Pillars of Fire In My Soul

her entire life into God’s loving hands with a child-like faith and trust. Without cultivating purity, the innocence of wonder, of delight in God’s creation, of joy in God’s mercy is not pos- sible. St. Faustina opened her heart in pure innocence to allow Jesus to use her as an instrument to remind the world of Divine Mercy. Love of God The third quality that Mary asked Helen to practice was love of God. Jesus tells us that the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds, and all our strength. Since God is love, any time we love — ourselves, others, or any of God’s creatures or creations — we are practicing love of God. Most of us are asked to love in little ways, to bring an attitude of love to the events and people that make up our lives. Again St. Faustina’s life inspires us to find small ways to practice enormous love for God. As with most practices, seeing loving kindness modeled at home helps us to act in a similar way. Helen’s mother set a good example of love for her children. For instance, every day Marianna brought a hot lunch to Stanislaus wherever he happened to be working as a carpenter. She made good use of the walk home to gather wood for the family fire. As a general rule, when it was a question of discipline, her sons remembered that she tempered the father’s severity with understanding compassion. Yet Stanislaus, too, modeled love for God for his family by his hard work on their behalf, his heartfelt ritual of daily prayer, and his cherished practice of reading stories of monks and hermits to the children. Helen seems to have cultivated a similar disposition of ready willingness to help others and show loving kindness towards her family and other people — as well as the animals that came under her care. From earliest childhood Helen seemed to have a sense that unless God was at the center of her life, life was meaningless. The Road to Canonization 153