As many of us know, this year has been declared a Jubilee Holy Year of Mercy by Pope Francis, which should remind all of us that Divine Mercy is not just a devotion practiced right after Easter each year but rather, a game plan we should follow every day.
I never cease to be amazed by how many otherwise devoted Catholics have either never heard of Divine Mercy or know very little about this beautiful and profound message from Heaven.
The message and devotion is based on the writings of Saint Faustina Kowalska, an uneducated Polish nun who, in obedience to her spiritual director, wrote a diary recording the revelations she received about God’s mercy. Its message is both simple and profound, and stands as the perfect antidote to the self-hate that is sin.
The Message
The Divine Mercy Message is simply that God loves all of us more than we hate ourselves. The reason we can make the above statement is that God is all perfect and all love, and He cannot create anyone, or anything, that is not essentially good and worthwhile.
God created each of us with a sacred purpose, a special and unique mission in this life, and it is our job to discern, discover, develop, and implement that purpose and mission of our lives. As Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos once stated, “No one was ever lost because his sin was too great, but because his trust was too small.”
Because God’s love is so great, so is His mercy, and because that mercy is greater than our sins, we should always approach Our Lord with trust, receive His mercy, and let it flow through us to others. In fact, this message is as simple as ABC:
A….Ask for His Mercy through constant prayer, repentance, and petitions for that Mercy.
B….Be merciful to others by extending love and forgiveness.
C….Completely trust in Jesus in that the more we trust in Him, the more we will receive.
Sin as Self-Hate
We know that the devil is the embodiment of hate, lies, and disobedience. Given so much from God, his core sin is that he did not want to serve, but to be served. In wanting to be greater than God, Lucifer embodied the exact opposite of what God stands for.
Having thrown away his gifts from God, the devil wants nothing more than to entice us to do the same. Nothing enrages him more than the fact that we have each been given the ingredients, and the mission, to become saints in the service of God. Having rejected his graces, satan wants us to do the same, and he knows that pulling us from our goodness, and toward our human insecurity and weakness, is the key to doing just that.
Consequently, the last thing that satan wants us to remember is that we can achieve great things in the name and service of God. He wants us to find ourselves incapable, hopelessly lacking in the “impossible” task of ever doing any good.
At some level, we know that God’s love and mercy for us is so great that it makes no sense to our simple, human limitation. This love and mercy contradicts satan’s lie that we are worthless and pathetically ill-equipped to make any difference in God’s plan.
Since satan does not want us to be on the team that God is always welcoming us into, the evil one will do anything and everything to get us to quit, to surrender, to the ultimate lie that we are merely God’s misfit toys, not meant or fit to aspire to holiness, much less sanctity.
Since God’s open arms despite our defects make no sense to us, sin becomes our unique opportunity and strategy to sabotage ourselves. If God is all love, then, sin becomes the singular and collective expression of self-hate, the self-fulfilling prophecy of a doomed eternity in despair that we deserve as fallen followers of a fallen leader.
Divine Mercy as The Ultimate Antidote to Sin
If the gap between God’s goodness and our defect is so great, so seemingly insurmountable, then the direct, simplistic response to that perceived gap is to surrender, to stop wasting our time trying to be something we cannot ever be.
Why try to be more like Jesus, when we are a lot more like the devil? This is hell’s propaganda for perdition, but we do not have to buy that propaganda.
Therein is the ultimate twist of Divine Mercy. Namely, that we are not called or expected to grasp for a perfection of which we are innately incapable as defective human beings. Such a misguided effort will merely lead to frustration, defeat, desperation, and surrender, not to mention the inherent self-obsession of those wrapped up in their ups and downs.
Rather, Divine Mercy lovingly and patiently asks us to admit our limitations, seek forgiveness and forgive in return, and love God so much that we dare to offer our defective selves in His service despite the fact that our self-appraisal of our own value, worth, qualification, and merit for that service is so apparently pathetic.
At the end of the day, following Christ is not about happily skipping on some cloud without faltering or falling. If we have learned anything from this world, it is that following Our Lord is more about getting up from the falls and stumbles than pretending that we can always avoid them.
Christ never promised us that we would never fall while following Him, but that He would always be there to help us get up again. It is no coincidence, I think, that the word “sin” in Spanish means “without”, for sin is truly choosing to be “without” God.
Let us recall that the principle difference between Peter and Judas was that Peter loved Jesus too much to not get up from his fall, while Judas loved himself too much to forgive himself for his stumble. Let us also recall that the good thief crucified next to Our Lord would become St. Dismas after repenting for his wrongs, while the other thief would be eternally doomed because of his refusal to admit and repent his imperfection.
In this beautiful year of Divine Mercy, let us resolve to love God with such trust, obedience, and dedication that we will always get up to follow His purpose in our lives regardless of our own misguided efforts to sabotage that purpose.
12 thoughts on “Divine Mercy as The Perfect Antidote to The Self-Hate of Sin”
Please could you explain practically how i can use the Divine Mercy as an antidote to self hatred….I’m a new convert, also have ptsd together with ocd, anorexia and a history of severe selfharm. I’m also lgbt but married in a heterosexual marriage. However much i try i cannot seem to escape the vicious and lifethreatening vortex of self hatred that torments me daily for all i am and fail to be. If you could offer advice that would be wonderful. Thank you so much. Alys
Thank you for your testimony. People get crosses. I have met a few survivors of the Soviet prison system. In the town here in Estonia where I do my shopping there was a small Nazi concentration camp. I think my parents suffered from PTSD in their exile decades, in part through the Hitler war. The daughter of one of my 1970s university friends died of anorexia a few years ago. Even these things are in a way no more chilling than the stuff people encounter every day in wealthy cities in North America – like the street person I met in Toronto perhaps ten years ago, who told me (a) that he was homeless because his small income was insufficient for paying rent, once he had bought his necessary medications, and (b) that his own children, aware of his homelessness, felt he had to find his own solution to his problems. When I see North American stuff like this, I sometimes feel as though North America deserves the full, terrible, chalice which people drank here in Europe in the 20th century – the dictators, the troops, the flames, the gulags. Nevertheless, I would offer the thought that in the economy of the Kingdom suffering does not go to waste. Your own suffering, once stated in clear testimony as you have stated it, makes it easier for others to bear their own. I know that reading your words today has helped me personally, at what is here a harsh and morally equivocal time. – If it would help you to correspond, do send me an e-mail, via toomas dot karmo at gmail dot com. Alternatively, or additionally, you might find it helpful to read Jerome K. Jerome’s words on sorrow, which I reproduce in blog format at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/2016/09/toomas-karmo-extract-from-victorian.html .
Well….you say that “God cannot create anyone of anything which is not good nor worthwhile.” A psychopath is a person which is devoid of conscience and incapable of rehabilitation … they kill, abuse, steal, etc without an aware of right or wrong. Alfredo Ballí Treviño who was the model for Hannibal Lecter was a psychopath and by definition a psychopath is a product of nature (genetics) while a sociopath is a product of nurture. The list is there…please show me goodness or worthwhileness in these creatures. Either your statement is true in every case, or if not in every case then untrue. Please justify your position rationally.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201401/how-tell-sociopath-psychopath
This Truth, not a position one takes, it is Truth. Jesus is Truth. We are all made in His image to know, love, obey and serve our Creator. Adam and Eve, chose to sin and turn against the Lord, thus paradise was lost. We choose sin. We choose to do evil. Evil, is within all of us. Is it just as evil, if I turn my back and do not cloth the naked, feed the hungry, comfort the forsaken? When I gossip and slander one who hurt me, because of my pride. It was Judas’s pride, that he could not repent and ask for forgivenes. We know Our Lord closely and still choose sin, imagine one who has never known The Lord and the darkness they are in.
