God’s Mercy Revealed: Healing for a Broken World

by Msgr. Peter Magee

St. Anthony Messenger, 2005

162 pages, $10.99

To order: (800) 488-0488

americancatholic.org

The fountain of God’s mercy is always ready to flow into our hearts, but pride and stubbornness prohibit us from opening our hearts to it. In fleshing out this fact, Msgr. Peter Magee exposes many ways we resist God’s mercy and tangibly shows us how to not only accept God’s mercy but also share it with others.

In 20 essays, Msgr. Magee moves us along a growth curve that begins with defining forgiveness and ends with rejoicing in God’s mercy. Provocative questions for personal reflection follow each essay. There are too many questions in some of the reflection sections; it might be best to read through all of the questions first and choose one or two to pursue more thoroughly. Each chapter ends with a well-written prayer that drives home the concepts and draws the reader more deeply into Our Lord’s merciful heart.

The prayer at the end of the chapter titled “Divine Mercy” expounds on the benefits of the sacrament of reconciliation and calls on the repentant spirit of the reader:

“Lord Jesus, by the power of your merciful passion, break through my resistance to your divine mercy. Grant me the Christian realism to accept the fact that I need, so very deeply, the refreshing grace of sacramental confession. Let me not separate you from your Church or your priests, for through them alone you have chosen to dispense the fruits of your Cross. I will trust in your mercy at all times. I will call the bluff of my pride and its rule of mercilessness. Help me, good Jesus! Help me! Kyrie, eleison.”

The essays are organized into four parts: Mercy and the Trinity, Mercy and the Church, Mercy and the Sacraments, and Mercy and Life. By analyzing the Church’s teachings, Scripture passages, the sacraments and real-life experiences, the author helps us to see mercy in theory and in action.

The well-formed Catholic will find little new in what Msgr. Magee presents. But there’s much to commend about the way he explains it.

“Jesus shares in the company’s distress; he groans or sighs at the man’s pain as he heals him,” he writes of the Lord’s healing of the deaf man in Mark 7. “It is almost as if he were himself absorbing the speech impediment. Jesus also shares, ever so quietly, in the people’s joyful astonishment — not so much the psychological and human joy of the healing (though probably that too) as in their spiritual joy at coming to believe in him as Healer, as Savior. It is the joy of salvation of which Isaiah sings with poetic and prophetic beauty, a text the Church relates to Jesus as the Healer: ‘Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy’” (Isaiah 35:5-6).

Msgr. Magee concludes this section by uniting us with the Healer. “Let us groan in prayer with Jesus, that the whole of our person, body and spirit, may be opened to his healing power,” he writes.

For me, the middle chapters seemed to bog down a bit in teacherly catechetics. But the final essays struck me as dynamic and energetic; the book went out with a bang. I especially enjoyed Chapter 18, “Merciful Nostalgia,” which considers how Christ must have cherished the time he had with his followers.

Given the great paradox that God is perfect justice as well as perfect mercy, isolating the latter for study is no small undertaking. Msgr. Magee has pulled it off with aplomb.

Marge Fenelon writes from

Cudahy, Wisconsin.