The Divine Mercy

Although Catholic mysticism is not for everyone, one of the visions associated with Sister Faustina's divine mercy is so powerful that, for me, it is stronger as a metaphor than as a mystical supernatural vision.

She wrote:

I saw a great light, with God the Father in the midst of it. Between this light and the earth I saw Jesus nailed to the Cross and in such a way that God, wanting to look upon the earth, had to look through Our Lord's wounds and I understood that God blessed the earth for the sake of Jesus.

The mystery of Earthly suffering is a challenge to anyone's faith. Some people are the authors of their own suffering. Most are not. Nobody deserves it. To believe that God understands our suffering - truly understands it intimately, from having suffered himself as both a Father bereaved and a Son unjustly suffering under Pontius Pilate - is to believe that God's empathy is complete. It is not the distant empathy of an enlightened benefactor. It is the instant and immediate mercy of someone who can't even look at us other than through the veil of his own deeply personal loss - compassion moved by Love. And Love proceeds in its truest form from personal experience.

Only the God who suffered is more united by far to the AIDs victim than to the corpulent rich man - as Mary says in the Magnificat, "He has lifted up the lowly, and sent the rich away empty." It is the God who suffered who I believe DOES know to say, "There there." It is the God with the power to make all things new who can wipe every tear away.

Including, Easter Sunday, his own.