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“O my Lord, inflame my heart with love for You,
that my spirit may not grow weary amidst the storms,
the sufferings, and the trials.”
– St. Faustina –
Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, born with the name Helena Kowalska, was a third child of ten born in Poland in 1905. Since the age of seven, she felt a calling through a voice in her soul to the religious life, which then she applied to a convent and was accepted at the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, after she had a vision of Jesus covered with wounds.
Throughout her life, Saint Faustina, known today as the “Apostle of The Divine Mercy”, she had lived a divine life faithful to God and doing His will. Through her, Jesus demanded her to spread and introduce to the world about the merciful of God, through: (1) the Image of The Divine Mercy with the inscription “Jesus, I trust in You”; (2) the Feast of the Divine Mercy on the Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday); (3) The Divine Mercy Chaplet; (4) and the prayer and meditation on His Passion at the Hour of Great Mercy (3 o’clock in the afternoon).
And through this post, I’d like to share some beautiful and meaningful messages from this book about her childlike trust and simplicity towards God, her obedience and acceptance towards her sufferings and God’s will, messages she heard from her confessors, God’s will that becomes her missions, and God’s beautiful way of showing love in her everyday life.
1. Her simplicity, innocence, and child-like attitude
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“I am here. I am here.
I am life. Eternal life.”
(book pg. 71)
But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness.
No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful.
Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
2. Her confessors message to her during her novitiate
“I am here. I am here.
I am life. Eternal life.”
The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.
These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided.
But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.
3. Her humility and courage on sufferings
4. God's love to her on daily life
5. Her obedience, dedication, faith, and love towards God
