Saint Faustina showed me how to prepare for my death, and that preparation is going to take the rest of my life…
I love Saint Faustina.
She is the sort of Saint who I knew nothing about until my sister asked me to read her Diary – and that was it… I simply loved her.
Saint Faustina was a nun who was terribly sick for most of her life with tuberculosis of the intestines. And despite her terrible suffering and illness, her diagnosis came so late that there was nothing to be done to alleviate her suffering.
Saint Faustina died – as she had lived – alone in her room, but for the presence of God.
During her life, Saint Faustina received many revelations from Christ and His Blessed Mother and even the angels and saints… In April 1937 Christ said to Saint Faustina, “Souls who spread the honour of My mercy I shield through their entire lives as a tender mother her infant, and at the hour of death I will not be a Judge for them, but the Merciful Saviour. At that last hour, a soul has nothing with which to defend itself except My mercy. Happy is the soul that during its lifetime immersed itself in the Fountain of Mercy, because justice will have no hold on it.” (Diary 1075).
And as I have been reflecting on the life of this Saint, I have also been thinking about the sacrifices that people make in this life.
There are sacrifices that are voluntary. And we always seem to hear a lot about those during certain times, like the Lenten season as we prepare for Easter. These sacrifices could relate to things like abstaining from Social Media for a period of time or fasting from food or drink at certain times or on certain days. Historically, people wore hair shirts or flagellated themselves as a deliberate voluntary sacrifice to atone for sin.
But here are other sacrifices too, and they can be terribly difficult to bear – because they are involuntary. You see, these sacrifices are the sacrifices that we have to simply accept. They are sickness, grief, pain, sorrow and loss. These are the things that we would never chose and yet we cannot avoid.
And I have been reflecting on the purposes of all these sacrifices – both voluntary and involuntary…
I mean, why do we need to offer sacrifices? What good does it do to make a sacrifice?
Well, since the fall of humankind, death is inevitable. We all will die so that we can be reborn into new life. And just as a baby is born – naked and alone – so too do we all die naked and alone.
In order to die naked and alone, we must GIVE away every single thing that we have ever earned or done in this world, because in death, EVERYTHING is given away… And, it is in this way that when we sacrifice or offer our suffering to God, what we are doing is PRACTICING death. We are practicing what it will be to die. And the more we practice the thing, the better we will be able to perform in the real event.
So it only makes sense that we must sacrifice – in a real and logical manner – so that when the FINAL TEMPTATION comes and we do actually die, we will be able to do so in a way that helps to sanctify us and we will not give into temptation.
And when I think about that today, I love Saint Faustina even more. Because she showed me how to prepare for my death. And that preparation is going to take the rest of my life…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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