Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

answer is readily apparent: to a large extent, they learned it from the childhood of God Himself . They learned it from the Christ Child lying in the manger. He Himself was their inspiration and example. Faustina wrote in diary entry no 1481: Today during Holy Mass I saw the Infant Jesus near my kneeler. He appeared to be about one year old, and He asked me to take Him in my arms. When I did take Him in my arms, He cuddled up close to my bosom and said, “It is good for me to be close to your heart…. I want to teach you spiritual childhood. I want you to be very little, because when you are little, I carry you close to My Heart, just as you are holding Me close to your heart right now.” The childhood of Christ was surely the very epitomy of spiritual childhood. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay was, at the same time, utterly surrendered in His human soul to all that the Father needed Him to do and to suffer. 11 Christ’s Holy Childhood challenges us all to adopt a similar attitude of trust and surrender to our heavenly Father. In our case, however, this attitude of trust and surrender is absolutely necessary to our spiritual cure . For ever since the Fall, sin has been like a spiritual disease, a plague that infects all of humanity. The first step in our recovery , therefore, has to be an act of entrustment of ourselves to the Physician of souls, the Triune God Himself. Before He can do anything for us, before He can effectively help us at all, we have to put our trust in His healing and sanctifying love. That is the only way His merciful love can fully operate on our behalf. In short, one of the reasons the Father sent His Son among us, first of all as a little child, was to show us this way of spir- itual childhood . We were to learn from Him “humility and simplicity.” As He lay in the manger and in His mother’s arms, in complete surrender to her loving care and to His heavenly Father’s plans for Him, so we are to live in simple and humble trust in her maternal intercession, and in God our Father, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 27 Saint Faustina and Devotion to the Christ Child