Hoping in Divine Mercy

It was shortly after my mother has finished her treatment for breast cancer that my parents went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje in 2000, and my father came home transformed. He kept going on about the Divine Mercy devotion and he wanted all of us to pray it. He even wanted to start a prayer group in our parish dedicated to the Divine Mercy. Being a nominal Catholic at the time, and not a fan of devotional prayer, I completely ignored my father. 

In the same year my parents had gone on their pilgrimage, Pope John Paul II instituted the Feast of the Divine Mercy into the liturgical calendar, making the first Sunday after Easter Divine Mercy Sunday. That April, he also canonized Sister Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun who had first received the message to pray for God’s Divine Mercy for the whole world through the chaplet given her at 3am and/or 3pm daily. 

Some 15 years later, when I had a better understanding of what the devotion to the Divine Mercy was, and even prayed the chaplet from time to time (it was shorter than the rosary which made it more attractive to me), I still had not a full appreciation of what God’s Divine Mercy meant in my life. I only began to understand the true depth of Divine Mercy when I met P, my husband. 

It was on Divine Mercy Sunday we had our first date and my conviction began growing exponentially from then that indeed, God’s love and mercy for all humanity, for me personally, is truly boundless. Time and time again, mercy has been shown to me, to us as a couple through courtship into marriage, and through the early days of our marriage till the present time. How else can we, two old fogeys set in our ways, make it work?

We began praying the chaplet daily when we decided to pray the Novena of the Divine Mercy on a Good Friday not long after marriage. Do I believe that prayer can move mountains? Yes, I do. Not only do I believe that praying the chaplet can bring about conversions, save souls, and ease the passage for the dying back to the Father, I believe that praying the chaplet makes me more self-aware, and therefore kinder, more forgiving and a more generous person. Jesus reveals to me whenever I fall short and what I need to do to rectify my selfish behaviour. 

Having had the source and summit of my Christian life (CCC 1324), the Eucharist, taken from me, I am left with my faith intact due in no small part to my disciplines of prayer, especially my devotional prayers of the rosary and the Divine Mercy chaplet. It hasn’t been easy going from daily mass to just spiritual communion but I trust that the Father sees the desires of my heart, all my despair and my sorrow, and helps me transform my deep sense of loss into something unimaginably beautiful. 

I can still evangelize in my cloistered life of the Community Circuit Breaker which began on April 7. My prayer can still change the world; it can still protect loved ones and connect me to others. I can still spread the ‘contagion of hope’ that Pope Francis talked about in his Easter Sunday Urbi Er Orbi message. “Christ, my hope, is risen!” and I have a responsibility to transmit this hope from ‘heart to heart’ as long as I remember what Il Papa said:

Christ’s resurrection is not a “magic formula that makes problems vanish...“it is the victory of love over the root of evil”. This victory “does not ‘by-pass’ suffering and death, but passes through them, opening a path in the abyss, transforming evil into good”. 

A blessed Divine Mercy Sunday, all.