Books like Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul

Gotta admit, this is one of my all-time GO-TO reads for times - like these, especially - when my elderly mind is darting anxiously like quicksilver lightning. Lately I’ve turned off my on-screen “breaking news” bulletins too, and while that helps, my own self-repeated postmodern questioning doesn’t.Enter this shy early twentieth century Sister with help...With an unlikely temperament.For at this same time, James Joyce was showing off snippets of his soon-to-be published Anti-Establishment Bête Noire, his Ulysses - with its amazing Streams of Consciousness - over at the little Shakespeare and Company reading room in downtown Paris.But, you know, this reclusive Sister in nearby Poland was just then writing this MASTERPIECE of a scrupulously reverent and acutely ethical Stream of Consciousness all on her own - WITHOUT Joyce’s influence!If you’ve ever read the luminous confessions of another Saint, from the previous generation - the Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse - you’ll know what I mean:For that’s tantamount to plunging into St. Faustina’s tell-all supernatural memoir - cause you’re entering a life filled with that SAME candour, and that SAME luminosity. But this book embraces rather than eschews St. Therese’s NO-NO’s wholeheartedly, as well.And that’s where Faustina differs, and really TAKES OFF...With supercharged scrupulousness; dense spiritual thickets so familiar to an unknown contemporary, Pessoa; and the three-dimensional other-worldly visions that very few saints - and much fewer of us - will ever experience.Naturally Faustina continually finds herself skating on thin ice. Or deep in a Dark Wood.O De Profundis, Domine...Truth is uncool in our world. Lies are comfortable. But there’s no comfort in them for this heroic woman.How does she get back home again? Well, her sole recourse is in the Passion of the Lord - and her only remaining option is to throw herself, as Nothing, at His feet.She is indeed that anonymous Christian who, we are told with divine candour, takes Heaven by Storm. Or Ursula le Guin’s anonymous tormented soul in her great story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas?That’s really not such a bad thing, says Faustina.Because it’s her only available option.Or maybe it IS bad, she’ll think again in a trice, because she’s ever so Low on the heavenly totem pole. Which is it?And thus more abundant power and insight - and biting angst - always accrues to her soul!She becomes in the end, somehow, Truly Blessed.I wish I could resolve my anxiety like that! Cause the only way I can resolve it eventually is with common sense - but I’m not often saintly.Her humility is so boundless.This book is the Story of a rich homemade Soup of a Soul. And it is also magnificent. Most guys I know, even Catholic, could never, ever, slog through all the angst and surreal word-pictures of this saga.But what word-pictures they are! Each one tremulously put into place with fear and trembling, like hot bricks fresh from the kiln of the saint’s mind - to produce, by the end of the book, a Towering Cathedral of divinely-inspired Vision.The world can’t abide books like this for too long! Nor can the Evil One...So when John Paul II read this remarkable thick book in the original Polish, a long time ago as a young man, he SAW it was much like a loose maverick locomotive roaring through the depths of his soul - and changing him.And Faustina’s Divine Mercy, because of him, would later become a Holy Feast Day, a Jubilee Year, and a recognized Objective of the Church.All because of one wonderfully and unselfconsciously anxious woman, who here transforms reams upon reams of her life into a big, thick Book...A book that, all on its own - and with a little help from Above - May one day CHANGE THE WORLD -By showing it the awesome, and very Real, Face of Divine Mercy.