a little king of mercy

Saint Faustina, the Infant Jesus, and the Six of Cups

Hi friends,

What a whirlwind month. The Contemplative Tarot  was released a few weeks ago, and it’s been the greatest joy to hear and see your responses. I’m so glad that you like it, and I love knowing how it’s touched you. 

I’ve done a lot (or it feels like a lot to me) of media stuff lately for the book release, and I’m going to list them here in case you’d like to read or listen: 

• Emily McFarlan Miller at Religion News Service interviewed me about the book

• I wrote a little piece for Newsweek on my experience with tarot and Christianity

• I got to chat with Kevin for the A Tiny Revolution podcast

• And I got to chat with Nick for the In Search of Tarot podcast 

• And I got to chat with Josh and Greg for the Rethinking Faith podcast

• And I got to chat with Jonathan for the Talk Gnosis podcast (there’s a video too if YouTube is more your thing)

Now doesn’t seem like the best time to be taking a break from my online presence, what with just having released a book and whatnot, but that’s exactly what I’m going to be doing in the next few weeks. I have a baby coming sometime this month (due the 22nd, but anyone who’s had a baby knows that due dates are vague), and I want to spend time with my family and the new baby without worrying about producing content. Also, to be honest, I need a break from the internet anyway. I need a little time to be alone with my thoughts without constantly trying to fashion them for consumption. I might be on Twitter and Instagram to share a few more podcast episodes as they’re released, but this will be my last substack essay for at least a few months. I have hopes to take a fallow winter and be back in the spring, but we’ll see how things go.  

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“. . .I want to teach you spiritual childhood. I want you to be very little, because when you are little, I carry you close to My Heart, just as you are holding Me close to your heart right now.” – Jesus, to Saint Faustina in a vision

I spent this last month rereading the diary of Saint Faustina Kowalska. Faustina is a fairly modern Polish saint. She lived in the early 20th century, and she was canonized in 2000 by Pope John Paul II. She was a classic mystic — she had many visions of Christ and even entire conversations with Christ that she wrote down with meticulous care in her diaries. These were published after her death in a nice thick volume that seems to be pretty well-read among Catholics. I think of Faustina as a well-known saint. Her visions inspired the Catholic devotion to the Divine Mercy, she created the Divine Mercy chaplet (one of my favorites), and the painting of Jesus that she oversaw (based on her visions) is, again, recognizable to most Catholics.

I think Faustina is an important saint specifically because of her devotion to this idea of Divine Mercy. Christianity is supposed to be a religion of generosity and hospitality, but we don’t always see that show up in practice. I think that our desire for safety and belonging can sometimes tip into an us-vs-them mentality. But I also think that one of God’s great gifts to us is God’s taking on the responsibility of judgment precisely so we don’t have to. God will take care of judgment in God’s good time and we don’t need to fret about meting out judgment ourselves. This gift frees us up to be God’s mercy in the world instead. 

The reason I picked up Faustina’s diary again is because I first read it when I was about fourteen, and one of the things I’ve been wanting to do lately is reread books that had a profound impact on me as a teenager that I haven’t revisited since. I have a sort of patient affection for my precocious teenage self, and it’s pleasurable for me to revisit the things she loved. 

When I first read Faustina’s diary, I was captivated by the romanticism of it, the intimacy of Faustina’s relationship with an adult Christ. It’s almost erotic, as so much Christian mysticism is. In one passage she writes, “O my Lord, inflame my heart with love for You, that my spirit may not grow weary amidst the storms, the sufferings and the trials. You see how weak I am. Love can do all.” In another, she writes about how the soul “begins to plunge itself into God and taste the divine delights.” In her recorded conversations with Christ, he says to her, “You are the delight of My Heart; from today on, every one of your acts, even the very smallest, will be a delight to My eyes, whatever you do.” As a teenage girl who lived on Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, I ate this stuff up. This is exactly what I wanted from religion: a mystical romantic relationship with the divine. 

I don’t not want that now, but I also think that a person’s spirituality ideally deepens and grows and becomes more expansive as one becomes older. One thing I picked up on with this rereading as a 32-year-old mother of three — a thing that didn’t even register to me when I was teenager — is Faustina’s deep devotion to the Infant Jesus. She had many visions of the Infant Jesus, often seeing him during mass when the priest consecrated the Eucharist. She talks about “the little Jesus, who came out from the Host and rested in my hands,” and “Jesus stretch[ing] out His tiny hands toward the congregation.” In a longer passage, she writes:

“I often see the Child Jesus during Holy Mass. He is extremely beautiful. He appears to be about one year old. Once, when I saw the same Child during Mass in our chapel, I was seized with a violent desire and an irresistible longing to approach the altar and take the Child Jesus. At that moment, the Child Jesus was standing by me on the side of my kneeler, and He leaned with His two little hands against my shoulder, gracious and joyful, His look deep and penetrating. But when the priest broke the Host, Jesus was once again on the altar, and was broken and consumed by the priest.” 

It’s a passage that seems jarring and violent until I remember that I feel the same way about my own children, an almost aggressive love, a physical desire to gather them up in my arms and bury my face in their necks and eat them up I love them so, as Maurice Sendak put it in Where the Wild Things Are.

Devotion to the Infant Jesus is not a devotion unique to Saint Faustina. It’s a common devotion, and used to be particularly common among nuns. Two of my favorite pieces of art from the Cloisters in New York are related to this: Christ Child with an Apple and Crib of the Infant Jesus. Nuns used to be gifted items like this when they took their vows, little statues or dolls of the Infant Jesus and little cradles for them to rest in. It’s such a tender, maternal practice. 

Saint Faustina’s devotion to the Divine Mercy is, I think, most often seen in connection with an adult Jesus, simply because the famous image of the Divine Mercy is depicted in that way. But I like contemplating the Infant Jesus in connection with Divine Mercy as well, because I think children have so much to teach us about mercy, specifically mercy as contrasted with judgment. When I think about who in my life best exemplifies mercy, I think of my children. They’re so good at not holding grudges. They move on from anger and frustration with startling quickness. I like to think that I’m a pretty good mother, but I do lose my patience with them sometimes, and when I ask for their forgiveness they cannot wait to give it to me. They’ve taught me so much about vulnerability and how to receive mercy. I think that Faustina, with her devotion to the Infant Jesus, understood that too. 

In The Contemplative Tarot, I wrote about the Six of Cups as an expression of divine love. There’s a quote I have saved in a journal – I think it’s Richard Rohr but I haven’t been able to verify – that says this: “For God is endlessly resourceful. He saw that his greatness provoked resistance in man; he saw that man felt limited in his very being and threatened in his freedom. That is why he chose a new path. He became a child. He made himself dependent and weak, in need of our love. Henceforth – so this God who became a little child is telling us – you can no longer fear me; from now on you can only love me.” The Six of Cups reminds me of this idea of God making Himself irresistible to us. I think Faustina thought of Christ’s mercy as wholly irresistible, and I wonder if her devotion to the Infant Jesus comes from this sense of irresistibility, a desire to scoop up the mercy of God and hold it to one’s breast. Children want to love; I think many of us find that captivating. We can fear God’s judgment; it’s harder to fear God’s love.