Grace was poured out on me. That is, the grace to let go of trying to grasp on to control of my life was offered to me through a personal retreat written by a Sister of Life, Sister Faustina Maria Pia, S.V. The same author of the Litany of Trust, Sister Faustina recently joined us to talk about her book Jesus I Trust In You, a month-long retreat where she helps build up the courage needed to “trust fall” into Jesus’ arms.
Blessed Is She: One of the gifts of being a Sister of Life is that you get to participate in the choosing of a new name. I’d love to hear more about your name. Are there any devotions tied to it?
Sister Faustina: My name is definitely a big part of how I've come to know God, and is something that, in a way, God chooses for us.
My mom had a conversion through Saint Faustina and came to know God through experiencing His message of mercy. She ended up naming me Faustina before she was even canonized a Saint.
I didn’t connect with Saint Faustina when I was young because I really thought she was far beyond me. When I entered religious life I ran into an elderly sister who found out my name was Faustina. I asked her to pray for me because I was going to get a new name. She looked at me with the love of a mother, but very stern, and she said, “Don’t you dare get a new name.” She then gave me a book that she had written, The Life of Faustina Kowalska: The Authorized Biography, and it filled in the human side of Saint Faustina that I never really encountered as clearly in the diary. After reading this book I absolutely fell in love with her.
I chose to take that name again because I need God’s mercy to secure me in who I am. Without His unconditional love I don’t have anywhere else to lean on.
Maria is for the Blessed Mother, and then Pia is for Padre Pio. My parents met through visiting Padre Pio when he was still alive, and Padre Pio told my dad to marry my mom, so I really owe the man my life. Saint Padre Pio is really teaching me how to suffer and to live that as love and not to separate those two things.
Blessed Is She: You are the author of both The Litany of Trust and the Jesus I Trust In You retreat. Can you share a little bit about how each of these came to be?
Sister Faustina: A few years into my religious life, I was in a situation that was really difficult to understand. I was looking at Jesus asking: What are you doing? The one thing that He was very clearly saying back to me was: Trust Me, trust Me.
I didn’t feel like He explained what that meant in my situation. Do I just wait for things to resolve on their own? Do I just cross my fingers? I didn’t know how to live it and apply it in real time. I started to realize that I didn’t know what trust meant. After many months of praying and struggling I was in my room, looking at the crucifix with a heaviness in my heart. I told Jesus that I wanted to understand what He was doing and then I would be okay if I knew that He was up to something specific.
His response to me was such an intimate and tender encounter with Jesus. He lifted my chin up to look into His eyes. I felt like He was saying: I don’t want your yes to depend on a bunch of circumstances. I want it to go to Me. I want you to look at Me and say, “Jesus, because You’re here in the situation and You have my life in Your hands, it's going to be okay.”
It was a sheer grace. I realized it’s not about circumstances, it’s about the relationship between me and Jesus and saying yes to Him with the whole of my life. All of a sudden I felt the floodgates of my heart open up to this huge desire to trust God more deeply, and my heaviness lifted.
Jesus wasn’t going to explain everything and give me His eternal vision. My situation didn’t resolve the second Jesus spoke to me, but my heart did.
In that moment I heard, not audibly, but in the stillness of my heart, an invitation to write a litany of trust. So, I took out my journal right then and there. I knew the Litany of Humility so I used that format and within ten minutes it was done. Without thinking much, I simply wrote everything that came over my heart. I held on to it for about a year without telling anybody and just prayed it on my own. A year later I was at a young adult event and I ended my talk on mercy with my litany. Afterwards there was a line of people asking me for a copy of the prayer, but I didn’t have any, so it took off from there.
The book wasn’t anything I intended, either. A few people told me they thought God was calling me to write, and I asked God to make it clear if this is what He wanted. The next day I received an email from a publisher asking me to write a book and offering to publish it. My Mother Superior said, “Yes, you’re going to do this,” and then writing the book became part of my obedience.
I was asked to write during a very busy season of traveling, but the invitation for the book offer came right at the beginning of 2020, and then the world shut down and I had this huge window of time in which to meet my deadline. Everything was truly God.
Blessed Is She: In your book you write about asking God to give us the grace to let go of our plans, because they might limit His plans. You talk about living your life as being a gift unraveled for Jesus. Can you explain what this looks like?
Sister Faustina: God sees life from the eternal perspective. We see the very small side of heaven that we’re on. What I mean by the unraveling of the gift of our lives is that as Christians, we receive new life in Christ, and the essential part of receiving this new life is a death to self.
I’m losing myself to gain life, to gain Christ, Who is Life. Trust is what enables us to live those little or big deaths. Trust is so pivotal in all this because we need to engage this death to self and see it as it truly is—a giving of ourselves to God.
Trust is the hinge to the doorway to new life. It’s this openness in a radical way to His thinking, His eternal perspective. God is putting an invitation out there in the midst of those situations to ask: Will you give Me yourself? Will you let go of your expectations or your plans?
Who are we to say where our love will be the most fruitful? That surrender and gift to God is where we come alive.
Blessed Is She: On my window I have written your quotation, “The future lies in eternity, which is our only goal. The treasure of time, which Jesus jumped into so readily, is that it invites us to begin to receive eternity now.” How does every minute have infinite value?
Sister Faustina: The Sisters of Life wear a medal on the outside of their habit that has a beautiful little quotation from a poem. It has a picture of Jesus and says, “Nothing would again be casual or small.” It is this reality that because Christ became incarnate and assumed human nature, the whole of our life is sacred. We believe that because of Christ, even the most mundane things are sacred and have eternal value. This is stunning.
That’s what Jesus taught for thirty years when He lived in the quiet of His home with His parents. For thirty years He decided to stay at home to live a hidden life, interceding for us in His daily tests and daily prayer. Every vocation has humble jobs, and that brings us to the place of encounter with Jesus. He knows the fidelity to the small things because of His own hidden years.
Jesus comes to dine with us, so to speak, in the most intimate place of our existence, the interior of our hearts, to live there, to do the dishes with us, to hear what we hear and inspire us in our conversations, to sweep the floor with us: that’s how much He wants to be with us.
Blessed Is She: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Sister Faustina: The biggest thing is that trust has really taught me that God is good. And that I am good. He keeps loving me, and that does not get old. It just keeps soaking in deeper and it frees the heart.
A “trust fall” is so easy for a little girl in the arms of her father whom she knows loves her. If we could begin to know how strong God is and how much He loves us, we would know that He’s not going to drop us. He wants us to fall into His arms. That’s all He wants. To let our hearts be embraced by Him. That gives Him so much joy.
Susanna Parent is a regular contributor to the BIS blog, speaker and a freelance writer. While a Wisconsin native, she now begins her mornings brewing French press coffee in the home she shares with her husband and children in the Twin Cities. When the sun sets, you’ll find her with friends enjoying a glass of red wine, preferably outside underneath twinkly lights. When not exploring all that the Twin Cities has to offer, she is indulging her wanderlust spirit by brainstorming their family's next new adventure. You can find out more about her here. Read all of Susanna's posts here.
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