I love  the Chaplet of The Divine Mercy. 

Each of the five decades is as follows:

“Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.”

“For the sake of His sorrowful passion have mercy on us and on the whole world.”  (repeated 10 times)

The conclusion:

“Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” (repeated 3 times)

 This is one of those prayers that no matter what I am worried about or how stressed I am I love.  I can cling to it.

A couple years ago my daughter, 11 years old at the time, had a sever seizure.   She has always been our most concerning child; she is severely autistic.  It was the first one she had ever had.  I was unprepared when she stepped off the bus from her summer-school class.  She was pale, dazed and disoriented.  She stumbled on her way into the house and laid on the couch.  I had been called and told that she was not feeling well, but this was beyond not well.  I immediately phoned my pediatrician who must have heard the concern in my voice.  She told me to take her to the hospital.

We got in the car, I gave my older daughter instructions to call her dad and let him know what was going on because… as luck would have it.. my cell phone was completely dead.  I drove away from the house, got about 7 blocks away when my daughter started convulsing in the back seat.  I pulled over at a little mini mart, ran in and called an ambulance.  When I returned to my child she was vomiting then began to shake harder.  Within minutes she stopped.  Her heart was racing, she was white, almost blue.  I was terrified.  I was begging God to make the ambulance arrive.  I was praying that He would hold her soul in his hand.  I feared I was watching my daughter die on the oily asphalt of a mini-mart while the sun shone down and strangers wondered what was going on.

The EMTs arrived in a flurry of tubes and blood pressure cuffs.  Her pulse was out the roof, she had to be intubated there.  Needles, tubes, the lightening-fast questions about when and how long,  the kind but totally no nonsense medical personnel rolling her into the strange mouth-like back of the ambulance — technological medical gadgetry all around and this little girl, with her blond curls all spilling across the white sheet of the gurney looking so small.  I hoped I was saying good bye for just a moment.  Just long enough to get to the hospital.  “Are you ok to drive?” one of the EMTs asked.  “Sure”, I said,  “I am absolutely fine.”

It was only then that I realized that my car keys were in one hand and my rosary in the other.  When I started the ignition I knew it was only a few minutes after three.  “..have mercy on us and on the whole world.” KBVM, the local Catholic Radio station was playing the divine mercy.  A particularly lovely sung version by Donna Cory Gibson.  

I drove carefully, listening to the words wash through me.  Absolute terror being brushed back into the corner of my mind.  Red light, green light.  God knows the suffering of a child, His child.  To watch with helpless sorrow as your child is taken away.  I have never felt closer to Mary.  How she  must have grieved to see her child bruised and beaten, broken for our sins.   The ambulance vanished into the traffic ahead carrying my poor little girl to the emergency room.  “For the sake of His sorrowful passion have mercy on us and on the whole world”  I pulled into the hospital parking lot just as the last decade was completing. 

I hoped my husband would be there, he was.  I prayed that my child would live.  She did.  No damage, no worse, no more seizures.   She was in intensive care for three days and in the hospital for five total.    “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”  It was Mercy that touched us that day.

Adversity is one way that God uses to bring us closer to Him.  This has always profoundly been the case with me.  Even if for a time I become angry or resentful when faced with some trial I find myself eventually to be the penitent daughter.   Inevitably caught in a realization of my own willfulness and pride and forced to return to God my father, most often with tears, to be embraced by the love that has always been.  It is truth, the thing most real, it is love that is eternal and knowledge of everything without questions.  Every repentance becomes a resurrection.  Each time we touch the divine we become new again.  In Christ we are perfected; in Him we become new creations.