Thoughts on Divine Mercy Sunday

I was married in a torrential rainstorm on the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday five years ago, which was also the day that Pope John Paul II died (a photo of the former event is above).  It seems to me mystically appropriate that our beloved Pope was born into eternal life on the vigil of the feast that commemorates the once-suppressed message of Mercy -- a message that he did so much to spread.

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I learned the Chaplet of Divine Mercy from the Sisters of Life back in 2004, and few days have passed since then that I haven't said it.  It has been a good fit for me as a devotion:  it's short, it goes by quickly, and it hammers home relentlessly the point that God's mercy trumps his righteous justice, which is, I suppose, why some Traddies shun it.  After all, it's human nature to insist that those pathetic stragglers who showed up on the job at the eleventh hour not be paid a full day's wages.  It's human nature to reel in horror when you see your father having a huge party for your wastrel brother who spent down his fortune on booze and whores.  But if God were only a God of justice, we would fear Him, but we would not love Him.  And God wants our love, and wants it freely given.  And who could not love so good a God as He, who looks at us, as He revealed to Saint Faustina, through the wounds of His Son, with compassion for our fallenness, our brokenness, our sin?

This blog was started as a sort of interior argument with my former parish priest, who suggested, after I had two traumatic miscarriages in four months, that God might be chastising me (not punishing, but chastising) for the sin of abortion that I had committed, and been absolved for, many years earlier.  This sounded wrong to me, so I mentioned God's promise to Jeremiah:  "I will forgive their sins and remember them no more"; Father R. countered me with an admonishment not to take Scripture out of context, "like," he said, "the Protestants do" (I suppose he believed that God's message applied only to the post-captivity Israelites).  I then brought up the well-known passage in Saint Faustina's diary, in which her confessor suggests that, the next time someone claiming to be Jesus comes to visit her, she should ask him to tell her what she said in her last Confession.  When He comes again, she does so, and Jesus answers, "I do not remember" (which seems a clear reference to Jeremiah 31:34).  Father R., however, explained to me that Saint Faustina was canonized for her holiness, not for her scriptural authority, and that her diary was full of self-contradictory passages.  I stopped inviting Father R., an exiled paisan in an Irish parish, over for homemade Italian food, and started avoiding whatever confessional he was working out of on Saturdays; I would graciously let as many people as necessary cut ahead of me so that I wouldn't end up spending any grille time with the man I had started calling, in my mind, names like Father Black Cloud and Savonarola.

But the truth is, I cried every day for months about that conversation with Father R.  And finally, I realized he had missed the point entirely, which is exactly why I need Jesus, and why he needs Jesus, and why we all do.  Christ died so that we wouldn't have to suffer in hell for all eternity.  He died for the forgiveness of sins.  Every time we say the Apostle's Creed, we profess our belief in the forgiveness of sins.  Another priest told me that it was Divine Providence that had led Father R. and me to cross paths, so that I could pray for him.  When I remember to, I do.

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In our neighborhood in our new city, an old man has stuck a tiny, faded picture of the Divine Mercy in a corner of his living-room window.  The first time I walked past his house, I was unbelievably grateful to see it.  I've walked past it hundreds of times now, and, for some reason, every time my little boy is with me on my walk, he says, at the exact moment we pass the Divine Mercy house, that he wants to go to the New York Botanical Garden, which was not far from where we lived in the Bronx, and was a place where we spent many happy hours.  This reminds me that the Divine Mercy is inextricably bound up, in my experience, with the Bronx.  I learned the devotion in the Bronx, on the Sisters of Life's retreat.  I came to live in the Bronx on April 2, 2005, the day of my wedding and the Pope's death, and, though I felt in exile even there, I came to fiercely love that most neglected and forsaken of boroughs.  If, as the Buddhists say, the lotus blooms out of the mud, then the Divine Mercy devotion reminds me that Christ, the gardener, brings beauty even out of barren, bloodsoaked soil.  "Where sin did abound, there grace abounded evermore."  In some mysterious way, the Divine Mercy devotion, for me, turned both the godforsaken Bronx and my godforsaken soul into good soil.  This is what you get from a God whose mercy trumps His righteous justice.  What's not to love?