds and laid them bare. But the powerful prayers called off any evil that had laid claim to those dark memories, leaving them exposed and raw, though protected by grace. Just as my baptism didn’t end a conversion, but began a new life and deeper conversion, so this sacrament of Reconciliation blew the lid of some dark shit and led me into a deeper stage of conversion.  

That’s what I’m focusing on this year: inviting God to heal what has festered for so long. That will require receptivity, right? I need to have a spirit of surrender with Christ the wounded Healer. I need to be vulnerable with Him. This vulnerability can lead so quickly to shame that I need mercy, both to claim it and accept it. The Divine Mercy was one of the first images that pricked my heart all those years ago at the beginning of my conversion to the Catholic Church. Now I have to live it, open my heart to it, bathe in its light. And in receiving it, I need to reflect it, to pour it out on those who have wronged me, both intentionally and unintentionally. Thus, forgiveness.  

You can see how I have to have three words this year. So if there’s a life coach out there who’s like, No, you only get ONE ya loser, to them I bite my thumb and cry, Fie! Leave me my three, the world depends upon it. I truly believe this is a new phase in the Church, a time of healing and wholeness. We need to heal so we can heal the Church, which can then heal the world.  

Barf, sentimental hogwash, you say. Trust me, healing is afoot.

my meet-cute with the Divine Mercy

In October of 2013, my husband and I were living north of Boston, and on a whim one Saturday morning we decided to drive with our four kids across the state of Massachusetts to Stockbridge to visit the National Shrine of Divine Mercy. It wasn’t entirely random; I’d been really wanting to go—St. Faustina was the first saint I loved and had taken as patroness at my baptism and confirmation (along with St. Thérèse of Lisieux). It was also the 75th anniversary of her death, so there would be an especially large gathering at the Shrine.

It was a beautiful drive, just as one would expect in New England in the fall; the trees that lined the turnpike were red and golden-hued, the air was crisp, the sky was clear. My heart was full as our little family prayed the chaplet on the lawn. As I looked around at all the people gathered there, humbled by the multiple priests hearing Confessions and the lines that trailed behind them, I was moved, but also amused by God’s leading in my life. I first encountered St. Faustina right at the dawn of my awakening to Catholicism, and she walked quietly alongside me up to my baptism a few years later. At that time, I had no idea of the impact the message of Divine Mercy had made on the world, only what an impact it had made on my own life.

I first heard of St. Faustina in the basement of my boyfriend’s house when I was around 16 years old. At the time I would often walk to his house after school. We’d do some homework, then “watch a movie” in his basement (code for “make-out”). On that particular day, his mom had borrowed a movie from their church library and was very excited about it. I don’t know why I was willing to watch this obviously religious video; maybe because I was trying to be nice, acquiescing to her earnest recommendation of this B-quality documentary. Or maybe she knew our code language (it wasn’t altogether clever). But I actually did watch this movie. It was about a simple, Polish nun named Sister Maria Faustina who had received a message from Our Lord, a message of mercy for the whole world at a time when the evils that preceded World War II had already been unleashed, unbeknownst to her. Normally a skeptic of anything Catholic, I was moved by her life, by her suffering and humility, by her solitude and contemplation, by how much Jesus clearly loved her. I wanted that. And that image of Jesus… He is touching his heart, from which two streams flow: one red, one white— blood and water— just as it was at the crucifixion when his side was pierced. Underneath this gentle and heroic Christ is written the words: Jesus, I trust in You.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the Divine Mercy. Like the image of the Sacred Heart, it had found a foothold in my entire being. I typed “Divine Mercy chaplet” into the search engine on our computer at home. It was an accessible prayer—an appeal to God’s mercy by the suffering of His son, for the salvation of the world. There was also something about the recalling of His “sorrowful Passion” and the meditation on His suffering that appealed to me. I prayed the chaplet in secret every so often, and increasingly more as I grew closer to Our Lord and the Church.

At the time, I really needed not just the message of Divine Mercy, but the image too. Home life had become increasingly stressful as addiction reared its ugly head and demanded the full attention of us all. I needed to see that look of tenderness from Our Lord, and to remember that He poured Himself out for love of me. I needed to call out for mercy as an intercession for my family, but also for myself in the midst of what seemed hopeless; I needed that mantra of Jesus, I trust in You, when there was no clear path forward.

The Divine Mercy message, chaplet, image, and the holy example of St. Faustina herself would become a staple in my spiritual life: in my struggles with anxiety and scrupulosity, in prayer for loved ones struggling with addiction and other over-powering difficulties, and in just remembering Christ’s mercy for me in my own continual struggle with sin. God knows I wasn’t looking for it, and certainly not where I encountered it, but how sorely I needed it.

At the National Shrine of Divine Mercy, there are life-size sculptures for each station in the Stations of the Cross.

To learn more about St. Faustina and the Divine Mercy message, visit here. For more information about the National Shrine, visit here.