As this Divine Mercy Sunday comes to a close, it is a joy to dip again into St Faustina's Diary and to be inspired by her to greater love for Jesus and His infinite Mercy.

Passage 1456, St Faustina's prayer
O most gracious Lord, how merciful it is on Your part to judge each one according to his conscience and his discernment, and not according to people's talk. My spirit delights and feeds more and more on Your wisdom, which I am getting to know more and more deeply. And in this, the vastness of Your mercy becomes more and more manifest to me. O my Jesus, the effect of all this knowledge on my soul is that I am being transformed onto a flame of love towards You, O God.

Passage 1466, St Faustina's prayer
Jesus, lover of human salvation, draw all souls to the divine life. May the greatness of Your mercy be praised here on earth and in eternity. O great lover of souls, who in Your boundless compassion opened the salutary fountains of mercy so that weak souls may be fortified in this life's pilgrimage, Your mercy runs through our life like a golden thread and maintains in good order the contact of our being with God. For He does not need anything to make Him happy; so everything is solely the work of His mercy. My senses are transfixed with joy when God grants me a deeper awareness of that great attribute of His; namely, His unfathomable mercy.

Passage 1468 St Faustina records an experience
For quite a long while, I felt pain in my hands, feet and side. Then I saw a certain soul who, profiting from my sufferings, drew near to the Lord. All this for starving souls that they may not die of starvation.

Dear St Faustina, thank you for being such a faithful witness to and prolific secretary of the Mercy of Jesus. We are covered with shame and sorrow at the thought of how few people on this great Feast Day of Mercy actually heard any words about the Mercy of Jesus from a friend, relative, priest or online source. Please intercede before Jesus that the spiritual attacks against our priests that have been stopping them preach fervently about the Mercy of Jesus may be lifted. May the Lord Jesus in His great Mercy deign to remove all the obstacles in the minds and hearts of His priests that are preventing them embracing their calling to be His Missionaries of Mercy. Amen.

St Faustina, pray for us, pray for His priests and pray for all those most in need of the mercy of Jesus. Amen.  

Yes, it has happened again. Another Divine Mercy Sunday Mass that should have been reaping the spiritual harvest from the previous nine days of grace, and what happened? In the middle of the homily the priest mentioned it was Divine Mercy Sunday. That was it.

It was a far cry from what Jesus confided to St Faustina: 'No soul will be justified until it turns with confidence to My Mercy, and that is why the first Sunday after Easter is to be the Feast of Mercy. On that day, priests are to tell everyone about my great and unfathomable Mercy….Tell the confessor that the Image is to be on view in the church…By means of this Image I shall be granting many graces to souls; so let every soul have access to it.' From passage 570 'Divine Mercy in my Soul'

Maybe they lack homily ideas that enable them to preach about Mercy from the liturgical texts.

If so, here is a sample homily:

First Reading Year B: Acts 4:32-35

Something utterly amazing happened to the first Christians in the days and weeks following the first Pentecost. They were spontaneously generous with each other.

Do you remember the passage in Luke chapter 7 when Jesus tells Simon the Pharisee that the woman who had been weeping over His feet and covering them with kisses must have been forgiven much because she showed such great love? These first Christians were just doing what comes naturally after you have had a life-changing encounter with God's Mercy.

Do you remember how cut to the heart the first Christians were after St Peter told them that not only had they colluded in the death of an innocent man - they had colluded in the death of the only begotten Son of God? Many of them would have been in the crowd that Good Friday calling for the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus. Some of them may have been in the group that went to arrest Jesus. Some of them may have taken part in the tortures of Jesus that took place with the permission of the Sanhedrin. They knew they had done serious wrong. They knew they owed God big time. And yet Jesus offered them a place in His Kingdom if they repented and were baptized. For what they had done, major punishment was logically expected. And Jesus offered them peace, forgiveness and an eternal share in His divine life.

These first Christians experienced the unexpected mind-blowingly generous Mercy of God. Therefore they loved much.

And Jesus still offers this today. There is a woman with four grown sons, who back when she was much younger went through four abortions. She knows with certainty that Jesus rescued her from the abyss. Each year Jesus continues to heal deeper layers of her soul. She knows she owes God big time, and her heart is full of love for Jesus her Saviour. Her life she has happily placed at His disposal, generously serving and encouraging all those Jesus brings into her life. Her life still has major challenges, but her trust in the Mercy of Jesus gets her through all of them.

If your life isn't being fueled by constant gratitude to God, then today is the day to have a good long think. How conscious are you that you owe God big time? Because we all do.

Look today at the Image of Divine Mercy. Look at the wounds in the hands, feet and heart of Jesus. They are His promise to us that if we come to Him with all of our sins, wrongdoings, and crimes, that He will forgive us and make us dance with joy. There is nothing that cannot be forgiven through the power of the wounds and blood of Jesus our merciful Saviour. Absolutely nothing that cannot be forgiven.

All we have to do is to humble ourselves, enter the door of the confessional, and in pouring out the miseries of our souls to the priest, encounter the never-to-be-forgotten Mercy of Jesus.

