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Archive for the 'Divine Mercy' Category

Divine Mercy Sunday

gabrielle March 30th, 2008

What I’m exploring here today is something I don’t fully understand myself, but I think it might help me if I put some thoughts down “on paper”.

Jesus told Sister Faustina, “I desire that this image be displayed in public on the first Sunday after Easter. That Sunday is the Feast of Mercy.” [Diary, Notebook I, No. 88] Have you ever wondered why Jesus chose the first Sunday after Easter and declared that it was the Feast of Mercy? This particular Sunday has other names as well, one of which is Low Sunday. Out of curiosity, I looked up Low Sunday in an old missal, one from prior to Vatican II, to see if there were any significant differences. One important difference that I found was that the Gospel, prior to Vatican II, opened with a Lesson from the Epistle of St. John the Apostle (First Letter of John, Chapter 5). I will just quote a small portion of it, to show you what we would have heard back then that we do not hear today:

“This is he that came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit which testifieth that Christ is the truth. And there are three who give testimony in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one. And there are three that give testimony on earth; the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three are one.”

Even if you were to look up the First Letter of John, Ch. 5 in a current Bible, you would not find it translated (at least in the versions I looked at) as precisely as it is stated in the old missal.

And so we have Jesus choosing to establish Divine Mercy Sunday on a day in which we were traditionally being taught about water and blood, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity. As I was pondering all these things, I took a look at what some bloggers had been saying about Divine Mercy Sunday over the last couple of years. I noticed some disturbing comments, two in particular - one from a priest who said that Divine Mercy Sunday, “changed nothing liturgically”, and another from someone who said that Divine Mercy Sunday had, “absolutely no effect on the liturgical celebration”, that it was only a devotion with an indulgence attached. Perhaps it is true that the devotion does not really change the liturgy of the day, but it changes our hearts, and immersion in the Divine Mercy message helps us understand the message of today’s gospel on a deeper level. Inclusion of the former passage from the First Letter of John would do so to an even greater degree.

In my post last year for Divine Mercy Sunday, if you had asked me why I included a picture of the Holy Trinity and a link to the beautiful Thrice Holy Hymn, I couldn’t have told you. I only did what the Spirit moved me to do. Today, I think I understand a little bit better.

At the risk of turning this post into a tome, I would just also like to share something with you from The Revelations of St. Gertrude the Great, from the entry for Low Sunday, which reinforces my glimpse of an understanding as to why Jesus chose this day. The entry opens with the words of Jesus, and continues with St. Gertrude’s understanding of His message:

“If you desire to receive the Holy Ghost…you must touch My Side and My Hands, like My disciples.” By this she understood that he who desires to receive the Holy Spirit must first touch the Side of Our Lord - that is, he must acknowledge how much the Divine Heart has loved us in having predestinated us from eternity to be His children and heirs of His kingdom, and in pouring forth such benefits upon us daily, notwithstanding our ingratitude…”

Yes It Is - 2

gabrielle March 27th, 2008

Divine Mercy. Jesus, I Trust in You. It’s also something to cry about - tears of grief, loss and pain; tears of forgiveness, hope and gratitude.

Yes It Is - 1

gabrielle March 27th, 2008

Divine Mercy. Jesus, I Trust in You. It really is something to sing about. Something to really sing about.

Zaufaj Panu juz dzis - Divine Mercy

Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Mercy”

gabrielle March 7th, 2008

Not long ago I posted the words and music to Leonard Cohen’s beautiful song, If It Be Your Will, which touched our hearts in many different ways. Recently I came across something closely related that I would like to share with you here.

In the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) archives, I found a series entitled, “Leonard Cohen: Canada’s Melancholy Bard”. Number Six in the series, “Cohen at 50″, is an archived radio broadcast from 1984, in which he is interviewed just after publication of his, “Book of Mercy”. The whole interview is wonderful; about one-third of the way into it, spiritual mercy is the focus of the discussion. Cohen describes what he simply refers to as a “wipe out”, but in the way he speaks of it, and of course, with “Book of Mercy” as the outcome, my feeling is that we are listening to him speak about something more akin to the dark night of the spirit rather than a burn-out. Just to give you a little taste of the conversation (forgive me if I did not transcribe it perfectly - I hope you will listen for yourselves if you are interested in this topic) here is a bit of what Leonard says:

Re the writing of the book: “…where there’s no other form of expression possible… and you can’t speak, and the only thing you can say is a prayer, then this is the kind of work that follows.”

Re the experience he went through: “…something like being stopped, something like walls, something like not being able to function in the way that you have been accustomed to, something like that. Just the point where all the laws of necessity and relativity no longer make sense and you want to address the absolute source of things if you can locate it, and you try to locate it.”

When the interviewer, Peter Gzowski , comments to Leonard that the book resulting from this experience is “not necessarily the work of a believer, this is not…a demonstration of faith or conviction, is it?”, Leonard responds:

“Those kinds of questions - I believe or I don’t believe - those belong to the mind, and, appropriately to the mind…but…when you find yourself in that landscape where the only thing you can do is prayer, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or not, because you’re not using that faculty that evaluates the reality of faith or the reality of God or not - it’s a completely different landscape; it is a cry, and there is an object of the cry, and it’s a certainty in that place.”

“One is not interested in proving or not proving the existence of the object; if you address yourself to the source of mercy, you might have the good luck to discover that there is a source of mercy… There is a source of mercy as I experienced it, and these poems are the document of that address and that kind of deliverance.”

Leonard Cohen’s, “Book of Mercy” is a collection of fifty psalms. I do not have the book myself, but here are two of the psalms that I found online:

Number 1:
I stopped to listen, but he did not come.
I began again with a sense of loss.
As this sense deepened I heard him again.
I stopped stopping and I stopped starting,
and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance.
This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all.
Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode.
I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love.
I beg for mercy. Slowly he yields.
Haltingly he moves toward his throne.
Reluctantly the angels grant to one another permission to sing.
In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked,
the court is established on beams of golden symmetry,
and once again I am a singer in the lower choirs,
born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.

Number 50:
I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name.
The raw heart beat against the world,
and the tears were for my lost victory.
But you are here. You have always been here.
The world is all forgetting,
and the heart is a rage of directions,
but your name unifies the heart,
and the world is lifted into its place.
Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning.