When Wounds Become Fountains of Mercy
I find myself saying to people in the confessional, “We have to let Jesus be for us what we’re trying to be for others.” That is, I have to let Jesus be patient with me if I am to be patient with others. I have to let him be gentle and understanding with me if I want to be gentle and understanding with others. Perhaps this is one way to understand what Our Lord meant when he said, “Love one another as I love you.”
I can’t give what I don’t have, but if I let Jesus pour mercy into me then I will have mercy to offer to others. Or, as he said to the woman at the well, “If you knew who was asking you for water you would ask him for water, and he would give you a life-giving water.” And he goes on to say that the water that he gives will well up like a spring inside of that person. Staying with that image of water pouring forth from within a person like a spring, let’s remember the image of the Divine Mercy that Saint Faustina had commissioned.
We can see the blood and water which gushed forth from the heart of Jesus as a fountain of mercy for us. This is the living water in which we trust. When Saint John said, “It is not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us,” he means that mercy can flow through us if we allow God to be merciful with us.
I don’t want to be abstract or overly pious about this so let me give a couple of examples of what it might look like for wounds to become fountains of mercy.
Say my wife is unfaithful to me with another man and I discover the infidelity. She shows little remorse, saying only that I should have seen it coming. How can I forgive her? It begins with my going to confession myself, not to make excuses for my wife, but to confess my own sins and to receive from him the mercy that I desire to offer my wife.
If I give God permission to heal my own infidelities then my sins can be transformed into springs of mercy welling up from within me. When I’m tempted to be emotionally abusive to my wife because of how she hurt me I can return in my memory to the sins I’ve been forgiven myself, where I find they’ve become like springs of life-giving water.
I can forgive the person who cuts me off on the road by recalling times that God has forgiven me. I was the obnoxious young person, but I have been treated mercifully. I don’t want to be like that servant in the parable who is reproached by the king for refusing to forgive his fellow servant a much smaller debt than the one he himself had been forgiven by the king.
But if we confess our own sins, they can become “the stuff that God uses to make us saints,” as my one friend put it years ago. And today, on this Feast of Saint Faustina, I would like to say that the sins we confess - the wounds in our own hearts that we allow God to heal - become the very source of the mercy we’re trying so hard to offer to one another.
How was it that Saint John Paul II could forgive the man who shot him? He himself confessed his own personal sins regularly. Long before suffering the physical wounds of the bullets, the Holy Father had been allowing God to heal his own wounds, which in turn would become fountains of mercy for the world.
What would it look like for us to become “apostles of mercy” like Saint Faustina and Saint John Paul II? It would look like forgiveness. And forgiveness continues to be the only means by which a person is saved. The hearts of our loved ones will change when we stop trying to change them ourselves, and start witnessing to the change of heart that we are allowing Christ to accomplish in us. +
