We were passed small folded cards at the start of a diocesan pro-life meeting a few years ago, and we opened them and began to pray The Litany of Trust for the first time.
Immediately I knew this prayer was inspired. Incredibly simple, but powerful. I turned the card over and saw with happy surprise that it had been produced by the Sisters of Life, a beautiful, growing community of vibrant women whose convent in Denver I had visited with my friend Laura not long before. Over a cup of tea and much laughter, I had seen in person the irresistible pull of a life given over completely to the Lord and in service to the human person.
Their website reads:
The Sisters of Life are a contemplative/active Roman Catholic community of women religious, who profess the three traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and a fourth vow to protect and enhance the sacredness of human life. We were founded by Cardinal John O’Connor in New York in 1991, and received formal approbation as a religious institute in 2004, under Cardinal Edward Egan. We currently serve in the [Arch]dioceses of New York, Bridgeport, Philadelphia, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Toronto, Canada. Our missions include serving women who are vulnerable to abortion, giving them the support and resources to be able to choose life for themselves and their children; hosting weekend retreats; evangelization; outreach to college students in Colorado; and helping women who have suffered after abortion to encounter the mercy and healing of Jesus Christ. (sistersoflife.org)
Of the women summoned by God to such work, I wondered about the one in particular who had a sort of “call within a call”—as Mother Teresa would have put it—to spread the message of mercy and trust through this new litany.
I should have known her name would be Sister Faustina.
She recently took an hour with me to share about the prayer, but even more, to share about how trust and mercy have shaped her life and her vocation—and the invitation they offer to every person.
“There’s something beautiful about trust,” Sr. Faustina reflects. “It’s a great equalizer. Everybody—whether you are new to the faith or have been a priest for fifty years—everybody needs trust every day. The homeless person on the street, the Protestant minister…the experience of trust makes us all children before God.”
How did you personally come to know the grace of trusting God? And your name—the connection to St. Faustina Kowalska (the ‘secretary of Divine Mercy’)—how did that come about?
“My baptismal name is Faustina,” she said, smiling at my surprise. “My mom grew up in Germany as a nominal Catholic. Her father left her family and so she had a lot of pain growing up. God was very distant. She came across a pamphlet on Divine Mercy very early on. She read one page and in this graced moment, realized that there was Someone immensely in love with her. That nothing could stop Him from loving her. And she immediately felt the love of the Father that she had never really known. Her life changed. So I grew up with a mother who loved my name!” She admitted, though: “I had to wrestle with it a little bit. I was intimidated by St. Faustina at first. She’d been to hell, to purgatory—her Diary is really mystical.”
But the message of mercy in the Diary had a certain appeal, especially in difficult times when she felt betrayed or misunderstood. “That’s where I encountered the truth that battled against this life, that God’s love doesn’t stop when we think it stops. It’s unconditional. It has this reckless, unrelenting quality to it.”
As a young woman, she went to school for nursing and hoped to be married someday. But there was an inner restlessness growing inside. “I got home from the hospital one night, and I fell into my bed, and just started to cry. I said, ‘Jesus, I feel like I’m living my life like a car going down a hill with its brakes on. I want to live, and something’s holding back!’ I realized it was my own constricted view of happiness.”
That’s when everything changed.
“God had been pursuing me my whole life, but whenever I had seen (religious) sisters I had been captivated by them but also scared that I wouldn’t be happy if I was a sister. In that moment of speaking honestly and vulnerably with the Lord about what I wanted, He broke in and said, ‘I want you for Myself.’
“In that moment, I tasted that love and that joy and peace of what His love was really like. I said yes in that moment, to not only give up nursing—which I really loved—but to be a nurse in His eyes. To help the sick and the dying on a moral level. To bring the healing that His love brings in the spiritual life as well the physical.”
She laughed, remarking that interestingly, within the field of nursing she had always had a particular interest in wound care. “I was drawn to bringing healing,” she said. “I also loved the heart and grew up thinking how the heart was crucial to bringing life to the whole body—how delicate it was, how precious. God is playful in that way!”
