Sister Faustina Kowalska: Her LIfe and MIssion

assurances of th is - gave joy which overwhelmed all her pains, and S ister F au s tina on h e r deathbed, h e r "bed of pain" was cheerful and smiling, though th in and altered to such a degree th a t "it was painful to look a t her", as some of the sisters who visited h e r said. The Diary also reflects th e image of someone equable and full of inner happiness. We can find a g rea t number of verses with a lyrical character, which show in full the mood she was then in. The Diary is a uniform song of pra ise to th e Divine Mercy. The circumstances in which th is poetic creativity arose rem inds us of ano ther troubadour of God’s love -St. Francis of Assisi. With both of these two, a body destroyed by disease had no effect on the basic equi­ librium of th e ir souls, which to the contrary - as if independently - blossomed in th e rays of God’s love and grace in a m a tu rity full of harmony, making energetic attem p ts to express in words w ha t was filling the h e a r t, and finding an appropriate ou tlet in a poetic use of rhyme and rhythm . St. Francis, in h is poetry, sings of God’s Creation about him, glorifying both the light and the da rk side of it, while S ister F au s tina sings the pra ises of th a t Divine Mercy which supports the world. S ister F au s tina ’s poetry is such an im po rtan t p a r t of her witness, especially in the la s t stage of h e r life, th a t it deserves a t le a s t a superficial discussion. Verses began to appear in h e r Diary a t the end of h e r stay in Vilnius, b u t those a ttem p ts , as ye t timid and clumsy in form, were sho rt and infrequent. Their number increased in the la s t two years of h e r life with g rea te r rapidity, which would indicate th a t she had found the most appropriate form for h e r to express wha t she felt and thought. The la s t several score pages of he r Diary are mainly filled with verses. S ister F au s tina ’s poetry strikes one above all for the precision of h e r though t and the clarity of its expres­ sion. Clumsiness, in places very noticeable, is p resen t only in the forms she used. There are m istakes in the 356