Today we are celebrating the feast of St. Faustina Kowalska. Many of us are somewhat aware of who she was and that our devotion to the Divine Mercy comes from the apparitions and mystical experiences that she had of Jesus throughout her life. Thankfully for the Church, many of those apparitions were written down and recorded in her journal. Because without that, we would not know about these beautiful encounters she had with the Lord or the message that Jesus has for us about His mercy.

In fact, in His interactions with St. Faustina, Jesus told her: “Humanity will not find peace until it turns trustfully to divine mercy” (Diary, p. 132). It shows us just how important it is for us to recognize the need for God’s love as His sons and daughters. The peace that we are so desperately looking for as human beings can only be found in Him. But that also requires us to be humble. It requires us to recognize that we can’t do this human experience on our own. We need God.

In her diary, Faustina wrote this:

“The more a soul humbles itself, the greater the kindness with which the Lord approaches it. Uniting himself closely with it, He raises it to His very throne. Happy is the soul whom the Lord himself defends. I have come to know that only love is of any value; love is greatness; nothing, no works, can compare with a single act of pure love of God” (Diary, 1092).

That’s what the Lord desires to do within our own lives. He wants us to experience the greatness of His love for us. But, that’s not always easy for us to do. As I said in my homily on Sunday, we get it in our heads sometimes that God could never love us because of the things that we’ve done. The importance of this message of Divine Mercy is that God simply wants us to turn to Him. He doesn’t care what we’ve done in the past. What matters is that we actively seek Him in the midst of those mistakes and failures, turn to Him asking for His forgiveness and His love for the times we have turned away from Him. Despite our sins, the Lord never turns away from us. He desires only to embrace us and love us.

So this morning, let’s ask the Holy Spirit for a special grace: to break down whatever walls we have placed around our hearts that prevent us from experiencing the Father’s love for us. Let’s give the Lord permission to enter our hearts anew and ask Him to give us a deeper experience of His love.

Image: Divine Mercy Shrine, Our Lady of Consolation Catholic Church (Carey, Ohio). Photo by: Nheyob. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.