“Lord, let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you.” We hear these words from the 33rd psalm, words that ensure to the Lord that we want to place our trust and our faith in him, words that ask for God’s mercy. Yet, how often do we live out that mercy in our own lives and offer that mercy to others?
Back when I was preparing for lay missionary work, I came across a book entitled Sorrow Built a Bridge, about the life of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the daughter of the famous American author. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Having written the famous American novel The Scarlet Letter, and having been a direct descendant of a judge at the Salem Witch Trials in colonial America, Nathaniel Hawthorne is tied directly to the Puritans and to American Protestantism, so I was surprised to find out that not only was his daughter Rose a convent to Catholicism, but she become the founder of an order of nuns. Rose had a very unhappy upbringing and unhappy marriage, both of which did not contain a lot of joy or mercy. Her ministry called her to minister to cancer patients in New York City, which would have been a class of people who were very much outcasts in the the late 19th century. She especially ministered to the poor in the tenement buildings of New York City who suffered from cancer. In 1900, with the approval of the Archbishop of New York, Michael Corrigan, she founded a religious order called the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. She became this order’s first Mother Superior with the name Mother Mary Alphonsa. She died on July 9, 1926 when she was 75 years old. Back in 2003, Cardinal Egan of New York opened up her cause for canonization. Without wallowing in her grief and sorrow, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop built a bridge toward a ministry that reached out to those whose lives desperately needed help. All of us are called to live out God’s mercy in our lives.
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