Divine Mercy in the Light of Mt. Carmel

Divine Mercy image at Vilnius, Lithuania

Catholics all over the world celebrate the first Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday, after our Lord Jesus appeared to St. Faustina Kowalska to spread the devotion of the Divine Mercy throughout the world. As we celebrate and glorify God for this important feast day, let us reflect on the words shared by some of our great Carmelite saints on the aspect of mercy.

So dearly does His Majesty love us that He will reward our love for our neighbor by increasing the love which we bear to Himself, and that is a thousand ways. - St. Teresa of Avila

We can never have too much confidence in the good God who is so powerful and so merciful. We obtain from Him as much as we hope for. 

The guest of our soul knows our misery; He comes to find an empty tent within us--that is all He asks.

- St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face

Oh Lord, my life and my strength, one of the greatest of the divine mercies which you have bestowed upon me is to deign to invite a creature so sinful and ungrateful as I am to love Your majesty. In Your presence the heavenly seraphim veil their faces, dazzled by the splendor of the of the divinity and the fire of Your love. I am honored by the liberality and the same time impelled to love You in return for Your love and for the desire that you have to unite me to Your heart, that sweet refuge to which I long to fly that I may find repose therein. – Ven. John of Jesus Mary, Divine Intimacy 

When one gets to know God, when in the silence of prayer He overshadows our soul with a ray of His infinite beauty; when He overshadows our mind with His wisdom and power; when He inflames us with His goodness and mercy; then everything on earth is seen with sadness. - St. Teresa of Jesus of the Andes

No matter how earnestly beginners in all their actions and passions practice the mortification of self, they will never be able to do so entirely--far from it--until God accomplishes it in them passively by means of the purgation of this night. - St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul