Monthly Archives: December 2015

Image of Divine Mercy for Veneration

Yesterday Marie and I attended a day on divine Mercy in Ottawa.  The guest speaker was Fr. Chris Alar, a Marion of the Immaculate Conception in the U.S. Archbishop Prendergast celebrated an opening Mass and stayed for the first talk by Fr. Chris.  There were over 200 people there.

Wow!  What a day we had.  We learned that the Message of Divine Mercy communicated in Poland to St. Faustina in 1938 by Jesus is perhaps the greatest message of all time.  Fr. Chris a very dynamic speaker, took us through what we need to know about this subject.

Background

St. Faustina (a Sr. of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, a nobody from nowhere) reported a series of apparitions, visions and conversations with Jesus that took place in her room in the convent in Plock, Poland.  She later published the details in the book Diary, Divine Mercy in My Soul.  In 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized Sr. Faustina and declared the Sunday after Easter to be Divine Mercy Sunday.  Word about Divine Mercy has been slowly getting out to Roman Catholics.  Now that Pope Francis has declared this the Year of Mercy, the world is about to hear about it.

The Message (not optional)

A =  Ask for God’s mercy.

B = Be merciful to others.

C = Completely trust in Jesus.

If you do this you will go to heaven.  That’s it!!!

The Devotion (optional)

F = Feast of Divine Mercy (the Second Sunday of Easter)

I = Image (the image you see above is of the painting of what  she saw)

N = Novena (nine days of prayer using the Chaplet below)

C = Chaplet (prayed using Rosary beads)

H = Hour (between 3 and 4 PM, Jesus died at 3 PM)

The Graces of Divine Mercy Sunday

Jesus told St. Faustina (Diary para. 699) “The soul that will go to Confession and receive Holy Communion shall obtain forgiveness of sins and punishment.” One must be sorry and want to amend one’s life, receive Holy Communion worthily (i.e., not be in a state of mortal sin) and trust in Jesus’ promise of Mercy.

It’s like an amnesty day for all past and forgotten sins.  No eternal or temporal punishment.  This is the most amazing message of all time!

Click here to listen a bit to Fr. Chris:

Just finished reading this biography by Walter Isaacson. It was a difficult read at times because Steve Jobs was very nasty at times – ignoring his family especially his first child Lisa and calling people xxxholes and firing them in front of other staff.

But I stuck with it, all 570 pages. In the end I came to admire the man. He had the uncanny ability to vision what people wanted before they knew it themselves.  He had multiple successes – the Macintosh, Ipod, Iphone, IPad and Icloud which made Apple the most successful technology company in the world.  His Zen Buddhism interest and background no doubt influenced  his approach to people and products.

He believed in brutal honesty in the workplace – he said “That’s xxxt” hundreds of times to people when shown their ideas or prototypes. One of his key roles at Apple apart from product design, was to ensure Apple had only “A” players on it’s staff.  “It’s not easy, but someone has to do it.” quips Jobs.  His focus he says, was always on making the best product possible, not making money. He played at the confluence of product design and manufacture with liberal arts and humanities.  He got people to do the impossible.  He had weird eating habits.

He was such a perfectionist that he lived in his first house for years with no furniture because he could not make up his mind what to buy. Another thing he is famous for is locking up Apple products so tightly that the user cannot get into them.  Otherwise, “they would screw it up” he believed.

It is perhaps for this latter reason that I have never felt compelled to purchase an Apple product. Call me nerdy but I like to know I can open the back and fiddle if need be.

In closing, I highly recommend this book for an honest look into one of the most enigmatic personalities in recent history. Jobs died of cancer in 2011 at the age of 56.

I learned a lot in reading this book, not just about Jobs.  Book 4.5 of 5 stars.  Steve Jobs documentary movie on Netflix 2 of 5 stars