LOVE AND SACRIFICE THAT MAINTAIN THE WORLD’S EXISTENCE
The vision of Mary, our Defender and Advocate, inspired Sister Faustina to follow her. Faustina undertakes, with the greatest devotion that she could afford, a plea to dismiss God's punishment from her homeland, but she was fully aware that her intercession would be worth little if it were not included in the intercession of the Holy Mother and if its effectiveness did not come from the Lord Jesus. " If it were not for the Mother of God, all our efforts would be of little use. I intensified my prayers and sacrifices for our dear native land, but I see that I am a drop before the wave of evil.
How can a drop stop a wave? O yes! A drop is nothing of itself, but with You, Jesus, I shall stand up bravely to the whole wave of evil and even to the whole of hell. Your omnipotence can do all things. "(Diary 686).
With the conviction that if she had not been associated with Jesus, she and her prayers and sacrifices would mean nothing and achieve nothing, Faustina often expresses on the pages of the Diary. Sometimes she feels that her prayer and sacrifice are not only included in Jesus' prayer and sacrifice, but are also part of it and therefore must be heard:
"O my God, I am conscious of my mission in the Holy Church. It is my constant endeavor to plead for mercy for the world. I unite myself closely with Jesus and stand before Him as an atoning sacrifice on behalf of the world. God will refuse me nothing when I entreat Him with the voice of his son. My sacrifice is nothing in itself, but when I join it to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, it becomes all-powerful and has the power to appease divine wrath "( Diary 482). It is not difficult to refrain here from recalling the concept of "omnipotentia precans" developed in Mariology.
("omnipotentia precans" - "almighty power of prayer" - a term developed based on the words recorded in the Gospel according to Saint Mark (11:24); if the prayer of us, ordinary people, can get so much from God, then what is the prayer power of the Mother of the Son of God!). But do not ignore the next sentence recorded by Faustina: " God loves us in His Son; the painful Passion of the Son of God constantly turns aside the wrath of God.” (Diary 482).
The psychology of Faustina's perception of what her intercession turns out to be even more complicated: it is God himself who tells her that he likes her and her intercession for sinners, and she increasingly feels her unworthiness and nothingness: " Unending is my interior astonishment that the Most High Lord is pleased in me and tells me so Himself. And I immerse myself even deeper in my nothingness because I know what I am of myself. "(Diary 947). We have here somewhat an empirical confirmation of the truth of what the Apostle Paul wrote: " yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20).
It seems here - in a love that unites us more and more with Christ and draws those who are distant from Him - lies the key to an authentic understanding of the images by which Saint Faustina presents the need and effectiveness of alleviating God's wrath on sinners, and save the world from God's punishment.
Let us pay particular attention to the three images appearing on the pages of the Diary: the image of God's friends supporting a sinful world in existence that would have long ago collapsed, the image of the restraining hands of God intending to punish, and the image of disarming God's anger.
Let's look at the first of these images. The idea of the righteous, shielding the world from God's punishment, appears already in the scene of the bargaining of Abraham with God for the fate of Sodom (see Gen 18: 23-33).
In Judaism, this idea took the form of the conviction that thirty-six righteous only known to God protect the world from destruction. In the Christian tradition, it was expressed, in faith in the particular effectiveness of prayer for the world, which people devoted to God to bring it to heaven.
"Thanks to the monks - wrote Silouan of Athos- prayer never ceases on earth, and this is needed for the whole world, because it lasts through prayer; when prayer weakens, the world will perish; when there are no prayers on earth, the world will die, great calamities will come, they are now. The world exists thanks to the prayer of the saints."
Of course, it is not a foreign idea for Sister Faustina that " the world’s existence is maintained by chosen souls; that is, the religious orders." (Diary 1434).
She writes: "Woe to the world when there will be a lack of religious orders!" (ibid.) However, once during one of the apparitions, the Lord Jesus complained to her that among religious souls he did not find complete devotion to his love: " So many reservations, so much distrust, so much caution. To comfort you, let Me tell you that there are souls living in the world who love Me dearly. I dwell in their hearts with delight. But they are few. In convents too, there are souls that fill My Heart with joy. They bear My features; therefore, the Heavenly Father looks upon them with special pleasure. They will be a marvel to Angels and men. Their number is very small. They are a defense for the world before the justice of the Heavenly Father and a means of obtaining mercy for the world. The love and sacrifice of these souls sustain the world in existence. "(Diary 367).
Careful reading the notes of the "secretary of God's mercy" suggests that the special similarity of these few souls to the crucified Jesus is realized by something more than just imitating Him. They somehow fall into his passion, somehow, they identify with their crucified Savior.
At the end of the carnival of 1937, Faustina writes: " During the last two days of the carnival, I experienced the overwhelming flood of chastisements and sins.
In one instant the Lord gave me knowledge of the sins committed throughout the whole world during these days. I fainted from fright, and even though I know the depth of God’s mercy, I was surprised that God allows humanity to exist. And the Lord gave me to know who it is that upholds the existence of mankind: it is the chosen souls."(Diary 926; cf. Diary 1533).
A year earlier, at the end of January 1936, Faustina - speaking of those few souls who are “the victims who sustain the world and who fill up what is lacking in the Passion of Jesus."(Diary 604) – she writes: " Truly, all those torments seem as nothing to me compared with the glory that is awaiting us for all eternity "(Dairy 605). This is probably the only place in the Diary from which we learn that its author also saw herself among those souls.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george