Mercy Day – Feast of Our Lady of Mercy
September 24, 2023
As Mercy Day approaches, I begin my annual reflections on the indescribable gift of Mercy in my life. A bouquet of Catherine’s quotes, phrases that I treasure, suggests itself for my prayer:
- My legacy to the Institute is charity…
- Mercy, the principal path pointed out by Jesus Christ…
- This is your life, joys and sorrows mingled …
- It is better to relieve a hundred imposters than to suffer one really distressed person to be sent away empty.
But today I choose a phrase that, when I first read it many years ago, rang like a bell in my heart. It is a phrase Catherine used to describe the magical beginnings of the Sisters of Mercy:
“It began with two,
Sister Doyle and I …”
It. That’s what Catherine called this indescribable reality we know as “Mercy”, this small beginning that has blossomed into a living, universal energy.
It. That embodiment of God’s Love in human caring and tenderness. That deep awareness of our “being in God” which frees us to be for another.
Though we can never fully describe it, every Sister of Mercy knows how she caught it. We saw someone living it, sharing it, rejoicing in it. And we were captured in its preternatural glow.
Srs. Peggy Musselman, Gail deMacedo, and Theresa Gormley
walking down Aldine St. to St. Hubert’s High School (1963)
For me, it was the unalloyed joy and hospitality of the Sisters of Mercy at my high school. I wanted to be like them, to discover the secret of their generous warmth. I wanted to have enough of that energy in my own heart to dispense it so easily to anyone who needed it.
At my graduation with my beloved sponsor,
Sr. Mary Giovanni
I didn’t have a clue when I asked to join them on my life’s journey. I was young, idealistic, and completely untested by the world. I simply trusted that, with them, I could open myself to the “It” that had inspired them. And that trust has yielded the central gift of my life, as Frances Warde describes it when talking about Catherine McAuley:
“You never knew her.
I knew her better than I have known anybody in my life.
She was a woman of God,
and God made her a woman of vision.
She showed me what it meant to be a Sister of Mercy,
to see the world and its people in terms of God’s love;
to love everyone who needed love;
to care for everyone who needed care.
Now her vision is driving me on.
It is a glorious thing to be a Sister of Mercy!”
Happy Mercy Day to all our Sisters, Companions, Associates, and Co-ministers throughout the world, and to everyone in the Mercy Family who has been touched and changed by “It”. Indeed, what a glorious thing!
Music: O Love – Elaine Hadenberg
Lavish Mercy 