Holiness: we must seek it and live it

Father Romeo Salinas is Vocations Director
for the Diocese of Corpus Christi.

We have come through another Lenten season, and in the process have striven to become closer to our Lord. We have been blessed once more to celebrate Easter Sunday in all its splendor and hope for God’s people. We continue now to practice habits newly formed or renewed and strengthened during Lent. 

We should begin and end each day with prayer. We should pray without ceasing. We must strive to draw closer to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and allow her to bring us closer still to Jesus and to renew daily our decision for holiness—to seek it and live it. We must try to go to confession monthly and receive the Holy Eucharist often. 

We have walked with Jesus and Mary through his passion, death and resurrection. We are among the “Blessed…who have not seen and have believed (Jn 20:29).” We must remember that without Jesus there is no salvation and that because he is love and mercy itself, he continues to grant us peace, love and spiritual nourishment for our souls “with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (1 Cor 5:8).”

In 1931, the Lord appeared to Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, an uneducated Polish nun from the Congregation of Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. God presented himself to her in a vision and called on her to deliver the message of his unfathomable love and mercy to the world. She saw Jesus clothed in a white garment with his right hand raised in blessing. His left hand was touching his clothing in the area of the heart, from which two large rays came forth, one red and the other pale. The Lord explained to Sister Faustina that the two rays denoted blood and water.  Water makes souls righteous, and blood is the life of souls. The Lord told St. Faustina to have an image painted according to the model in her vision with the signature, “Jesus, I trust in you.” 

Through prayer and concentration in her years at the convent, Sister Faustina developed childlike trust in God, mercy toward her neighbors and in-depth knowledge of the mystery of Divine Mercy. 

In his book on St. Faustina, “The Divine Mercy Message and Devotion,” Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC writes that God charged her to:

• remind the world and the Church of the truth of God’s mercy for every human being, as revealed in the Scriptures;
• plead for Divine Mercy for the whole world, especially for poor sinners, through the practice of new forms of devotion to the Divine Mercy; and 
• begin the apostolic movement of Divine Mercy, so that followers will proclaim and entreat Divine Mercy for the world and practice the works of mercy, emulating the example of Sister Faustina.

God is love and mercy itself. He loves us no matter how bad our sins. We must repent of our sins; approach the Lord in prayer and ask him to pour his mercy out upon us and upon the whole world; we must extend that same love and forgiveness to others as he does to us. We must trust completely in his love and mercy for us as we ask for these graces, for without asking to receive these graces they will not be ours. God cannot and will not force these graces upon us; we must pray for them of our own free will with repentant and trusting hearts. We must come to our Lord with total and complete trust, for trust is the essence of his Divine Mercy. 

Through St. Faustina, the Lord gave us means for receiving the graces of Divine Mercy: the image of the Divine Mercy; the feast of Divine Mercy; the chaplet of Divine Mercy; the novena to Divine Mercy; and the Hour of Great Mercy. All these means of devotion draw us back to the Holy Eucharist.  

As nature proclaims the coming of spring with an awakening and nurturing of new life on earth, so we must look to the continued renewal and cultivation of our strength and resolution in prayer, faith and knowledge of God’s unfathomable love and mercy for all of us. Easter Sunday and Divine Mercy Sunday are opportune times to awaken our hearts to God, who is love and mercy incarnate and our creator.  

Waking to God’s love is choosing holiness by going to confession; receiving the Holy Eucharist; praying; and having the strength to be merciful to others, beginning with our own families. We must model for them, as the saints did for us, the willingness to trust in God’s will; this is seeking true holiness; this is reaching for eternity; this is finding our true vocation.