“We choose sin” you say and it is true for the vast majority of humanity. A psychopath does not choose to be a psychopath, he/she is simply born that way, with NO conscience. There are exceptions to every belief …A psychopath, as I gave evidence, does not choose evil, he/she is evil and not able to be rehabilitated. Prove me wrong using science or psychiatry, the DSM….
Even a psychopath can choose to NOT act on the impulses. Jeffrey Dalhmer knew he could not, once released from prison, resist the temptation to kill and cannibalize. So he begged the court to give him a life sentence and the court obliged him. In his plea he told the court exactly why he wanted to be locked up for the rest of his life: so he would not harm anyone again. It took self awareness on his part to 1) recognize the serious weakness in himself and 2) not only realize he was a danger to others but to choose to not be that danger. While in prison, he converted to Christianity before being beaten to death by other inmates.
Dahmer was a sociopath, not a psychopath. “Psychopathy is related to a physiological defect that results in the underdevelopment of the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and emotions. Sociopathy, on the other hand, is more likely the product of childhood trauma and physical/emotional abuse. Because sociopathy appears to be learned rather than innate, sociopaths are capable of empathy in certain limited circumstances but not in others, and with a few individuals but not others.” Psychology Today.Scott Bonn, PhD 1-22-14
Adam, by your own definitions you admit that psychopaths are incapable of feeling guilt, sympathy etc. Numerous morality authorities have added that they are actually incapable of committing mortal sin since they may not even have the cognitive ingredients to fulfill the requirements for committing a mortal sin. Christ’s Divine Mercy extends to those of us who consciously sin yet repent and seek forgiveness and mercy. I would imagine that, if a psychopath does not even feel guilt, he is therefore incapable of asking for forgiveness. Furthermore, if he or she does not even think what he has done is wrong, his actions may not even be sins. While those actions are evil, I would ask you if you think a person sleepwalking who butchers someone deserves to go to hell for that act? I am not God, and I do not presume to know who can or cannot be saved, but I have to wonder why you feel the need to stain the beautiful notion of Divine Mercy with the particular example of psychopaths. We should leave that issue to God, and practice the humility that is required for our own salvation for, if we are not careful, a long line of psychopaths will enter Heaven way ahead of us as we arrogantly presume to judge who should or not be saved. By the way, making sport of trapping Christ’s Mercy was a diversion which the Pharisees did not use productively.
My response was to the fact that God cannot create anyone or anything not good nor worthwhile. My response dealt only with psychopaths…neither good nor worthwhile beings. Using your line of reasoning and extending it genetics can excuse many more evils in the world….not sure you want to go there! A psychopath is the embodiment of pure evil….a genetically hypersexualized person, although genetically determined, is culpable, etc.
I repeat…leave that to God, and worry about your own salvation and saving those you can. To say that Psychopaths are completely without value is to say that nothing good can come from them. However, if we pray for them, good comes from that so, even in their evil, some good can come from Psychopaths. To say that those people are simply a waste and should never have been created is to say that God makes mistakes…do you want to go there? Let’s just leave it at that since we will likely never convince the other anyway.
Rationally, then, we are talking about goodness in terms of being, not in terms of right and wrong. There are transcendental properties that apply to all things in existence: they are good, true, one (and some argue, the beautiful). In their very existence all things are good, but the person can be morally evil and thus have the absence of the moral good/virtue . It is a shame that English does not have a word distinction for Good and good, but there you have it.
Thomas Aquinas talks a lot about transcendentalism and moral good and evil. You may want to read him.
You say…”….and He cannot create anyone, or anything, that is not essentially good and worthwhile.
Well, a psychopath is a “person” in all simplicity born without the capacity of conscience. This condition is a function of nature (genetics) rather than nurture (sociopath). There is no cure for psychopathy as there is an resolute absence of conscience, ie Hannibal Lecter. God created psychopaths? Psychopaths are essentially good? And worthwhile? And explanation would be appropriate….
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201401/how-tell-sociopath-psychopath