She uncovered her call to the consecrated life, specifically, the Sisters of Life. And then it was time to submit three names to the Mother Superior, one of which (with the rare exception) would be chosen as a new identity—“something that articulates the spirituality of your heart, how you’ve received God and how you want to be a channel of His love,” she explained.
“Taking it to prayer, I had so many names, titles of the Blessed Mother, saints I loved! It was time to switch things up if I wanted to. But…nothing was sticking. The one thing holding me back from taking my name, Faustina, was because I felt like there was a disconnect between me and St. Faustina, because she really was so holy. There was a friendship between us—but it was distant.”
A month before she had to submit her three names, she was given a book on St. Faustina. “This book was a godsend for me because it described the things that the Diary didn’t. When she wrote the diary, she was under obedience to write her mystical experiences—so that’s what she did. She didn’t write about herself. But this new book described how she was a comedian, an animated storyteller, a debater, a freckled red-head…all of these things made her humanity come alive. So when I went back to the Diary, I saw her with completely new eyes. I saw her weaknesses, and in the midst of them, how convinced she was of God’s love for her. And between us there was a new friendship and she helped me to accept my own humanity, to accept who I was with my gifts and my weaknesses. At that point, while I had always loved the message of mercy, she brought it home to me in a way that I needed.”
After that, it was clear what her first choice would be. And the Holy Spirit agreed: she would in fact called be Sister Faustina Maria Pia.
So how did the Litany come about? Obviously, it is a reflection of this message of mercy. Was it something was ruminating in your heart for awhile—or did the Holy Spirit download it into your heart one day? At what point in your vocation did the prayer come to be?
“After I made my first vows, which is after three years in the convent, I had grown a lot in my spiritual life but I was still very much a beginner. I encountered a situation that was particularly difficult. It took me to a new frontier of trust (because) I didn’t know what to do. Every time I tried to pray about it, I felt blank, like there was complete darkness and insecurity about myself and about what God was asking. This went on for a number of months.
“When I went to prayer, I saw Jesus in the Gospels and He was asking, ‘Do you believe me? Do you trust me, that I am the Lord?’ I kept grappling with what trust was and why it was important. He kept showing me how crucial it was to trust Him, and yet I didn’t know what I had to do to trust, and what was impeding me from trusting.”
In the midst of that, she was praying one day before the crucifix on the wall of her cell. She remembered bringing Jesus her own powerlessness in her troubled situation. And there was, in that moment, and exchange that happened, more in the heart than in words.
“Jesus gently seemed to lift my chin to make me look at Him, and in an instant, there was a grace. He seemed to say, ‘I don’t want your ‘yes’ to go to a bunch of circumstances. I want you to give it to me. I don’t want your trust to be in the safe realm of your understanding, but in Me.’ At that moment, I realized that this is love, and it moved my heart so deeply. That Jesus was pursuing my love, this pure gift I had to give Him, if I would choose Him above everything else. Which is what my heart wanted, although I didn’t recognize it.”
In that moment, she said yes: “Yes, I want to trust You!”
“And then I felt as if there was a billowing cloud coming up behind me, a desire not only that I would trust, but that everyone would trust, that everyone would realize that the invitation of love was for them.” She describes it as an “act of mercy” in that moment, a singular desire that all know what they were made for.
“I sat there in the midst of these desires, I heard Jesus in my heart say, ‘write the Litany of Trust.’ I grabbed my journal and wrote: ‘Litany of Trust’ on the top of a page. I sat there and looked and looked at that page, not knowing what that was supposed to be!”
But she thought of litany of humility and the structure of it, and basing it loosely on that, the words seemed to flow over the next twenty minutes. “It really wasn’t a labor—the labor was the run-up beforehand! It was unexpected; I had no previous thoughts of writing a prayer.”
