Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

Mother, He explained to Faustina exactly what He meant in diary entry no. 529: On the evening of the last day [November 15] of the nove- na at Ostra Brama [in Vilnius], after the singing of the litany, one of the priests exposed the Blessed Sacrament in the mon- strance.When he placed it on the altar, I immediately saw the Infant Jesus, stretching out His little arms, first of all toward His Mother, who at that time had taken on a living appear- ance. When the Mother of God was speaking to me, Jesus stretched out His tiny hands toward the congregation. The Blessed Mother was telling me to accept all that God asked of me like a little child, without questioning; otherwise it would not be pleasing to God. At that moment, the Infant Jesus vanished, and the Mother of God was again lifeless, and her picture was the same as it had been before. But my soul was filled with great joy and gladness, and I said to the Lord, “Do with me as You please; I am ready for everything, but You, O Lord, must not abandon me even for a moment.” We should not underestimate the sheer heroism that our Lord was requesting of St. Faustina here. To “accept all...without questioning” and to be “ready for everything” involved a total surrender to divine providence. There was nothing childish, sugary-sweet, or excessively sentimental about this. Rather, it was to be a life of total abandonment of self and trust in God. In fact, Christ infused the same spirit into another great devotee of His Holy Infancy: St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, the “Little Flower.” She called it the way of spiritual child- hood, and she wrote of this in her spiritual autobiography: Jesus has chosen to show me the only way which leads to the divine furnace of love; it is the way of child- like self-surrender, the way of a child who sleeps, afraid of nothing in its Father’s arms. 10 If we ask where St. Thérèse and St. Faustina learned such heroic and total surrender, this complete childlike trust in God, the 26 Jesus, Mercy Incarnate