READING 1
Lamentations 3:21-26
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.” The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
READING 2
From the encyclical Dilexit Nos x 197-199 by Pope Francis
While nothing need be added to the one redemptive sacrifice of Christ, it remains true that our free refusal can prevent the heart of Christ from spreading the “waves of his infinite tenderness” in this world. Again, this is because the Lord wishes to respect our freedom. More than divine justice, it was the fact that Christ’s love might be refused that troubled the heart of Saint Thérèse, because for her, God’s justice is understood only in the light of his love. As we have seen, she contemplated all God’s perfections through his mercy, and thus saw them transfigured and resplendent with love. In her words, “even his justice (and perhaps this even more so than the others) seems to me clothed in love.”1
This was the origin of her Act of Oblation, not to God’s justice but to his merciful love. “I offer myself as a victim of holocaust to your merciful love, asking you to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within you to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of your love.”2 It is important to realize that, for Thérèse, this was not only about allowing the heart of Christ to fill her heart, through her complete trust, with the beauty of his love, but also about letting that love, through her life, spread to others and thus transform the world. Again, in her words, “In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be love… and thus my dream will be realized.”3 The two aspects were inseparably united.
The Lord accepted her oblation. We see that shortly thereafter she stated that she felt an intense love for others and maintained that it came from the heart of Christ, prolonged through her. So she told her sister Léonie: “I love you a thousand times more tenderly than ordinary sisters love each other, for I can love you with the heart of our celestial spouse.”4 Later, to Maurice Bellière she wrote, “How I would like to make you understand the tenderness of the heart of Jesus, what he expects from you!”5
REFLECTION
Mercy (misercordia in Latin) is the Lord’s heart (cor) for our misery (miseria). To receive the Lord’s pent up mercy—mercy that others were not receiving into their misery—St. Thérèse had to enter into their misery. Her willingness to receive His mercy was a willingness to share in the misery of others. For St. Thérèse that came particularly through sharing in the wound of abandonment, the wound of distrust and disbelief particularly suffered by atheists.
It was a wound familiar to her in her own way, because of the repeated experience of abandonment in her childhood—first from her mother’s breast cancer, then from the removal of her wet nurse, then from the loss of her mother through death, then from the departure of her replacement mother, Pauline, who entered Carmel. St. Thérèse knew repeated loss from her earliest years, even while she experienced tremendous love from her Papa.
God used that wound to bring her mystically into the misery of atheists that she could receive the mercy of God for atheists and in some way help to redeem atheists. Her Oblation led her into a supernatural suffering and a supernatural love as she shared the agony and the mercy of the Heart of Jesus.
How is the Lord inviting you to share the miseries of the world so as to receive more mercy from the Heart of Jesus? How is Jesus inviting you to open your heart to receive more of His Love for His little ones and even for the lost ones?
Newman’s Prayer to the Sacred Heart (longer or shorter form)
One of the prayers from the Roman Missal
Act of Oblation to Merciful Love
- Ms A, 83v.; cf. Letter 226 to Father Roulland, 9 May 1897. ↩︎
- Act of Oblation to Merciful Love, 9 June 1895, 2r-2v. ↩︎
- Ms B, 3v. ↩︎
- Letter 186 to Léonie, 11 April 1896. ↩︎
- Letter 258 to l’Abbé Bellière, 18 July 1897. ↩︎
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