Fr. Roger J. Landry
\nThe Anchor
\nPutting Out Into The Deep
\nApril 05, 2013<\/p>\n
On Sunday, Pope Francis in his Easter greeting before his solemn blessing for the city and the world (Urbi et Orbi), said that greatest Easter wish would be for \u201cevery heart\u201d to recognize that \u201cJesus is risen, there is hope for you, you are no longer in the power of sin, of evil! Love has triumphed, mercy has been victorious! The mercy of God always triumphs!\u201d <\/p>\n
His choice of saying \u201cevery heart,\u201d rather than\u201cevery mind,\u201d was intentional. Many might recognize this truth intellectually, but they may not yet truly embrace it; and they have to grasp it with their heart to experience the true joy of the resurrection that Jesus wants to give us. <\/p>\n
Francis invited everyone to \u201caccept the grace of Christ\u2019s Resurrection,\u201d and then defined that grace as the transformation that occurs when we receive God\u2019s mercy in our hearts so deeply that we begin to share it: \u201cLet us be renewed by God\u2019s mercy, let us be loved by Jesus, let us enable the power of His love to transform our lives, too; and let us become agents of this mercy.\u201d <\/p>\n
These are powerful words as we approach Divine Mercy Sunday as the culmination of the Easter Octave on Sunday. <\/p>\n
This connection between Easter and the assimilation and sharing of God\u2019s mercy Jesus Himself will underline at Mass on Sunday in the Gospel we\u2019ll hear. <\/p>\n
Jesus\u2019 first act upon appearing to His Apostles was to wish them peace and then make them capable of bringing peace between God and human beings out to the world. \u201cJust as the Father sent Me, so I send you,\u201d He declared, and we know that the Father sent Jesus into the world as the Lamb of God to take away the world\u2019s sins. He breathed on them the power of the Holy Spirit \u2014 since only God can forgive sins \u2014 and said, \u201cThose whose sins you forgive are forgiven; those whose sins you retain are retained,\u201d setting up the essential structure of the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. The only way the Apostles, their successors and their priest collaborators would know which sins to forgive and retain would be if people told them their sins. <\/p>\n
Jesus did this all on Easter Sunday night because the way we experience His Resurrection is through Reconciliation. He emphasized this connection in the Parable of the Prodigal Son when the father said: \u201cMy son was dead and has come back to life again.\u201d Every Reconciliation, therefore, is meant to be a resurrection. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s why it\u2019s so fitting that Divine Mercy Sunday be the exclamation point on the joy of the Easter Octave. <\/p>\n
One of the reasons why, I believe, that Divine Mercy is not just another devotion, is because it is essential for the true joy and reality of Easter to penetrate our hearts and for us to relate to the Lord as He desires and deserves to be loved. <\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t enough in the 12th and 13th centuries, for example, for the truth about the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist to be grasped intellectually. Jesus desired that this reality pass from our heads, to our hearts to our knees, and through Blessed Juliana of Li\u00e8ge, Father Peter of Prague, St. Thomas Aquinas and other instruments, brought about true Eucharistic piety and appreciation for Christ in what He would later call the \u201cSacrament of love.\u201d The feast of Corpus Christi, Eucharistic adoration, 40-hour devotions and other practices were all born from this desire of the Lord, not because He was a hypersensitive narcissist who wanted our attention and appreciation \u2014 far from it! \u2014 but because He wanted to transform and bless us through our taking His real presence seriously. <\/p>\n
He did the same thing with His mercy, first through stimulating devotion to His Sacred Heart and then, in the 1930s, through His apparitions to St. Faustina Kowalska, asking her to bring to the world His desire for us to recognize our need for His mercy, come to receive it in the way He established, and, having been transformed by it, begin to share it with others. <\/p>\n
In a world with so much unexpiated guilt leading to ceaseless cycles of violence, vengeance, hatred, and interpersonal and international wars, Jesus candidly declared that the world will not have peace until it turns to receive and share His mercy. Jesus established five practices by which we could grow in love of Him as Mercy Incarnate. These are practices that are destined to lead not only to personal renewal, but parochial and ecclesial renewal \u2014 and through ecclesial renewal, to bring about the renewal of the world. <\/p>\n
The type of renewal by God\u2019s mercy that Pope Francis talked about on Sunday in St. Peter\u2019s Square has been one of the central ideas of his approach to the faith throughout his life. <\/p>\n
We examined last week how he discovered his own vocation as a 16-year-old boy through his experience of God\u2019s mercy in the confessional and how, through his motto \u201cMiserando atque Eligendo,\u201d he is announcing to the world that the Lord chooses us to be His disciples precisely through looking at us with a glance of loving mercy. <\/p>\n
An authentically Christian discipleship begins with our recognition that we\u2019re sinners in need of salvation and the concomitant experience that that Savior looks on us with merciful love. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, feeling oneself a sinner is one of the most beautiful things that can happen, if it leads to its ultimate consequences\u201d the future Pope Francis said in a 2010 book length interview, \u201cEl Jesuita.\u201d At the Easter Vigil, he says, we sing \u201cO Felix culpa,\u201d exulting in the \u201chappy sin\u201d that brought us to experience the love of the Redeemer. \u201cWhen a person becomes conscious that he is a sinner and is saved by Jesus, he proclaims this truth to himself and discovers the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field. He discovers the greatest thing in life: that there is someone Who loves him profoundly, Who gave His life for him.\u201d <\/p>\n
Many Catholics have sadly not had this fundamental Christian experience, he lamented. \u201cThere are people who believe the right things, who have received catechesis and accepted the Christian faith in some way, but who do not have the experience of having been saved.\u201d <\/p>\n
He then gave a powerful metaphor of what the authentic experience of God\u2019s mercy is like. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing when people tell us a story about someone risking his life to save a boy drowning in the river. It\u2019s something else when I\u2019m the one drowning and Someone gives His life to save me.\u201d <\/p>\n
That\u2019s what Christ did for us to save us from the eternal watery grave of the deluge of sin, a truth we celebrate with jubilation on Divine Mercy Sunday. That\u2019s what we should celebrate every day of our life, just like someone whose life has been saved by a hero would never be able to forget his Savior or thank Him enough. <\/p>\n
Unfortunately, he said, \u201cThere are people to whom you tell the story who don\u2019t see it, who don\u2019t want to see, who don\u2019t want to know what happened to that boy, who always have escape hatches from the situation of drowning and who therefore lack the experience of who they are. I believe that only we great sinners have this grace.\u201d <\/p>\n
The experience of God\u2019s mercy \u2014 which the Divine Mercy devotion fosters \u2014 helps us to experience who we really are: Unless we see ourselves as great sinners rescued by the merciful, life-giving love of our Savior, we don\u2019t yet grasp who God is, who we are, and how to have life to the full. <\/p>\n
The future pope defined himself in \u201cEl Jesuita\u201d as a \u201csinner who has been loved by the mercy of God in a privileged way.\u201d And he\u2019s seeking to help us all to see ourselves through the same lenses. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s the path to our living our faith with as much joy and self-giving as we\u2019ve all been marveling to see in Francis. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fr. Roger J. Landry The Anchor Putting Out Into The Deep April 05, 2013 On Sunday, Pope Francis in his Easter greeting before his solemn blessing for the city and the world (Urbi et Orbi), said that greatest Easter wish would be for \u201cevery heart\u201d to recognize that \u201cJesus is risen, there is hope for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1013,708],"tags":[1693,1018,1019,1020],"class_list":["post-3673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anchor-column","category-articles","tag-1693","tag-column","tag-putting-into-the-deep","tag-the-anchor"],"yoast_head":"\n