Did you know right away that you would share the litany? Did the Lord also communicate in that moment that this wasn’t just for you?
“I think deep down, I did know it was for others, but it felt so vulnerable to share that I kept it to myself for about a year. I prayed it myself. And although I had a sense it would be for others, I didn’t know it would be for this many others!
“Around year later, I was at a young adult talk speaking about mercy. I decided to end my talk with the litany of trust, and I led them through the responses. After the talk, I had a line of people asking for the prayer, and I didn’t have copies! Two of the other sisters were there when I shared it. They asked, ‘where did you get them from?’ I told them I wrote it, and one of the sisters who is a graphic designer created a pocket-size version of it to distribute.”
That was the little card that ended up in my hands.
When did you realize that the appeal of the prayer was bigger than you ever thought?
“I don’t remember that exactly, but I do remember being touched at certain points when I’d hear things—like when a woman called to say she was bringing it into the prisons—I lost it.” She began to tear up, thinking of it. “And when I see it translated into so many different languages, in Africa, all over Europe.” But the individual stories have touched her the most. She shared that a priest struggling with his vocation called to tell her that it was the only prayer he was able to pray in that darkness.
She feels like it is such a gift to be a part of, and yet detached from it in the sense that God had used her in her weakest point – a testimony to the fruitfulness of our ‘yes.’ Whatever God has called us to, He asks nothing more than our consent and the space in our soul to move. But that requires our humility…and our trust.
“When we have nothing else to give, that is enough,” Sr. Faustina reminds us. She encourages us “to say to God, ‘I believe in your love so much, that when I feel like I have nothing to give, it is enough. You are the one who shows me my worth.’ When we don’t have the energy, the space, the words, the time—whenever we feel like we have nothing to give, that is the moment of grace. Now God can work. Now God is free because I’ve gotten out of the way!”
The secret to staying in that place of surrender and trust? Keeping your eyes on Jesus.
“When we are called, if we look at ourselves, we are filled with fear and anxiety. But if we look at Christ, those fears fade. We are made to live in His gaze. In that place, the impossible is done.”
Litany of Trust
From the belief that I have to earn Your love … Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear that I am unlovable … Deliver me, Jesus.
From the false security that I have what it takes … Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear that trusting You will leave me more destitute … Deliver me, Jesus.
From all suspicion of Your words and promises … Deliver me, Jesus.
From the rebellion against childlike dependency on You … Deliver me, Jesus.
From refusals and reluctances in accepting Your will … Deliver me, Jesus.
From anxiety about the future … Deliver me, Jesus.
From resentment or excessive preoccupation with the past … Deliver me, Jesus.
From restless self-seeking in the present moment … Deliver me, Jesus.
From disbelief in Your love and presence … Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being asked to give more than I have … Deliver me, Jesus.
From the belief that my life has no meaning or worth … Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of what love demands … Deliver me, Jesus.
From discouragement … Deliver me, Jesus.
That You are continually holding me, sustaining me, loving me … Jesus, I trust in you.
That Your love goes deeper than my sins and failings, and transforms me …Jesus, I trust in you.
That not knowing what tomorrow brings is an invitation to lean on You … Jesus, I trust in you.
That You are with me in my suffering … Jesus, I trust in you.
That my suffering, united to Your own, will bear fruit in this life and the next …Jesus, I trust in you.
That You will not leave me orphan, that You are present in Your Church…Jesus, I trust in you.
That Your plan is better than anything else … Jesus, I trust in you.
That You always hear me, and in Your goodness always respond to me …Jesus, I trust in you.
That You give me the grace to accept forgiveness and to forgive others …Jesus, I trust in you.
That You give me all the strength I need for what is asked …Jesus, I trust in you.
That my life is a gift … Jesus, I trust in you.
That You will teach me to trust You … Jesus, I trust in you.
That You are my Lord and my God … Jesus, I trust in you.
That I am Your beloved one … Jesus, I trust in you.
Amen.
Reprinted with permission of the Sisters of Life.