Having taken a detour to the final paragraph of Spe Salvi in last week’s Easter Sunday article, I would like to return to our ordered progression through this beautiful document on Christian hope. On this Octave Day of Easter, we continue to bask in the light of Christ’s Resurrection, the reason for our hope in eternal life, won for us by His victory.
After having addressed the problem of a purely individualistic hope, and seeing how our being members of the Church necessarily involves a hope that is rooted in the unity of brothers and sisters in Christ, the Holy Father proposes an interesting reflection on one of the ways in which this “community-oriented vision of the ‘blessed life’” (SS 15) has been lived out in the history of the Church. He writes about the rise of monasteries in the Middle Ages. The Holy Father writes:
It was commonly thought that monasteries were places of flight from the world (contemptus mundi) and of withdrawal from responsibility for the world, in search of private salvation. Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired a multitude of young people to enter the monasteries of his reformed Order, had quite a different perspective on this. In his view, monks perform a task for the whole Church and hence also for the world. (ibid.)
One of the images St. Bernard uses when speaking about the role for the good of the Church that monasteries play is the image of “tilling the soil” in order to prepare a new Paradise. The one who labors, that is the one who goes off to this way of life, is preparing that new Paradise for themselves and for the whole Church. Here is how St. Benard explains it:
A wild plot of forest land is rendered fertile—and in the process, the trees of pride are felled, whatever weeds may be growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is thereby prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish. (ibid.)
Pope Benedict concludes this paragraph with the question: “Are we not perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current history, that no positive world order can prosper where souls are overgrown?” (ibid.)
I think these points provide a nice lead into the message the Church proposes for our reflection on this day, that of the Divine Mercy. The message of Divine Mercy is one that has been more widely proclaimed for the past twenty-five years since Pope St. John Paul II brought it to the Church’s universal awareness. But it is a message that is as old as the Gospel. The Divine Mercy message can be summed up as simply as remembering ABC:
A – Ask for His Mercy. God wants us to approach Him in prayer constantly, repenting of our sins and asking Him to pour His mercy out upon us and upon the whole world.
B – Be merciful. God wants us to receive His mercy and let it flow through us to others. He wants us to extend love and forgiveness to others just as He does to us.
C – Completely trust in Jesus. God wants us to know that all the graces of His mercy can only be received by our trust. The more we open the door of our hearts and lives to Him with trust, the more we can receive. (https://www.thedivinemercy.org/message)
The message of Divine Mercy is a message of hope that the whole world needs to hear. By following the above formula, we do the spiritual work of “tilling the soil” in our hearts and for the world, preparing us for that new Paradise that awaits us. Let us therefore be generous in living this message.