If there is very little joy and generosity in your life, it is a pretty safe bet that you haven't seen the inside of a confessional for quite some time. Jesus is waiting for you there. Do not be afraid. His Mercy is limitless. He wants to heal you. He wants to restore you to full friendship with Him. He wants you to experience the joy and transformation of His forgiveness.

As soon as Mass is over I will be heading straight into the confessional. I will stay there as long as you keep coming. It is not a hardship for me. Every time someone comes to meet Jesus in the confessional, in this wonderful sacrament of Divine Mercy, Jesus shares with me some of the joy He feels when someone seeks His Mercy. It is the joy a junior scrub nurse feels doing her tiny bit to help the great surgeon transform severely mangled bodies into clean healthy bodies.

This Easter was an unusual one for me. Normally I stay in the same place to celebrate Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, because I consider it is a complete journey that you should go through with the same cohort of people. But this Easter I was celebrating it in four different parishes on the four different days.

It was an unusual one for me in another sense as well, because due to Proclaim 2014 I was more conscious of how someone who comes to Church only for Christmas and Easter might perceive what is going on.

And the analysis? All of the parishes scored the same report. Good liturgy, good homilies, reasonable music, soul-stirring stuff, and absolutely no follow-up opportunities for anyone whose soul had been stirred. Where it really counts we could be doing so much better.

If the powerful Good Friday liturgy stirred your soul and you wanted to talk to someone about the existence of God, or what to do about the spiritual experience you had, or about what you could do to take the next step in deepening your relationship with God there was easily found method of doing so. Even parish bulletins don't appear until Sunday. 

It seems at the times we as a parish could do the greatest good for others that we are at our weakest ebb. At regular Sunday Masses we have full complements of wardens, welcomers, extraordinary ministers of holy communion, etc. But at Christmas and Easter at least half of them go away on holidays at the very time that we need double of them. This means at the very least we should be training lots of people to fulfill those roles.

It could do so much good if parishes had an A6 sized prayer card that could be handed out as people arrived, or left on the pews for people to find. Prayer cards with good artwork, a short Gospel quotation or two (appropriate for the liturgical season), information about regular weekend Mass times and sacrament of penance times, telephone and email contact information for the parish office, and a further set of telephone and email contact information for those who want to ask faith based questions. For the latter a separate gmail address could be set up which the RCIA team could access and find answers for.

But we also need to do something about striking while the iron is hot and before it begins to cool. Parishes could have a team that conducts a question and answer session after each of those four major Easter ceremonies. Certainly such sessions would need to be announced by the priest at homily time, and it would require stamina on the part of everyone because the Easter ceremonies are much longer than regular weekend Masses. Else you could make a question and answer session follow on from Morning Prayer on Good Friday and Holy Saturday and after Morning Mass on Easter Monday.

There is also something to be said for daytime and evening question and answer sessions on Easter Monday and Easter Tuesday before the holiday makers go home. 

As a whole we do the preparation parts well with Lent and Advent discussion groups, but we don't have a follow-up culture of Eastertide and Christmastide discussion groups. That needs to change so that we can all ground the special spiritual experiences and insights that the Easter ceremonies bring to each of us, and let them begin to bear the spiritual fruit God intended them to produce.

As parishes we could do so much better.

Do you have any other ideas for how we could begin to develop a parish culture of follow-up after major liturgical events?

Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for us
St Peter, and all the holy Apostles, pray for us.

On Good Friday many of us pray the 14 (or 15) Stations of the Cross that follow the journey of Jesus from His condemnation to death to His burial in the tomb. This devotion has helped us understand what Jesus has done for us as well as how to deal with the moments of suffering that punctuate our lives.

In recent decades there has been an option to do something similar to help us meditate upon the resurrection of Jesus. Like the well known Way of the Cross, they too have 14 stations. Sometimes they are called the Via Lucis or Way of Light. Starting from the proclamation of the resurrection by the angel to the women in the empty tomb and going through all the recorded appearances of the risen Jesus in the Gospel it ends with the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Having prayed through several versions of the Stations of the Resurrection over the years, I can attest that they are very helpful spiritually. For when our hearts and minds become convinced that Jesus is risen, our lives receive new hope and vitality. And it certainly takes time for that conviction to seep in.

Below is a version of the Stations of the Resurrection that was prepared with an ecumenical audience in mind. Each Station has a scripture reading, a reflection and a prayer. The first PDF contains 16 pages, with print at a size to be comfortable reading out loud from a microphone. The second PDF is for personal use and takes 9 pages. 

Praying these Stations of the Resurrection should take about 30 minutes in a group setting, and a bit less if prayed on your own. They were written with the residents of an aged care facility in mind, but they would work just as well with a prayer group or youth group.

May all of those holy ones to whom Jesus showed His risen glory, His Mother, St Peter, St Thomas, St Mary of Magdala, the holy women, the other Apostles and the rest of the faithful disciples always intercede for you when you pray these Stations of the Resurrection.

Happy Easter!